In The Accidental Superpower, Peter Zeihan describes America’s local buffers:
America’s southern border region is all either desert or highland or both, relatively flat on the northern side of the border, but rugged on the southern side. Aside from the border communities themselves there are only two meaningful Mexican populations within five hundred miles of the border, Chihuahua and Monterrey, and even they are five hundred mountainous miles apart from one another. As Santa Anna discovered during the Texas Independence War, there is no good staging location in (contemporary) Mexican territory that could strike at American lands. In the Mexican-American War of 1846–48, the Americans took full advantage of that lack of staging areas, that thick buffer, and their superior transport to strategically outmaneuver the larger, slower, and exhausted Mexican forces — and this in an era before the Americans had battleships and jets. At the war’s conclusion, the United States seized half of Mexico’s territory (including California) — the half that was easier to get around in.
Canada’s border with the United States is much longer, more varied, and even more successful at keeping the two countries separated. In the border’s eastern reaches mountains and thick forests so snarl transport options that infrastructure even today is thin and vulnerable. In the far west the Rockies are a great border zone in that there is nothing for hundreds of miles on either side of the border that resembles a major staging area. The sole point of potential conflict is the Strait of Georgia, the body of water between Canada’s Vancouver Island and the northwestern extremes of the U.S. state of Washington. A Canadian impingement upon the strait would block maritime access to Puget Sound, home of Seattle and Tacoma. Yet the region’s population (im)balance is heavily in the Americans’ favor: The three Pacific coast American states outpopulate British Columbia by ten to one.
In the middle portion of the border region — the Prairie provinces–Midwest border — connections are almost omnipresent. This is a bad deal not for the Americans, but rather for the Canadians. South of the border zone one encounters ever denser American populations with ever more developed land and ever better transport infrastructure, both artificial and natural. In contrast, moving north into Canada one hits an initial line of cities — Calgary, Regina, and Winnipeg — and then a whole lot of nothing. The Prairies have little choice but to be American in economic orientation and even somewhat midwestern culturally. Their physical links to both British Columbia and the core Canadian provinces of the east are weak at best and regularly disrupted every winter. Their links to the colossus to the south, however, are substantial, multimodal, multiply redundant, and almost always functional.
If the United States has one of the easiest geographies to develop, Mexico has one of the most difficult. The entirety of Mexico is in essence the southern extension of the Rocky Mountains, which is a kind way of saying that America’s worst lands are strikingly similar to Mexico’s best lands. As one would expect from a terrain that is mountain-dominated, there are no navigable rivers and no large cohesive pieces of arable land like the American Southeast or the Columbia valley, much less the Midwest. Each mountain valley is a sort of fastness where a small handful of oligarchs control local economic and political life. Mexico shouldn’t be thought of as a unified state, but instead as a collage of dozens of little Mexicos where local power brokers constantly align with and against each other (and a national government seeking — often in vain — to stitch together something more cohesive). In its regional disconnectedness Mexico is a textbook case that countries with the greatest need for capital-intensive infrastructure are typically the countries with the lowest ability to generate the capital necessary to build that infrastructure. By the time the Mexicans completed their first rail line from their sole significant (preindustrial) port at Veracruz to Mexico City in 1873, the Americans already had over fifty thousand miles of operational track.
[…]
The one thing that Canada has going for it is that it does have a navigable waterway — the Saint Lawrence — but since that waterway merges with the Great Lakes, the Saint Lawrence watercourse is shared with the United States, making most Canadian waterborne commerce subject to American proclivities. That, in fact, is the theme of Canada as a whole. It is far easier for almost all of the Canadian provinces to integrate economically with the United States than with each other.
So Mexico is what the United State should have been. Got it.
Mexico: Where the American Dream Lives On!™
The obstacles to travel between Canada and US in the east are overstated. There is, for example, the large Champlain-Hudson corridor.
New England, especially MA, NH, and ME, has a substantial French Canadian population. This is a residue of Canadians coming south to work in the New England textile mills.
Canadian politics is left of US, and the addition of any province to the US would give the Democrats a permanent majority in both Houses of Congress.
I must commend Jim for his one-sentence summary of Sobel’s “For Want of a Nail”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Want_of_a_Nail_(novel)
Thanks, but what is the connection? The War of Independence was waged to establish the Articles of Confederation, which would have worked had the British Parliament honored the Treaty of Paris. The Constitutional Coup was made in 1789, six years after the War’s conclusion, because the States needed a unified military command to fend off continuing incursion lest they fall back under the Unwarrantable Jurisdiction. As late as 1814, the Reds burned down the City of Washington, and as late as 1863, when American ports were secured by America’s greatest ally, Russia, the Reds were busily sinking American ships and blockading American shipping on behalf of the South. People tend to forget that the United States were at loggerheads with “Great” Britain from the time of the Founding until the very moment that the U.S. government was finally captured and America thereby reintegrated into the Empire by the subtlest of subtle political skullduggeries, the so-called World Wars.
What is the “Five Eyes” and why is the United States a member?