On January 7, Donald Trump said publicly for the first time that he wanted to force Canada to become the 51st state. The president-elect had spent two months waiting to be inaugurated. He seemed to be yearning for action, to be on TV, to signal how he would lead. So he invited journalists to a gilded room in his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, stood behind a podium and spoke in a way that no American president had spoken in living memory. “You get rid of the artificially drawn line, and you take a look at what that looks like, and it would also be much better for national security,” he said. “Don’t forget: we basically protect Canada.” Trump was talking like American leaders in the 19th century, bewhiskered men who used spittoons, men who believed their republic had a mandate from God to conquer and improve territories governed by lesser peoples.

It was hard then to know how seriously to take him, so I called a former senior American official to ask what to make of it. He was rattled. “I actually think he wants the territory,” he said. His fear was contagious. An icy jolt went down my spine as he sketched out the scenario. Trump could escalate tariffs until the Canadian economy was in ruins, then make overtures to Alberta—a take-it-or-leave-it offer to tear it out of Canada.

“Why don’t you become a state?” he imagined Trump saying. “You don’t have to send billions of dollars to Ottawa anymore. Your tax rates will be lower. A dollar will be a dollar. You won’t have to ask for permission to approve any pipeline, because you’ll be within the United States.” Could Trump play the nasty kind of game that Putin has played on the margins of the Russian Federation—stir up trouble and then send in the troops to restore calm?

The conversation terrified me. I started to wonder if Trump really thought he could get away with absorbing Canada. That week, I ran into a former Canadian special forces operator and asked him if Canada could stop an American invasion. He laughed and told me it would be over before it began. The Pentagon could remotely shut down our communications, fire a few missiles and it would be done. A lot of Canadians were asking themselves the same questions, as Trump insulted, belittled and threatened the country, calling the prime minister “governor,” promising we’d be better off as the 51st state. Eventually, even his press secretary smirked and joked about it.

It took time for Canadians to feel that jolt, but when they did, there was a national gut check. In the media, in the academy, in the halls of power, on shop floors, in pubs and at kitchen tables. Did we want to become Americans? The answer became clear soon enough, in the biggest wave of Canadian nationalism in living memory.

Absolutely not.

Never.

Two days after Trump’s press conference, Justin Trudeau flew to Washington to attend Jimmy Carter’s funeral. Trudeau had been recently forced to announce his resignation. Everyone was tired of him. Trump snubbed him at the funeral.

But somebody had to tell the Americans that Canada was not interested in becoming the 51st state.“That’s not going to happen,” Trudeau told Jake Tapper on CNN. “Canadians are incredibly proud of being Canadian. One of the ways we define ourselves most easily is, well, we’re not American.”

That answer struck Tapper as odd. A month later, when he had Mark Carney on the show, he played him the Trudeau clip. “Kind of a curious answer,” Tapper said. Carney, then a candidate for Liberal leader, laughed nervously. He was too diplomatic to tell Tapper the truth. Canadians define themselves in opposition to the United States because the country was founded by people who rejected the bloody American Revolution. We’ve kept rejecting it for almost three centuries.

The United States is an unpredictable and increasingly dysfunctional empire, an extended experiment in pushing everything to the extreme. Canadians, on the other hand, have a long but imperfect history of muddling along peaceably. We are not bound together by some intrinsic identity—by language, race, religion or a shared and glorious history of revolution or conquest. We become nationalistic only when it is necessary to protect ourselves against the aggression of the United States.

That negative, defensive definition has always been enough. It is kind of the point of Canada.

The story begins in 1763, after what Americans call the French and Indian War, English Canada calls the Seven Years’ War and Quebecers call la guerre de la Conquête. It was a colonial border war between the French and British, fought with muskets and cannons, with troops in canoes........

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