“What about the rest of the North?” asked McGeorge Bundy, president of the Ford Foundation, back in the 1970s while considering yet one more grant to help the troubled Alaska Natives.

The initial reaction of a young staffer asked to pursue the question was that the boss was making some strange reference to the Civil War.

That was not his point, nor was he talking about the global contrast between rich and poor nations, described in terse terminology, especially during the Cold War, as the North-South Divide. Instead, Bundy was referring to the Arctic Circle and far-northern regions of the globe, and asking whether geographic unity and climate uniformity were reflected in similarity of challenges to public policies.

Donald Trump’s incendiary remark about the United States potentially acquiring Canada, Newfoundland and, by the way, the Panama Canal was probably — though not necessarily — rather offhand, but points intended or not to significant international challenges.

Those challenges........

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