Making Sense Of Hemispheric Defense In Trump Era

March 13, 2025 by Tyler Durden

President Trump's worldview is for greater coordination of national and hemispheric defense across the Americas, hence the push for stronger economic integration between the United States and Canada, coupled with a hardened defense perimeter stretching from the Arctic to the Panama Canal.

Let's visualize that...

Steve Bannon's War Room has extensively covered the Arctic as the "Great Game of the 21st century." He recently warned that Canada's military weakness is a "soft underbelly" for North America.

Bannon argues that Trump will boost hemispheric defense across the Americas by annexing Greenland, reclaiming control of the Panama Canal, and securing Canada's northern border.

It's all about "hemispheric control," Bannon has previously said, noting that it will be time for a new era of hemispheric defense across the Americas once Trump delivers peace in Eastern Europe.

Bannon continued to add color to Trump's possible hemispheric defense plan, which might explain the heightened focus on integrating the US and Canadian economies..

On a podcast with far-left California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday, Bannon provided even more color on how Trump's hemispheric defense plan could reshape the Pentagon...

"... this is why I think President Trump's hemisphere - the shift to hemispheric defense, which is from Greenland to the Panama Canal - more of a naval strategy in the Pacific. It's the three Island chains and really the vast desert of the Pacific is really the American Heartland that's our defensive barrier - that to me should restructure the entire Pentagon and Armed Forces to that to for structure around that I think Pete Hegseth has got to move immediately. I think there should be significant cuts to the defense department..."

As Bannon continues laying out what appears to be Trump's grand plan, historian Arthur Herman penned in the National Interest how "pooling US-Canada resources from energy to AI to defense would be a boon for global and hemispheric security."

Herman pointed out that the US is "on the brink of what futurist Herman Kahn would term a US-Canada "superstate," that will dominate the fate of the Western Hemisphere as well as global markets."

Despite the US economy being 12 times larger than Canada's in nominal GDP terms, the planned coordination of US-Canadian resources—from energy to AI—could yield tremendous benefits for North America and comes at a time when the US is locked in a massive great power struggle with China.

Herman outlined four areas where a US-Canada partnership or "superstate" can have a powerful impact on the future of the Americas:

1. The most obvious is energy. Today, Canada is the fourth-largest producer of oil (5.76 million barrels per day in 2023) and the fourth-largest in natural gas (18.1 billion cubic feet per day in 2023). Taken together, the United States and Canada produce about 30 percent of the world's natural gas and 25 percent of the world's oil. A North American energy bloc, including LNG exports and cross-border pipelines like the still-suspended XL Pipeline, would dominate global markets as never before, while also reshaping the overall geopolitical landscape of energy production.

2. The second area is the extraction of strategic minerals. While the proposed mineral deal with Ukraine will take years—even decades—to yield results, Canada is already a major producer of gold, iron, nickel, and copper. It also sponsors important projects involving its rich reserves in rare earth elements such as lithium, cobalt, graphite, and vanadium. The global demand for lithium is expected to more than quadruple from 720,000 metric tons in 2022 to an estimated 3.1 million metric tons in 2030. The IEA projects that demand for cobalt will climb from 215,000 metric tons in 2023 to 454,000 metric tons by 2040. Meanwhile, the demand for nickel is slated to triple by 2030, thanks to the demand for electric vehicles—including in China. While China has sought to dominate supply chains in all these critical minerals, a proactive U.S.-Canada consortium could displace China as a major supplier to world markets. Indeed, Canadian companies could help to revive the United States' own mining industry, which ceded global leadership to countries like China, Canada, and Australia thanks to outsourcing and over-regulation (the United States even closed its Bureau of Mines in 1996). Working together, the American and Canadian mining sectors can set clean and environmentally safe standards for the extraction of all these materials.

3. The third area is AI and quantum technology. While we rightly think of the United States as the global leader in AI and machine learning, according to Deloitte's 2023 AI report, Canada ranks third among G7 countries in total funding per capita for generative AI companies, and first in AI publications per capita. At the same time, Canada has emerged as one of the leading centers for the research and development of quantum technologies, including quantum computing. The University of Calgary in Alberta, the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, and Sherbrooke University in Quebec are among the world leaders in quantum technology. Together with America's already established leadership in AI, especially in generative AI and quantum computing, both countries could be on the verge of launching a new era of advanced information technologies—truly a digital Golden Age.

4. The fourth and final area is coordination on national and hemispheric defense. In addition to border security, coordinating American and Canadian defense spending, including on advanced technologies, should be a major topic of discussion between Ottawa and Washington in the second Trump administration. For example, working together to secure the Arctic region will become a security priority, as the region becomes a focus of great power competition with Russia and China. Coordinating strategic operations in and around Greenland and coordinating space power effects shared between the US Space Force and the Canadian Air Force should also be a significant priority.

As we've previously noted, nearly one year ago, Real Clear Defense's Francis P. Sempa noted that Trump "would settle for a Western Hemispheric defense."

This all plays into Trump's executive order to "Build the Iron Dome for America," a next-generation missile defense shield for the United States against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks, as well as the race to the Arctic.

So after a Russian peace deal, the focus should shift to hemispheric defense across the Americas and the cohesion of the US-Canada economies