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Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

A substantial fraction of Americans support the President's threats, similar to hangers-on enjoying a high-school bully musing over whether to punch a student. There might not be support for military invasion, but it's there for applying extreme economic pressure and seeing how much Canada can be forced to give up.

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> There might not be support for military invasion, but it's there for applying extreme economic pressure and seeing how much Canada can be forced to give up.

Agreed, but those are two quite different points, aren’t they? Isn’t it Trump’s job to extract the best deal he can from Canada? And the fact Canada has made itself utterly dependent on the US—economically and militarily—was Canada’s deliberate choice.

To the extent that it's the President's job to represent the country's interests as opposed to delivering tears for his supporters to savor... not all of us believe that the "best deal" must end with Canadians hating us after we extort, threaten, insult, and abuse them. From a practical standpoint, I'm not convinced that the reset underway of the US-Canada relationship is likely to bring a net benefit to the US.

The US has spent a significant amount of money and manpower in the past 70 years to convince countries, not just Canada, to be dependent on them. The US has reaped the benefits of this, such as having military bases abroad, using the US Dollar for trade, easy travel for its citizens etc. So then why is the US upset about countries being dependent on them when they set that system up and received benefits from it?

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