He Did Not Conquer: Franklin's Failure to Annex Canada

The failure to unite northern America has really been to our collective benefit. This permits the Western Anglo-Euro Alliance a massive advantage in the nested Matryoshka doll of coordination structures - allowing each level of governance to act independently while still steering a collective fleet in one direction. One imagines a nightmare where the United States and her allies weren't structured as so, but that all that is NATO was fused into a single legislative structure causing France to be subject to the same anti-nuclear-power rules as Germany or the US, and American and Canadian healthcare to be identical in provision and functionality.

NATO preserves the unitary alliance's single defense perimeter - and the US's reciprocal relationships with East Asia extend that border past the Pacific. What a stroke of good fortune in failure turned to strength in alignment.

One imagines that organizing human beings is about choosing the appropriate degree of coordination. Each man cannot be left to choose what is law alone. And a unitary world government will surely poorly serve us all. But perhaps this polycentric unity we have allows us experiments analogous to the US's federal structure, but practised at the size of countries. Canada is best Canada and allied with the US, and the US is best US and allied with Canada - and both with Europe and with the Easternmost of Asia and so on.

And one note about the article's tone that I have forever found annoying. Transitory administrations temporarily trouble the alliance. There is no enduring advantage to any to destroy it. This endless rumination on a past long gone by as if to imply that 4 years of governance can end our nations' collaboration is melodramatic nonsense. I think the example is best set by our shared ancestor, the UK: George Washington stands as a statue in Trafalgar Square; and Jan Smuts stands in Parliament Square. We are all allies now, and dwelling morosely on a time when we weren't does none of us any favours.

The US-Canada alliance has far too much strategic benefit to both. And this kind of separation of policymaking while retaining geopolitical unity will probably be far more durable than power centres of the past, even as the strength of its keystone, the US, wanes.

After the American Civil War, the Fenian Brotherhood began conducting raids in Canada to capture the transportation networks, and attack military targets, and plot to kidnap Canadian officials. Their goal was to force the British Government to grant freedom to the Republic of Ireland in exchange for regaining control of Canada.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenian_raids

Needless to say, even though the US Government didn't do much to stop them, they weren't very successful in those goals, and seem to be mostly forgotten today. The joys of regional genealogical research.

Proof of North American homogeneity, despite the lack of unification: this article was written by Tim Cook.

> Tim Cook was the author or editor of nineteen books, including The Good Allies: How Canada and the United States Fought Together to Defeat Fascism During the Second World War.

I notice several problems with this book title in hindsight.