President Donald Trump, right, shakes hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, during a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan on June 28, 2019. AP file

We know how Russian President Vladimir Putin thinks about Ukraine. In speeches and written manifestos, Putin has rejected the legitimacy of his neighbor’s sovereignty and even its distinct identity. He sees Ukraine as part of a greater Russian nation, and Ukrainian history as a footnote to a greater Russian patrimony. Ukrainian culture, in his view, is an aberration that consolidated mostly due to Bolshevik social engineering. The integrity of Ukraine’s borders mean nothing to Putin’s Russia, which has been occupying Ukrainian territory since 2014. And the independent, democratic aspirations of Ukrainian people are all the more anathema, cast by Putin as simply the agenda of “Nazis” and outside foreign actors.

Much to the chagrin of European partners, President Donald Trump has, at times, echoed some of Putin’s talking points on Ukraine. He has blamed NATO for goading Russia into an invasion and Kyiv for not wanting peace thereafter. After Russia launched more missile strikes on Ukrainian cities last week, killing civilians, Trump appeared to defend Putin. “I actually think [Putin is] doing what anybody else would do,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday afternoon, suggesting Moscow was pressing its perceived advantage. “He wants to get it ended.” Russia, he repeated, “has all the cards.”

If Trump is playing the proverbial cat among the pigeons of Western diplomacy, he’s also upending things closer to home. The seeming rupture Trump provoked in U.S.-Canadian relations can’t be explained just through his ideological mercantilism and belief in tariffs as an effective, coercive tool. Trump has a similar ax to grind with Mexico, but he has only questioned Canada’s necessity to be independent and sovereign. Canadian officials, including outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, are convinced that Trump’s bluster about making Canada the 51st state is genuine and that he sees wrecking the Canadian economy as a pathway to future U.S. annexation.

According to the New York Times, Trump, who has repeatedly described Trudeau as “governor,” aired out more than just his known grievances about trade imbalances in phone calls with the Canadian prime minister early last month. Trump told Trudeau “that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary,” the Times reported, adding that “he offered no further explanation.”

Trump isn’t about to pull a Putin and infiltrate “little green men” across the Canadian border. While there’s no rattling of sabers or mobilization of forces, the White House has been linked to several potential hostile moves, including the possibility of cutting Canada out of the long-standing “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing network, scrapping existing agreements over the management of the Great Lakes, and major revisions of current military cooperation across the North American landmass.

Unlike in Ukraine, there’s no significant constituency anywhere in Canada that would welcome its larger neighbor’s aggression — on the contrary, the flagging political fortunes of Trudeau’s Liberals have been dramatically revived by Trump’s threats. “Rather than having a federal election about domestic political concerns, as we had expected to have, instead we expect to have a federal election where the ballot question is who is best equipped to deal with the economic and political threat that is being posed by Donald Trump’s administration,” said Lisa Young, a political science professor at the University of Calgary, to my colleague Amanda Coletta.

Trump has shaken the foundations of the United States’ closest relationship and forced an existential reckoning north of the border. “People who have followed Canadian politics for a long time can’t think of an instance where we’ve seen a shift in vote intention that’s as rapid and as significant as what the polls are currently showing,” Young said.

“We have thought of the Americans as our friends and partners,” Jonathan Wilkinson, Canada’s natural resources minister, said last week. “I don’t think we’re going back there, even if the tariffs are removed.”

Daniel Woolf, an eminent historian at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, pointed to the “false security” felt for decades by Europeans and Canadians thanks to a 20th-century Pax Americana. “Our unmilitarized frontier is an arbitrary line, established by treaties that were themselves the product of previous conflicts and negotiations,” he wrote last week in the Globe and Mail, a leading Canadian newspaper.

“No nation in existence falls within the exact boundaries that defined it two centuries ago,” Woolf added. “Our own territories were not solidified till 1949, and our newly unfriendly neighbor’s were not fully established till a decade later. Just because its 50 states are a nice, round number doesn’t mean more can’t be added.”

Trump is not the first U.S. president to want to claim or annex Canada. The War of 1812 — remembered in the United States for the vainglorious defense of Baltimore harbor and the humiliating British sack of Washington — was a conflict provoked mostly by U.S. desires to expand into Britain’s remaining North American domains. Some of Canada’s earliest nationalist myths stem from the efforts of British forces and their Indigenous allies to repel the United States’ rather bumbling incursions into regions that are now the provinces of Ontario and Quebec.

The Tariff Act of 1890 — linked to William McKinley, the staunchly protectionist future Republican president who helped author it — was conceived by U.S. politicians in part as a measure to bully Canada into the U.S. fold. As the economist historian Marc-William Palen recently explained, then-Secretary of State James Blaine wanted to do away with competition over lumber and fish with the British dominion, and saw the new measures as a path toward “a grander and nobler brotherly love, that may unite in the end” the United States and Canada “in one perfect union.”

Trump lionizes McKinley and sees that era of high U.S. tariffs as evidence of a “golden age” generated by major trade barriers. In a mark of his apparent interest in territorial expansion, Trump signed an executive order after his inauguration that celebrated McKinley as a president who “heroically led our Nation to victory in the Spanish-American War” — a conflict that significantly expanded the United States’ global footprint more than a century ago.

The irony is that the tariffs lauded by Trump now, and championed by U.S. Republicans then to weaken Canada, didn’t achieve their goals. The deep costs on ordinary Americans led to a disastrous defeat for Republicans in the 1892 midterms. And it strengthened Canada’s future political identity as distinct from the United States.

“It backfired immensely on the United States,” Canadian historian Craig Baird told CBC this weekend. “Not only did it increase prices for people in the United States, but Canada really started to kind of join hands and become more nationalistic and we aligned ourselves much more with Britain. So our trade with Britain skyrocketed over the next couple years, from 1890 to 1892. And it really shifted us away from the United States and made us feel more part of the British Empire.”