The Many Routes To War
It is said that it is darkest before dawn. Unfortunately for us, it is not yet midnight.
A wider, bloodier war feels like it is coming, but it is not yet clear who will fight who first, or what might finally trigger it. Will it be a civil war, a regional war, or a global war? Or will whole populations simply concede their rights, their democracies, their entire nations, to avoid the bloodshed?
When an ICE agent murdered a young mother dropping her son off at school in cold blood this week in Minneapolis, Minnesota, they did the one thing that could actually galvanise the American opposition: they killed a clearly peaceful, happy, white woman in cold blood. ICE killed at least 32 people in 2025, and Renée Nicole Good was not the only ICE shooting so far into this week-old year.
In response, Minnesota governor and 2024 Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz is preparing the state’s National Guard to protect the people of his state. The subtext is that he is prepared to use his state militia as a barrier between the federal ICE, which has turned into an American Gestapo, and his people.
Walz knows what is at stake. This is the third internationally high profile, politically motivated death in his state since he assumed the governorship in 2019.
In 2020, just six blocks from where Renée Good was murdered by the federal government this week, George Floyd was murdered by a city police officer, catapulting the Black Lives Matter movement into a household term.
And it was the Democratic speaker of his own state’s legislature, Melissa Hortman, who was assassinated last summer by a Republican.
The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution reads, simply:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The State National Guard — not the members of the NRA — is the well-regulated militia, and, should they be deployed to get between ICE and their arrest quotas, could easily turn into a spark that generates a wider civil war in the United States. Should the National Guard obstruct ICE, it is not hard to imagine that an agency willing to murder a civilian in cold blood on multiple cameras for the crime of driving her car would be willing to shoot their way through a National Guard line. They already blame “radicals” for what they call a “3200% increase in vehicular attacks.” Such a conflagration would have the potential to escalate nation-wide and, if that were to happen, it is unlikely that the United States as a country would survive as it currently exists.
It is far from the only nexus toward a war, and it is one that may be avoided as long as there remains a concentrated effort to continue non-violent protest. Violence only serves the interests of consolidating the Trump dictatorship far more than ending it, and we can expect more and more brazen attempts to goad the people into fighting back to allow their long-sought state of emergency.
Internationally, if Venezuela is Trump’s Czechoslovakia and Canada is his Austria, Greenland is becoming his Poland.
Just a few months ago, Denmark led NATO exercises premised around defending Greenland from a Russian or Chinese attack, but it is the United States that is actively threatening the strategic island in the North Atlantic.
Should Trump carry out his threats to attack Greenland, Denmark would be forced to defend its territory, as its current imperial protector. Moreover, Europe as a whole is vowing to defend Greenland, just as England and France drew the line with Hitler at Poland, resulting in their declaration of war when he invaded on September 1st, 1939.
Such an attack would put the rest of NATO in an awfully awkward spot. Article 5 of the NATO treaty declares an attack against one NATO member to be an attack against all, but there is no provision for how to deal with one NATO ally attacking another. They’re allies after all, so such an event was never conceived.
The fact that we are even having this discussion, even if it is meant by the Trump administration as nothing more than a distraction from the fact that they have flouted the law and only released 1% of the Epstein files, means that NATO is already effectively a dead issue, handing that long-sought victory to Trump’s closest ally, Vladimir Putin.
Speaking of Putin, allegations surfaced this week from a former Trump advisor, Fiona Hill, that Putin had offered him what amounted to Venezuela for Ukraine in 2019. Though Hill claims that she was sent to reject the offer, it is hard to ignore that Trump had a lengthy private phone call with Vladimir Putin the week before he attacked Venezuela and kidnapped the country’s own dictator immediately after meeting Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
In the attack, Americans faced minimal resistance from the Russian anti-aircraft weapons the country uses. It is possible that the American electronic warfare systems are 100% effective, but it certainly begs the question of whether they needed to be that day.
Which leads us to the most obvious source of potential war that we are currently facing: Trump’s Donroe Doctrine itself, where the United States will retreat from the eastern hemisphere in order to fully dominate the western hemisphere, dividing up the world into “spheres of influence.”
Related to the previous point, seeing the world through Trump’s narrow intellectual capacity as being simply divided into three roughly equal non-democratic superpowers means ceding eastern Europe to Russia, and Taiwan, the Philippines, and other regional interests in their region to China.
This might have the benefit of avoiding war between any of those three players, but such a direct war was never really in the cards in the first place. More to the point, the entire African continent and much of south Asia are seen by this American worldview as little more than regions to conquer or exploit, if they are aware they exist at all.
In this new reality, the European Union will have to rearm itself very quickly, and fully integrate its member states militarily, to deal with the dual threat of Russia taking the east while the United States takes the west, starting with Greenland. This is a threat the European Union is aware of, with an €800 billion rearmament program already under way. This may all be theory, but the Europeans are clearly treating it as a credible threat.
In this world, Canada will either need to align militarily with Europe, or eventually find ourselves as a de facto part of the United States, left with that difficult choice between sovereignty and security. This stark choice is also at the core of the difference between the Canadian government and its official opposition.
Donald Trump, easily the dumbest man to govern any major power in generations, is the single common denominator in all of these scenarios.
If a NATO country were to attack another NATO country, would that not be accepted as a defacto resignation from NATO effective immediately? After all, in terms of employment, the United States is an "at will" country.