First, American forces would strike with poison gas munitions, seizing a strategically valuable port city. Soldiers would sever undersea cables, destroy bridges and rail lines to paralyze infrastructure. Major cities on the shores of lakes and rivers would be captured in order to blunt any civilian resistance.
The multipronged invasion would rely on ground forces, amphibious landing and then mass internments. According to the architects of the plan, the attack would be short-lived and the besieged country would fall within days.
The target was Canada, part of a classified 1930 strategy – War Plan Red – for a hypothetical war with Great Britain where the US would seek to deny it any foothold in North America. A collaged artwork of Trump wearing a Maga hat and medals, standing in front of the Capitol building with helicopters and fighter jets flying in the background. The image has been designed to look like an oil painting.
But the invasion plans, once dismissed as a fumbling historical quirk, have taken on fresh relevance as the US pivots its foreign policy to an increasingly aggressive view of its “pre-eminence” in the western hemisphere and turns its sights on both foes and allies.
I don’t think that old plan would work today. Take severing undersea cables. Some of the major Pacific undersea cables terminate in Vancouver, serving the entire Pacific Northwest. Severing them seriously degrades communications throughout northwestern US while not disconnecting Vancouver from the rest of Canada, or the world at large.
Not to mention: how exactly would the military hold these strategic cities? The majority of important/export from the port cities is already to the US. If they tried something like this, Canadians would just go on a general strike and the US would be severely impacted.
That’s assuming of course that NATO ignored the situation and China didn’t take the opportunity to invade Taiwan and Japan.