SCARBOROUGH, ONT.—Stephen Miller, United States President Donald Trump’s personal intellectual thug, has invoked what he calls “the iron laws of the world” to justify the administration doing what it wants, where it wants, and to whom it wants. Peaky Blinders couldn’t have said it better. Miller’s exact words were: “We live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” He went on to assert that these principles have existed since the beginning of time.

Miller has missed one critical feature of iron laws: iron rusts. In physics and in geopolitics, it oxidizes. Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but inevitably. The iron law of iron is that over time it weakens, deteriorates, and flakes away.

The other problem with iron is that the object it strikes is often made of iron, too. The Greenlanders, the Danes, and even the Europeans—rarely united on anything—demonstrated iron resolve in response to Trump’s bully‑boy tactics. Iron on iron is not a pleasant sensation. In fact, it is jarring, producing little more than sparks and damage, with no benefit to anyone.

Miller emphasized that “international niceties” are secondary to strength, force, and power in the real world. However, it is the niceties of international law that turn iron into steel. Steel is stronger, more durable, and far more resistant to corrosion. Miller might keep that in mind as he and his boss swing from one shiny object to another. For the past 80 years, the strength of the American empire has rested not on brute force, but on its support for international rules, norms, and institutions.

Ignoring international and domestic constraints may provide temporary impunity, but Newton’s third law still applies: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Blowing up NATO has left its remaining members scrambling to rearm. Until recently, the default assumption was to buy American. Instead, the bully’s iron fist is now costing the U.S. billions of dollars in lost F‑35s contracts and other defence procurements.

Tiny Denmark, which stood up to the bully, has publicly lamented that its F‑35s are costly, maintenance heavy, have a lot of downtime, and are a regrettable purchase. The longer Canada “reviews” its own F‑35 contract, the less likely it is that the full purchase will ever be completed. When a once‑reliable ally goes rogue, dependency on that ally for critical defence infrastructure becomes a strategic liability. U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra, who casually threatens our sovereignty in our own airspace, may forever be remembered as the American ambassador that blew the multi‑billion-dollar F‑35 deal.

Iron flakes from the outside, but it corrodes from within, as well. The flagrant abuse of truth and the rule of law by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents against American citizens is not merely appalling—it reflects a governing philosophy that believes niceties are for suckers. Abuse of power is not strength; it is weakness.

The deliberate division of citizens into blue and red, left and right, leaves everyone angrier, more confused, and increasingly contemptuous of the institutions that once held the country together. A citizenry at war with itself cannot sustain an empire—hegemonic or otherwise. When citizens begin taking up arms against one another, whatever power the state imagines it possesses is already gone.

Mass shootings in the U.S. have become so routine that unless at least four people are killed, they barely register as news. Trump’s criticism of the federal agents’ killing of Alex Pretti—an ICU nurse shot and killed by federal immigration enforcement agents during a protest in Minneapolis—for carrying a firearm raises the internal contradictions of American political life to a whole new level. Apparently, in Trump’s mind, the right to bear arms does not extend to protests against unlawful federal action in Minnesota, but was perfectly acceptable to storm Congress and assault police officers while armed in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.

The iron law that dismisses legal and moral restraint is not strength. It is desperation. That should concern everyone—particularly Canada.

Why should we care as the U.S. accelerates down this path of wanton self‑destruction—one might even say a death spiral? Because Greenland is not the prize; it is the tease. The Canadian Arctic is the real objective to be obtained by any means necessary. Separatism has always had a small but persistent audience in Canada. What is new is the prospect of that movement being backed by a foreign government armed with vast resources and an industrial‑scale disinformation machine. Taking control in the Arctic is much easier if Canadians are consumed by their own internal political divisions stoked by foreign interference. Divide and conquer is an age-old strategy, modernized by a false narrative propagated on a small number of gullible fools.

Money and false narratives can distort outcomes even when referendums are lost. The corrosive damage lies in the process itself. Before the Clarity Act, we used to joke about “never‑endums”—having referendums until you got the answer you wanted. The social and political exhaustion they generate is debilitating.

Fox & Friends launching a barrage of misinformation may repel many Canadians, but it will still find an audience—and that audience will be destabilized. Trump’s preferred methodology has always been chaos. Every day is a tariff day. Different targets, different sectors, relentless pressure until capitulation. It is exceedingly difficult to hold a country together while chaos is deliberately stoked at home and abroad to distract from chaos within.

The strategy, such as it is, relies on internal conflict to deflect responsibility. If citizens are busy fighting one another, they are less likely to notice who lit the match. When that fails, the next shiny object and the next distraction becomes the focus.

John McKay is the former Liberal Member of Parliament for Scarborough–Guildwood, Ont., and is the former Canadian co-chair of the Canada-U.S. Inter-Parliamentary Group.

The Hill Times