And now, here we are… I’ve asked both Shore, who works in Canada at the University of Toronto, and Dr. Michael MacKay, a political philosopher from Canada who has worked in Ukraine, to share their insights on the escalation of US threats to Canada. Shore shared the following anecdote: After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I spent a lot of time talking to American journalists and politicians, trying to explain the relationship between Russia and Ukraine. At one point in spring 2022, I was doing a briefing for a Democratic congresswoman and her staff. The room was full of smart people, who didn’t necessarily have expertise in Russia and Ukraine in particular. Everyone knew that Ukraine and Russia had both been part of the Soviet Union; that the Soviet Union had collapsed in 1991; that Ukraine had become an independent country then; and that Russian was spoken in both countries. And I spontaneously tried an analogy: I asked them to imagine that January 6th had gone the other way, that we were living in a Trumpist dictatorship, and that under the guise of “Making America Great Again,” Trump decided to send the US army to invade Canada and start shelling Toronto. Well Canada, like Ukraine, is a bilingual country, where more or less everyone (also) speaks English. Canadians eat hamburgers and french fries just like Americans do. Lots of people in Philadelphia, say, have cousins in Toronto. Lots of Americans study at Canadian universities and vice versa… so why would they object if the American army were to cross the border, invade the country under the guise of brotherhood and start bombing a major city — or two or three or four? I was trying to help American politicians relate to the fact that no possible cultural and/or linguistic affinity between Ukraine and Russia made an invasion and mass slaughter less outrageous. And this was such an incredibly effective analogy at the time precisely because it was inconceivable to everyone in that room that the United States would ever even vaguely contemplate invading Canada. And now, here we are… —Dr. Marci Shore for Bette Dangerous 10/