chaos_knight posted...
Scary part is we could take over Canada within a week.
This is laughably naive. The US military couldn't even get across a landmass the size of Canada and set up the necessary infrastructure they will need in a month and you're expecting them to conquer the country in a week?
Here's some fun facts about Canada:
-It is the largest country in the world by area other than Russia.
-It shares the world's single-largest land border with the US - a border that is almost completely undefended and would be horrifically vulnerable to infiltration by guerillas and partisans for attacks on US population centres.
-A significant amount of the country is rural and some of it is accessible only by air, making ferreting out guerilla groups virtually impossible.
-Canada has the seventh-highest guns per capita in the world, with approximately one gun for every three people. Most of these guns are long guns, as handguns are heavily restricted in the country.
Combine a massive geographic footprint with a well-educated, well-connected populace and you have what might be the greatest military tarpit in the world. Canada would not "win" a fight with the US, in that there isn't going to be another Canadian flag planted over the smouldering remains of the White House, but it is going to be completely impossible to take and hold for any length of time. It would be a quagmire that would make Iraq and Afghanistan look like the Anglo-Zanzibar war. Even accepting that the US would likely be able to seize most of Canada's major population centres quickly, the amount of resources needed to hold onto them for any length of time would be staggering. Partisan warfare and internal insurrection - aided by restive leftist groups within the US - would be ceaseless and highly destructive. The vast space between Canada's population centres means that military groups assigned to each would be unable to effectively support one another, amplifying the need for numbers.
And this is without getting into the response by the rest of the world. An American invasion of Canada would trigger NATO Article 5, necessitating the rest of the world's leading military powers to respond. US trade would be severely curtailed and it is quite likely the world economic system would be decoupled from the US dollar, which would cripple America economically. The US would be left with no major allies or trading partners (aside from *maybe* China, but even they would likely smell blood in the water and try to capitalize, perhaps even with an invasion of Taiwan which the US would then need to either divert resources towards or allow one of the most critical supply lynchpins in the modern world - semiconductor production - to fall into Chinese hands and/or be destroyed).
An actual military invasion of Canada would ruin the US.