Imagine a small, democratic nation, perched on top of a diverse and bustling continent. Outside of a few cities, its people are spread out over a vast northern hinterland. Its long, largely unguarded border is shared with one of the world’s military superpowers. And that neighbor has recently articulated a desire to acquire new territory.
What might that small country do to protect its independence? In the case of post-World War II Finland, the solution was a delicate balancing act: Helsinki sought to stay on the good side of the neighboring Soviet Union while maintaining a nominal degree of political independence. At a time when many of the Soviet Union’s other neighbors were being forced to adopt its political, economic, and diplomatic rules, Finland was able to keep its own intact after successfully resisting several Soviet invasions—but only by promising not to threaten Soviet interests.
Imagine a small, democratic nation, perched on top of a diverse and bustling continent. Outside of a few cities, its people are spread out over a vast northern hinterland. Its long, largely unguarded border is shared with one of the world’s military superpowers. And that neighbor has recently articulated a desire to acquire new territory.
What might that small country do to protect its independence? In the case of post-World War II Finland, the solution was a delicate balancing act: Helsinki sought to stay on the good side of the neighboring Soviet Union while maintaining a nominal degree of political independence. At a time when many of the Soviet Union’s other neighbors were being forced to adopt its political, economic, and diplomatic rules, Finland was able to keep its own intact after successfully resisting several Soviet invasions—but only by promising not to threaten Soviet interests.
Ever since, “Finlandization” has become a byword among foreign-policy experts for a country that abandons the pursuit of an independent foreign policy to forestall aggression from a much larger, more powerful neighbor. This is one reason why Finland’s recent NATO accession was such a monumental shift: The country broke decades of careful neutrality to side with the West.
Today, as U.S. President Donald Trump repeatedly threatens Canada with economic warfare and outright annexation, the country’s situation is eerily reminiscent of where Finland stood three-quarters of a century ago. In a speech at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called for his country and other middle powers to give up the notion that “compliance will buy safety” and to instead “diversify to hedge against uncertainty.”
But experts say that Canada’s options in the face of U.S. aggression may be magnitudes worse than Finland’s were against the Soviets—if Ottawa doesn’t play its hand perfectly in the short to medium term.
At the end of World War II, Finland found itself in a delicate spot. The Soviet Union had already demonstrated an appetite for expanding its territory and was terrified of attacks on Leningrad through its long and exposed Finnish border. It developed a strategy of pressuring, dominating, and even annexing neighboring countries to ensure that Russia remained secure.
In response, Finland developed a strategy of “adaptive acquiescence,” as political scientist Hans Mouritzen put it. That came in the form of the 1948 Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance, which promised that Finland would fight to protect the Soviet border if armies entered Finnish territory. In exchange, Finland could remain ostensibly neutral in the Cold War—and pursue trade agreements with the West.
If Carney is to accomplish his goals, then Canada must similarly pursue other alliances while maintaining a degree of deference to an increasingly bellicose United States, on which it still depends for nearly 70 percent of its export market. But unfortunately, Canada’s position is an unfortunate inverse of Finland’s from 70 years ago.
First, there’s politics. Though Finland’s treaty with the Soviet Union guaranteed its political neutrality, the imbalance of power between the two nations meant that Helsinki was always wary of provoking Soviet displeasure. That created a chilled political culture and gave Moscow effective veto power in Finnish politics; Soviet threats to torpedo trade agreements, for example, sunk a democratically elected Finnish government. The media likewise fell in line: Self-censorship of anti-Soviet perspectives was widespread in Finland for decades.
In Canada, by contrast, it’s hard to imagine a political party, news panel, or editorial avoiding criticizing the United States out of fear of invasion or trade retaliation. After all, Canada and the United States “often have vocal disagreements,” said John Keess, a historian at Canada’s Royal Military College—and these can even get quite nasty. The 2025 reelection of Carney’s Liberal Party is just the most recent example of Canadians publicly, and profoundly, rejecting U.S. politics at the ballot box.
But while Canada might not toe the line politically, it has long been ceding control over key areas to the United States—especially when it comes to the military.
Since the 1950s, when the United States developed thermonuclear weapons, Keess said, successive Canadian governments have treated any potential military conflict with the United States as a certain defeat and integrated national defense to benefit from the U.S. nuclear umbrella. The result is that Canada today has limited military capacity without assistance from shared U.S. systems. “We can’t secure all Canadian airspace right now by our own means,” Keess said.
That’s all the more consequential because Canada offers a much more tempting target for annexation than Finland ever did. In 1948, Finland offered few natural resources that the vast Soviet territories did not already have, and it was largely dependent on the Soviet Union for its fuel. Canada, by contrast, provides nearly 60 percent of U.S. crude oil imports and is home to many other strategic resources. And while its vast territory may be a challenge to hold, it is more than double the United States’ size on a map—a rationale that shouldn’t be underestimated when it comes to real-estate-minded Trump.
Unlike Finland with the Soviets, Canada has also spent decades deepening its reliance on the United States, meaning that trade in those resources have become vital to both countries’ economies. Any attempts to use them as leverage would be highly damaging to Canada and the United States—and provide compelling grounds for more serious conflict.
Worst of all, Canada would probably be a comparatively easy target for the U.S. military. Finland’s ostensible neutrality toward the Soviet Union was aided by the costly experience of the 1939-1940 Winter War, when a small but nimble Finnish force inflicted massive casualties on the Red Army and limited the loss of territory to less than 10 percent of the country.
The experience lingered in the Soviet Union’s memory and informed the Kremlin’s tolerance for Finnish autonomy. It also helped forge Finnish national identity and support a culture of rugged and enduring civil defense. Finns are “well aware of the history of being a country that has been trampled on,” said David Carment, a political scientist at Ottawa’s Carleton University. “It’s kind of been a battleground. We don’t have that experience.”
But Canada does have some options for maintaining autonomy on the edge of a bellicose empire. Carment would like to see some variation of what Carney articulated at Davos: a “middle power” strategy of seeking diverse and practical alliances to increase the benefits of Canadian autonomy to the United States, alongside the perceived cost of any U.S. move against it. “You go from being an easy target, because you’re totally integrated, to being a costly problem,” Carment said.
To achieve that, Canada will need to carefully unwind decades of integration with the United States. “If these vulnerabilities were engineered, they can be reverse engineered,” Carment said. Agreements such as Carney’s new “strategic partnership” with China are a prime example; reducing Canadian reliance on U.S. tech oligarchs is another. To do so successfully, Carney will need to be mindful not to overspend his political capital and fall victim to domestic opposition from those whom Carment called “continentalists”—sympathizers of the U.S. administration. They include Conservative legislator Jamil Jivani, who believe, Carment said, that Canada would be “best off being a junior partner to the U.S., because all other outcomes are worse.”
There is some chance that these continentalists are right. If Carney does not manage his strategic position carefully—or if the Trump administration perceives deals such as the one that he struck with China as too threatening to U.S. interests—Canada could face a much worse fate. Canadian military officials caused a stir recently when they leaked their predicted outcome of a full-scale U.S. invasion of Canada, which confessed that the country’s military could not forestall defeat for more than a couple of weeks. The Winter War it was not.
Even if a shooting war with the United States remains highly unlikely, it is clear that the Trump administration could exploit other vulnerabilities to destabilize Canada. It is already stoking a separatist movement in Alberta run by enthusiasts for U.S. annexation, which security experts fear may provide the pretense for further U.S. meddling. Even considering the damage that it would cause to his own economy, Trump could walk away from the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which is currently under review, or demand untenable political concessions, such as allowing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations inside Canada, as some Republican lawmakers have called for. That would be a military occupation in all but name.
But as long as Canada remains nominally independent, the Finnish example shows that Ottawa has options; “sovereignty is not an on-off switch,” Keess said. For a little while longer, at least, it’s still up to Canadians where to set the dial.
