Only a decade ago, U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent comments on Canada would have read as a deliberate parody of bad Middle East punditry. In his demands for the country’s annexation, Trump has repeatedly called Canada’s border with the United States an “artificial line.” He’s gone on to say “somebody did it a long time ago” and this border “makes no sense.”
Swap in, say, Iraq and Syria, and this quote could come from countless conversations about Middle Eastern politics and conflicts. The same sentiments have been invoked by at least one future U.S. president, regional leaders, and, most notoriously, Islamic State propagandists intent on erasing the Iraqi-Syrian border. Now, Trump’s proxies like Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem have started to performatively dismiss the existence of the Canadian border, or Canada’s right to exist at all.
The claim that some borders are “natural” and others are “artificial” is a bad idea that cuts across the ideological spectrum. It’s been used by ultra-nationalists who believe the right borders keep people out while the wrong borders separate a Volk who belong together. It’s also a favorite line of anti-colonialists who believe the West unfairly divided up the world. But both in Canada and in the Middle East, the story isn’t really that simple.
In the Middle East at least the story has a clear villain. The “somebody” who drew the borders here is actually two people: Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, British and French officials who signed a secret 1916 agreement to divide up the region. Their artificial lines created a series of artificial states which in turn created a century of instability and violence.
An archival map of the Middle East.
The proposed French and British division of the Middle East in 1916.Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot/Royal Geographical Society
Or so the story goes. The problem with this narrative isn’t that Sykes and Picot had good intentions or drew particularly good borders. Rather, it’s the implicit suggestion that better borders were actually available. A quick look at the history of the region shows that any set of possible lines would have created controversy. The “right” way to divide the Middle East was no more obvious than the “right” way to divide up modern Europe—something that took a few world wars to sort out.
Thankfully, the idea that there’s something “artificial” about Canada’s border or its existence as a sovereign state still sounds insane. But what makes this border any realer than the borders of the Middle East? The French and British initially carved up North America with the same zeal they carved up the Middle East.
A vintage map showing North America.
The French and British division of North America in 1762. L’Amerique Septentrionale/ Lettre et Jean Thomas Herissant via David Ramsey Map Collection
And the present U.S.-Canada boundary treaty was signed less than a decade before the Sykes-Picot agreement by a British diplomat acting on behalf of colonial Canada. The process for deciding on the United States’ northern border wasn’t secret, of course, but the result was definitely just as straight. And as in the Middle East, it divided longstanding political and cultural communities whose interests weren’t fundamentally taken into account.
Whether in the Middle East or the Midwest, all borders are artificial. What makes some more stable than others isn’t that they just happen to be in exactly the right place, or to run along a river or mountain range. Rather, it’s the politics and diplomacy that goes into making them work—and, as the recent history of the Middle East shows, dismissing borders as artificial is one sure way to disrupt this. Going in search of “real” borders will simply make the ones you’ve got less stable and more violent.
And as in the Middle East, straight borders aren’t inherently artificial. Rather, they appear in plains or deserts where there aren’t the right geographic features to make more natural-looking ones. They also appear where governments are hostile or indifferent to the non-sedentary peoples who regularly cross them. Whether it was Sioux in the Great Plains or Bedouins in the Syrian Desert, the communities most affected by new borders were never the priority of the people drawing them.
It’s a sign of how peaceful the U.S.-Canadian border has been that most Americans know very little about how it came to be. But this doesn’t mean its current location was inevitable or without controversy.
At the start of the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress sent letters inviting a number of what are today Canadian provinces to attend. They, however, declined the invitation, after which the Continental Army’s invasion of Quebec failed dismally. The War of 1812 saw another invasion of Canada.
But by then, the U.S. ardor for annexation had begun to cool. As explained by Richard Maas in The Picky Eagle, a combination of xenophobia and democratic idealism made the prospect of incorporating a region full of French Catholics and British loyalists less appealing. In short, the border that emerged in the early 19th century reflected the fact that the people to the north didn’t want to be part of the United States, and the United States didn’t want them to be a part of it either.
Still, from Maine to Oregon, there were a lot of details left to work out. Consider, for example, the bloodless Aroostook War, a dispute over Maine’s northern border in the first half of the 19th century. Some geographic vagueness in the 1783 Treaty of Paris led to competing claims over which particular highlands “divide those rivers that empty themselves into the St Lawrence, and those which fall into the Atlantic Ocean.” After the Dutch failed to mediate, events on the ground escalated. New Brunswick lumbermen arrested the head of a small Maine militia and the state began mobilizing more men. (There was also, inevitably, an incident with a bear.) Then, cooler heads in Washington and London prevailed.
Two vintage maps showing disputed borders in Oregon and Maine.
Left: A map showing the Oregon Controversy, with disputed areas in the Pacific Northwest spanning modern-day Oregon and Washington states and British Columbia in Canada. Right: A map of the Maine Controversy showing disputed areas in the Northeast.Interim Archives/Getty Images
The resulting 1842 Webster-Ashburton Treaty basically split the difference between U.S. and British claims. It provided an equitable distribution of lumber resources, but it didn’t follow any deeper geographic or demographic logic. On both sides of the new border were French-speaking Acadians and members of the Mi’kmaq nation, who hadn’t necessarily signed up to be part of either the United States or British Canada in the first place. Meanwhile, some on the Canadian side were left resentful, believing London had sold out their claims in pursuit of good relations with the United States.
During this same period, Washington and London also found themselves at odds further west, over the division of the Oregon territory. While this controversy is best remembered for the slogan “54°40′ or fight,” the reality is that the United States neither secured the 54°40′ parallel as its northern border nor fought over it. Instead, another pragmatic compromise secured the excessively straight border Trump objects to.
Initially, much of the more-western United States border was also marked out by watersheds. The Louisiana Purchase gave the United States the territory that drained down through the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, while Britain controlled the land that drained into the Hudson Bay. However, this line, called the Laurentian Divide, turned out to be really hard to find amidst the flatness of the Great Plains. So, in 1818, Washington and London agreed to set the border at the 49th parallel instead: far simpler and not that far off.
A vintage map of the United States.
A map used in schools circa 1900 shows U.S. territorial acquisitions between 1783 and 1853.Alamy
If the new line looked tidy, it still left another question: how to divide the territory west of the Rockies that drained into the Pacific. Britain wanted access to the fur trade on the Columbia River. James K. Polk, champion of manifest destiny, envisioned a border stretching all the way up to Alaska, in other words, the 54°40′ parallel. As it happened, though, Polk wanted Mexican territory even more. And so, to avoid trouble with Britain at the start of the Mexican-American War, he reached an agreement to extend the border straight west along the 49th parallel.
As the controversies in Maine and Oregon show, the line between the U.S. and Canada could certainly have turned out differently. But in criticizing the border as “artificial,” Trump isn’t demanding to somehow fix it. He’s not calling to create Greater Maine or to finally fight for 54°40′. He’s not suggesting we revert to the Laurentian Divide because it is more hydrographically authentic. He’s also not championing the legal rights of native tribes to cross the border more freely. And he’s definitely not raising questions about the reality or permeability of the equally artificial U.S.-Mexican border.
Instead, Trump is suggesting that the artificiality of the border somehow implies the artificiality of Canada as whole. The quote above ends with him concluding that Canada is “so perfect as a great and cherished state.”
This has always been the deeper thrust of the Sykes-Picot argument. It’s not simply that Middle East’s borders are in the wrong place. Rather, it’s that they mask a more real configuration of states drawn along linguistic, racial, religious, or historic lines. This is how you get hypothetical re-mappings of the region with, say, the Sunni populations of Iraq and Syria combined into one state, or the Kurds with an independent state of their own.
To the extent it can be discerned, Trump’s logic seems to be that since Canadians are (in his view) white, English-speaking, and right next door, they might as well be Americans. Setting aside the accuracy of all this, the more significant issue is that Canadians furiously disagree.
Indeed, one thing that’s become clear in the Middle East is that whatever anyone else thinks, people are unlikely to think of their own country as fake. Saddam Hussein, for example, believed that Kuwait had been artificially detached from Iraq, yet his efforts to remedy the situation were not welcomed. Likewise, the Islamic State’s attempt to destroy the border between Iraq and Syria was met with a violent response from the governments of both countries. States created within living memory, like Pakistan or Bangladesh, mean as much to their people as those that evolved from medieval kingdoms. And their borders are just as real.
In fairness to the Islamic State and Hussein, neither the Islamic State nor Iraq were around to object when Britain first drew the borders that they were trying to destroy. What’s so surreal about the United States Sykes-Picoting itself is that Washington was around, and didn’t even go to war when it had the chance. Instead, after hammering out the border with Canada in the 19th century, it worked out a few final details in a 1908 treaty and never looked back.
Where the Sykes-Picot story claims to offer a clear origin of the Middle East’s turbulent history, it confuses cause and effect. Whatever the deeper historic roots, violence in the region has only been exacerbated by those trying to change or erase its borders. Conversely, two centuries of peaceful diplomacy have left the U.S.-Canadian border uniquely stable—still the longest undefended border in the world as of publication.
By bringing the myth of artificial borders back to the United States, Trump won’t make its borders any better or more real. Instead, he risks creating the very instability that, in the Middle Eastern context, this myth was created to explain.