The National Security Strategy issued by the Trump administration last Friday isn’t merely a restatement of “America First” principles; it is a codified assertion of unilateral American power within the Western Hemisphere, carrying serious implications for Canada.

The strategic heart of this declaration lies in the commitment to “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine” in the Western Hemisphere. Although the doctrine’s historical association is with Latin American stability and stemming unwanted migration, its “Trump Corollary” expands the scope to explicitly include preventing “non-Hemispheric competitors” from controlling “strategically vital assets” and, crucially, ensuring America’s “continued access to key strategic locations.”

To execute this mandate in the North American Arctic—an area of rapidly intensifying geopolitical and economic competition—the Trump administration is creating the national security justification to take another step towards formalizing Canada’s satrap status, this time by forcing a permanent change in the status of the Northwest Passage.

The report is full of “tells” that this is where an “America First” foreign policy is headed, and likely faster than we think. The most aggressive language is found in its operational directive demanding “establishing or expanding access in strategically important locations,” backed by the requirement for a “more suitable Coast Guard and Navy presence to control sea lanes… and to control key transit routes in a crisis.”

To state the obvious, the Northwest Passage, the sea lane connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, is the only major strategic transit route in the North American half of the hemisphere. For decades, the legal status of the Passage has been managed by a diplomatic compromise: the 1988 Arctic Cooperation Agreement, under which the United States agreed to seek the Canadian government’s consent before sending its icebreakers through the waterway.

The National Security Strategy’s mandate to actively establish or expand access serves notice that this consent-based arrangement is now deemed strategically incompatible with America’s hemispheric interests. To the point: Washington views the Passage as strategically vital to deterring Russia and China—powers already active and staking claims in the far North— and cannot afford, for reasons of deterrence and defence, a contingent capacity (i.e., Canadian permission) to secure the Arctic and the hemisphere.

This sobering analysis is further backed up by the National Security Strategy’s stated economic goals. Specifically, the report calls for, “Securing Access to Critical Supply Chains and Materials” and expanding American access to critical minerals within the Western Hemisphere. This translates to economic leverage in the Canadian Arctic, where the U.S. seeks to gain effective control over dual-use infrastructure necessary for resource development and force projection, such as through the modernization of NORAD and mining concessions on land and the seabed to access strategically important metals and minerals. By identifying strategic resources “with a view to their protection and joint development with regional partners,” and by utilizing government financing programs to pressure partners to award sole-source contracts to American companies, Washington aims to exert domain control via economic means. It is hard to see the report as setting up anything other than a clear collision course with Canadian sovereignty by subordinating diplomatic caution and historical precedent to newly defined strategic necessities. Specifically, it provides the formal justification for the U.S. to execute a Freedom of Navigation Operation (FONOP) in the Northwest Passage without Canada’s consent, thereby undoing Ottawa’s internal waters claim. Since the U.S. routinely uses FONOPs globally to challenge “excessive maritime claims” by allies, partners, and competitors alike, and given the strategy’s emphasis on quickly re-shoring the defence industrial base and maintaining dominance, delaying this assertion risks, in the estimation of the Trump administration, allowing competing powers to set an unfavourable precedent in the Arctic. This strategic urgency ensures that an American FONOP is now more, not less, likely, and is something that could happen sooner, not later. The core dilemma for Canada is that its reliance on integrated defence cooperation with the U.S. inevitably diminishes its ability to maintain independent operational control over its own territory. This reality, coupled with Washington’s unilateral assertions, reinforces the cynical but correct observation that the report marks another important step toward reducing Canada to a strategic appendage of the U.S., or in the more direct and clarifying language of the president, a “51st state.”