Scenario: Three hundred meters below the North Atlantic

In the icy darkness, an autonomous glider—a torpedo-shaped drone the size of a kayak, drifting on programmed currents—suspends its descent. Its acoustic sensors detect something: a faint anomaly in the background hum of current and marine life, barely distinguishable from the ocean itself. The onboard algorithm processes, classifies, hesitates.

Three hundred miles southwest, in the operations room of HMS Somerset off the coast of Ireland, the data arrives as a flicker on a screen. Before the duty officer can request confirmation, the contact vanishes. Somewhere in those black waters, a Khabarovsk-class submarine—nearly silent, its pump-jet propulsion and composite hull rendering it acoustically invisible—has crossed the Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap undetected.

This is not yet reality. But it is frighteningly plausible. Russia *did* launch the Khabarovsk last month from Severodvinsk, equipped with Poseidon “doomsday” torpedoes and noise-reduction technology that renders it nearly undetectable. Sir Gwyn Jenkins, Britain’s First Sea Lord, warns that Russian incursions into British waters have increased thirty percent in just two years.

The threat extends beyond Britain: Canada’s Arctic archipelago faces similar incursions, its sovereignty claims unenforceable by a military too small and underfunded to patrol what it notionally controls. Both countries deploy technology—Britain’s Atlantic Bastion network of AI-guided gliders, Canada’s Arctic surveillance projects—but neither possesses the scale to sustain credible defence alone. And the alliance framework that once guaranteed their security has come unmoored.

The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy speaks contemptuously of “civilisational erasure” in Europe and signals alignment with Moscow over Brussels; the Kremlin has praised the document as consonant with its own thinking. Trump’s blustering threats toward Canada—whether tariffs or talk of annexation—have placed the US-Canadian partnership in question for the first time since the 1800s. The post-war settlement is in full collapse.

English-speaking liberal democracy now faces an existential threat it has not confronted since 1945. For eighty years, Britain, Canada, and the United States constituted the core of the liberal democratic order—parliamentary systems, rule of law, market economies tempered by social provision, multilateral institutions.

That triangular structure is dissolving. What emerges is a multipolar configuration in which the United States has abandoned liberal internationalism, and in which Britain and Canada—the two remaining English-speaking liberal democracies of consequence in the Northern Hemisphere—possess neither the scale nor the resources to operate as autonomous actors. In a world organized around continental-scale powers, fragmentation means irrelevance, and irrelevance means subjugation. A closer partnership of Britain and Canada – and Anglo-Canadian Union, if you like – represents a strategic response that preserves both agency and the liberal democratic model itself.

Consider the geopolitical landscape of 2045. China commands twenty percent of global GDP and projects power across two oceans. The United States confronts imperial overstretch and domestic fracture, its capacity to guarantee security commitments increasingly uncertain. India rises, non-aligned and calculating. The European Union, if it coheres, represents another pole, though one riven by contradictions and resource dependence. In this configuration, Britain at 70 million and Canada at 40 million are not players but pawns. They possess neither the demographic weight nor the resource base nor the military capability to defend their interests independently. Their choice is stark: collaborate toward a larger formation, or become objects rather than subjects of international politics.

The material complementarity is almost absurdly perfect. Britain brings technology, capital, military capability, diplomatic infrastructure, financial centrality. The City of London remains the world’s second financial center; British universities dominate global rankings; the Royal Navy operates nuclear-powered attack submarines and aircraft carriers; the permanent Security Council seat grants institutional leverage. But Britain cannot feed itself, cannot power itself, cannot secure its own resources.

Canada inverts this precisely. It possesses the second-largest territory on earth, vast energy reserves, critical minerals, fresh water, Arctic sovereignty, and food surplus. But Canadian military forces are a hollow shell, Canadian diplomacy derivative, Canadian technology dependent on American platforms, Canadian population too sparse to exploit its geography. A union solves both sets of deficiencies simultaneously. Britain supplies brain and sinew; Canada supplies bone and blood.

But complementarity is not merely defensive. Both countries have been G7 growth laggards since 2016—Britain strangled by Brexit’s economic isolation, Canada trapped in resource extraction with insufficient value-added manufacturing. A closer union breaks both impasses. Britain gains access to resources it currently imports at volatile prices; Canada gains access to capital, technology, and expertise to move up the value chain.

Energy security—Canadian oil, gas, and uranium flowing to British manufacturing and power generation—eliminates Britain’s structural vulnerability while creating integrated industrial capacity neither possesses alone. Critical minerals—rare earths, lithium, copper, cobalt—currently monopolized by China through processing control, can be extracted in Canada and processed in Britain, creating supply chain sovereignty from mine to finished product. The union does not merely combine existing capabilities; it creates new ones. A £4 trillion economy with energy autarky, resource independence, and technological depth operating as a single market generates growth neither partner can achieve separately.

The cultural dimension compounds economic advantage. Britain and Canada together constitute the largest English-language cultural production system outside the United States: publishing, film, television, music, higher education, scientific research. London and Toronto anchor a cultural economy already deeply integrated through talent flows, institutional partnerships, and shared audiences.

A union formalizes what already exists informally, creating a genuine alternative pole to American cultural hegemony. This is soft power at scale: the capacity to shape global discourse, set standards, attract talent, and export ideas. In an era where cultural influence translates directly to economic advantage—where intellectual property, platform dominance, and content creation drive growth—a union positions itself as the third cultural superpower after the United States and China.

Climate leadership follows naturally. A union commands vast northern territories warming faster than anywhere on earth, rendering it the primary laboratory for climate adaptation. Canadian Arctic research capacity, British climate science —together these create the world’s leading centre for cold-climate technology, renewable energy integration, and sustainable resource extraction. While other powers scramble to decarbonize economies built on fossil fuel dependence, a union operates from abundance: hydroelectric capacity, uranium for next-generation reactors, rare earths for wind turbines and batteries, timber for carbon sequestration. It becomes the first major power to achieve net-zero while maintaining industrial capacity—a model other nations must either emulate or purchase technology to replicate. Climate leadership is not altruism; it is economic strategy.

The Arctic dimension alone might justify a union. Climate change is rendering the Northwest Passage navigable, unlocking resources and trade routes that will define twenty-second century geopolitics. Russia militarizes its Arctic frontier; China declares itself a “near-Arctic state” and pushes into northern waters; the United States shows covetous interest but is constrained by Pacific commitments. Canada cannot defend the Arctic archipelago alone—it lacks icebreakers, submarines, surveillance infrastructure, and the military budget to acquire them. Britain cannot access Arctic resources or routes without territorial presence.

Together, they dominate the GIUK Gap—the chokepoint through which Russian submarines must pass to reach the Atlantic—and control the Northwest Passage entirely. With Norwegian and Danish partnerships, a union would command the entire Arctic-Atlantic maritime space. Control of northern approaches and routes is to the twenty-first century what control of Mediterranean and Suez was to the nineteenth. A union makes Arctic dominance feasible; separation makes it impossible.

Energy and resource security compound the logic. Europe’s dependence on Russian gas revealed the fragility of economies lacking indigenous energy. Britain imports seventy percent of its gas; its North Sea reserves deplete. Canada possesses 170 billion barrels of oil, massive natural gas reserves, and uranium sufficient to power reactors for centuries. The union achieves energy autarky—a condition no other major power except the United States and Russia can claim. China imports eighty percent of its oil; India is entirely dependent; the European Union, even with Norwegian gas, remains structurally vulnerable. A union, by contrast, can withstand blockades, embargoes, and supply disruptions. In an era of weaponized interdependence, this is not luxury but necessity.

Military integration transforms both partners. Britain maintains nuclear deterrence and expeditionary capability but struggles to sustain operations; Canada fields forces too small to matter. Combined defense spending of £105 billion—far exceeding France, on a par with Russia—purchases credible capability: two carrier battle groups, a dozen nuclear attack submarines, integrated air defense, Arctic patrol, and global reach. Critically, this permits operational independence. A union need not request American permission for deployments, need not subordinate strategy to alliance politics, need not accept constraints imposed by dependency. It becomes what Britain has not been since 1956 and Canada has never been: a power capable of autonomous action.

The alternative is grim. Britain outside the European Union, outside a larger formation, drifts toward Argentinian irrelevance—a once-consequential power nursing memories and resentments. Canada, its economy dependent on a potentially hostile United States, its Arctic claims undefendable, its military negligible, becomes a resource appendage, subject to coercion it cannot resist. Separately, both are vulnerable to pressure, inducement, and marginalization. Together, they constitute the fourth pole in a multipolar order: not a hegemon, not a supplicant, but a consequential power with global reach, resource independence, technological sophistication, and military capability.

History does not offer choices between ideal and flawed options; it offers choices between bad and worse. An Anglo-Canadian Union requires constitutional innovation and political courage. But the logic is ineluctable: organize or decline, federate or fragment, achieve scale or accept subordination. In a world of giants, middle powers face extinction. The union offers survival—not through nostalgia, but through ruthless adaptation to the world as it is.

GardenWalker