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Roger W. Bowen is a political scientist who has published two books about Canadian affairs and the country’s relationship with the U.S.

Since 1775 the U.S. has invaded Canada three times and has “won” only once. Planned but not undertaken, on at least two separate occasions America’s foreign policy makers developed two different “contingency plans” to invade Canada. If Donald Trump, who wants Canada to become America’s 51st state, tries to have his way, he’ll likely rely on one of these plans.

In 1775, both Lower Canada (Quebec) and America were British colonies whose subjects were outraged by the wrongs they were forced to endure at the hands of their imperialist overlord. Very aware of the growing anti- British sentiment among the people of Quebec and America’s 13 colonies, Britain focused on how to keep the angry North American colonists on both sides of the border from joining forces.

The decisive Battle of Quebec (City) forced an American retreat. Similarly, the United States had at best mixed results in the War of 1812, but did not win. Our one “military” victory against Canada happened in the late 1830s in the so-called “Aroostook War.” It in fact was a series of skirmishes between lumbermen on both sides of the Maine-Canada border that came to an end with a negotiated treaty setting the boundaries of the Maine-New Brunswick border.

Actual armed conflict between the two neighbors has been rare. “War Plan Red” of 1930 was a contingency plan for the American army and navy to work together in order to stop an invasion of the homeland by Britain. This plan assumed that British troops would invade America primarily from Canada, and that the British navy would ship war materiel through Halifax, Nova Scotia. War Plan Red called for seizing Halifax, even using poison gas, and occupying all major Canadian cities and its electrical power infrastructure.

A second untested plan was instigated by American war planners based on real events in the late 1960s and early 1970s. French President Charles de Gaulle had visited Quebec in 1967 and famously uttered “Vive le Quebec libre,” effectively telling French Canadians that Quebec should separate from Canada.

Quebecois leaders responded. Rene Levesque quit the Liberal Party and formed the Parti Quebecois and soon thereafter issued a “manifesto” that would require a referendum on Quebec’s future. From the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa one confidential cablegram to Rufus Smith of the U.S. Department of State predicted that an independent Quebec “might try to throw a line over to Louisiana, Maine, etc.” in the event of a separatist upheaval.

A young political scientist who was a strong supporter of America “projecting” power in Southeast Asia/Vietnam was Zbigniew Brzezinski. At Columbia University Brzezinski developed an institute to study communism and wrote and a well-received book about Soviet totalitarianism that caught the attention first of John F. Kennedy, then President Johnson on whose State Department’s Policy Planning Council Brzezinski participated and to which he offered his considered yet alarming view that de Gaulle’s entry into Canada and Levesque’s separatism might well destabilize Canada and harm the United States. That view was based on a detailed, inter-agency analysis that became National Security Staff Memorandum # 9, portions of which remain classified today.

Brzezinski’s concerns expressed in 1967 seemed prescient just three years later during the FLQ Crisis when Prime Minister Eliot Trudeau suspended the civil liberties of Canadians following the Front for the Liberation of Quebec (FLQ) kidnapping British Trade Commissioner James Cross and Quebecois official Pierre LaPorte, whom they later murdered.

Trudeau made the case that many Canadians “apprehended insurrection” due to the “climate of terror and violence” perpetrated by the radical wing of the FLQ. Its radicalism went continental once American Black Panther Stokley Carmichael called for Canadian Blacks to “get all the guns you can” and “be prepared to kill for your people in the long period of armed struggle against white society.”

Mark Rudd and Jerry Rubin, both American anti-Vietnam War radicals, allegedly encouraged rioting by separatists in Vancouver. By 1971 the FBI concluded that the FLQ is not “just another bourgeois movement” but instead had the effect of turning Quebec into a bastion of rebellion against all central authorities.

Enter Trump. The trade war that he started in order to force Canada to kowtow has hurt America’s reputation more than Canada’s so far. U.S. polls show that 80% of all Americans continue to give Canada high favorable ratings, while 80% of Canadians view Trump unfavorably and 75% do not trust U.S. negotiators to play fair. Canadians are boycotting many American manufactured goods and American travel destinations in order to show their contempt toward the bully south of its border.

Canada deserves an apology from America’s leaders.

Treating neighbors as you wish to be treated is an honorable notion in democratic civil society. Trump seems not to understand this basic norm, so it must be left to the Congress to issue an apology to Canada when the tariffs are finally suspended and the saber-rattling ends. The official apology might end with a “thank you” for responding quickly and forcefully with military assistance following the tragedy of 9/11.