Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the possible death and dismemberment of my country. Time and again, I scan the news and hear rumblings of war. Threats of annexation and domination. Glib guides on the political benefits of erasing my country from the map. Grim military models projecting our army’s easy defeat in hypothetical invasion scenarios and our society’s collapse into a patchwork of mujahedeen-style militias.

I do not live in Iran, or Cuba, or Venezuela. I live in Canada. And until very recently, such headlines would have been the work of perverse fantasists. Canada has long been a veritable Eden of middle-class gentility. But something grave has shifted in the world order. Under the National Security Strategy (NSS) of the Trump administration, the line between allied and enemy nations has blurred to the point of non-existence.

Today, the U.S. and its antagonists can strike virtually anywhere at any time, making geography less and less relevant to conflict. Over the past half-century or so, the goals of war have also changed. Now, in many cases, the motivation is no longer economic cooperation or territorial security — it’s civilizational domination. According to the NSS, America is rightly the center of the Western world, with a sacred duty to empower like-minded patriots to save weak-willed nations like Canada from the “civilizational erasure” now threatening Europe.

Around the world, we have seen the proliferation of what those in American security circles call “gray zone tactics” — skullduggery lying just below the threshold of warfare: disinformation, sabotage, destabilization. In Canada, this has taken the form of U.S. officials promoting rabid separatists and threatening economic war. In Mexico, it has meant American pressure coercing the government to undertake destabilizing anti-cartel operations. In Europe, it’s been a constant funnel of right-wing grievance on platforms tilted by Trump-backing billionaires. 

Trump and his defenders have argued that his administration is merely “fighting fire with fire,” operating on the same level as America’s adversaries. Russia’s Internet Research Agency famously used social media disinformation to great effect during the 2016 U.S. election and tried to influence the Brexit vote. Its client states have dumped Iraqi refugees on the Polish border and flooded Lithuania’s airspace with balloons. The Russian military has also repeatedly targeted civilian infrastructure across Eastern Europe. China swarms contested seas with fishermen and targets critical U.S. infrastructure for cyberattacks. It has also been accused of secretly severing internet cables and torqued online platforms to hide the appearance of dissent.

But what is unique about this new United States is the way it has so swiftly added allied nations to its list of targets. Increasingly, it appears there is no interior to this new empire, only new battlefields. Liberals of all nations are now seen by many as enemies within who are in need of swift correction to the righteous MAGA path, according to Michael Williams, an expert on the international far-right at the University of Ottawa. 

“The West is a cultural and political entity [whose] greatness is being undermined by liberalism,” Williams explained of this view. “So you need to find ways to attack liberalism in any way you can.”

The result is effectively little civil wars, everywhere. Coupled with the Trump administration’s growing hostility toward international law, multilateral institutions and conventional morality, it is, in a word, chaos — an era of perpetual anxiety, paranoia and fear.

This kind of gray zone warfare is the fruit of decades of transformation in the ideology of combat. The feeling of uncertainty it generates has been a defining feature of marginal places on the edge of empires for centuries — for both those receding in an age of collapse or advancing in a time of conquest. It’s still unclear which is happening now or how long it will last. But what’s evident is that the notions of borders, nations, alliances and war that helped sustain “the long peace” of the late 20th century are crumbling. In their place, something far less stable has emerged: a world in which the gray zone is no longer the exception, but the rule.

Frontier To Fiction

Before the modern gray zone existed, there was the frontier — another concept largely borne of American martial fantasy. Like the gray zone, the frontier is an ambiguous region pregnant with the possibility of violent conflict. On the frontier, an individual is required to survive largely without the certainties of statehood — or the class distinctions they reproduce.

“Canada has long been a veritable Eden of middle-class gentility. But something grave has shifted in the world order.”

For the 19th-century historian Frederick Jackson Turner, this made frontiers great cauldrons of social experimentation. He suggested that the frontier experience had helped forge all the distinctive aspects of American culture: its democratic spirit, rugged individualism, practical materiality — and propensity for violence.

But the truth is perhaps more complicated. The term “frontier” naturally admits a certain asymmetry shared with many modern gray zones. It is not a border; it permits no equality between those behind it and those beyond it. It is the projection of a powerful state onto those outside of its charted territory — the muscular edge of an expanding empire. Frontiers have historically been theaters for some of the most regressive forms of nation-making. From the Cossack frontier of the Russian empire to the borderlands of modern-day Pakistan, empires and modern states have outsourced state authority to local strongmen. 

Luke Kemp, a research affiliate at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and author of “Goliath’s Curse,” which traces processes of the formation and collapse of large societies, has written that in their early stages, many states are indistinguishable from criminal enterprises. They try to cement their presence by limiting what he calls “exit options” —  the flexibility and dynamism inherent to frontiers. Thus, they enclose land, patrol hinterlands and steal (and hoard) resources. This policing occurs even at the level of identity. As the complexity scientist Peter Turchin has observed, frontiers frequently give rise to new forms of group solidarities that quickly fester into ethnic divisions. They are the natural homeland of “us versus them.”

Daniel Hoyer, a computational historian who works with Turchin at the Seshat: Global History Databank, said this dynamic appears again and again in historical data. In the Roman world, he noted, writers spent centuries warning about “barbarians at the gates,” even as the identity of those barbarians constantly shifted. “It’s the same language over and over,” he told me. “The enemy keeps changing, but the story stays the same.”

The point is not simply hostility. Such narratives create what Turchin calls “metaethnic frontiers” — cultural boundaries that frame political competition as an existential struggle between civilizations. The more personal and threatening those conflicts appear, Hoyer told me, “the more powerful they become as a mechanism for creating internal cohesion.” This would suggest that the dynamism of frontiers is usually a negative one — an experience of gradually diminishing diversity and individual freedom. But this process can also work in reverse. Grayness returns as the state cedes control — and exit options become more plentiful.

“Gray zones work both ways,” Hoyer said. “They can intensify and localize conflict, but they’re also areas of exchange.” In fact, the diversity of social arrangements that emerge in these liminal spaces may be one reason they repeatedly appear in history. “Having that diversity of social structure,” Hoyer argued, “is part of what drives social evolution.”

That can involve evolution away from the advancing state. In his 2009 book, “The Art of Not Being Governed,” the anthropologist James C. Scott identified how groups opt for these exit options in times of state expansion and decline. In his study of the nomadic people of upland Southeast Asia, he rejected the notion that they were merely the descendants of some Stone Age culture. Rather, he wrote, they were “best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys — slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare.”

With frontiers being such fruitful zones for elective non-participation, it is perhaps no surprise that the primary project of modern statehood has been their elimination. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648, a series of peace treaties that arguably birthed the modern nation-state, established the principle of territorial integrity, granting states a fantastical degree of authority over the former gray zones at their borders. The subsequent 300 years saw the advancement of modern cartography and the mad dash to attribute ownership to virtually every scrap of land on Earth.

But the frontier never disappeared — it simply moved inside the state. The ambiguous violence, dissent and diversity that characterized it moved inside the body politic, taking on a psychological dimension as citizens were encircled by borders they had not consented to. With the myth of ethnic self-determination in the wake of the First and Second World Wars, this took on a totalizing quality. In many states, the policing of identity inherent to the frontier became a widespread obsession. Vast, diverse and interconnected regions, like Greater India, the Ottoman Empire and the Levant, were violently partitioned to fulfill the abstract promise of homogenous ethnostates.

“Today, the U.S. and its antagonists can strike virtually anywhere at any time, making geography less and less relevant to conflict.”

These beliefs have persisted right up until our present moment. For comfortable middle-class countries like my own, they helped endorse the lie that the violence inherent to borders was not, and could not be, happening. Our dollars went to fund weapons fired on foreign frontiers and our allies suffered onslaughts of irregular violence, but we were seldom officially at war. Only in January, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, did Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announce that these fictions could be sustained no longer.

“You cannot ‘live within the lie’ of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination,” he told the assembled dignitaries. “We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it.”

It was a eulogy already decades late.

Everywhere War

Almost as soon as the state declared total control over its borders, the area between them started to become grayer. The Second World War and its aftermath saw the first great heyday of psychological warfare, spycraft and sabotage, creating what former U.S. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller once called “a new geography of defense,” aimed at the conquest not of physical territory but the hearts and minds of citizens.

Though this skullduggery first became the norm in the Cold War, military thinkers tend to trace the aggressive proliferation of these tactics to the aftermath of 9/11. In the decades-long “Global War on Terror,” American military power was concentrated in the executive in such a way that its deployment could be increasingly haphazard and informal. No longer did it require the “total engagement of the nation,” the military researcher André Simonyi wrote in a recent analysis of modern warfare. It barely required the engagement of Congress.

Far from shrinking war, this expanded it. Ever since, war has been “ongoing, through all means available, violent and non-violent, and is not defined by time and clear end-states,” Simonyi wrote. “For anyone involved … the legal difference between a state of war and state of peace is [increasingly] irrelevant.”

This is one reason America’s new adventurism can’t be written off as a product solely of Trump or Trumpism. It is, in many ways, the natural consequence of two decades of optimizing military violence for omnipresence — of policy decisions enhancing the ambiguity of war, undermining the convenient fictions of territorial sovereignty established at Westphalia.

“Gray zones aren’t new,” Kemp told me. “Colonial empires of the past used privateers to harass and plunder rivals, while even ancient empires engaged in propaganda against neighbors.” The main difference, he said, is that modern gray zones are disconnected from the geography of the frontier — and have scaled enormously as a result. “Previously, the frontier was mainly nearby territory,” he said. “Today, it can be global.”

These changes have coincidentally occurred alongside the erosion of the traditional nation-state. As Kemp noted, private companies have been deployed to abuse and enclose imperial frontiers since the days of the East India Company. But the liberalization of finance in the 1990s placed the largest of these entities almost entirely beyond the grasp of states. Over the following 30 years, the rapid rise of a global billionaire class has placed control over many of the instruments of violence into private hands.

Today, we are living through the consequences of these shifts. Gray zone tactics targeting civilians have been endorsed and normalized by some of the very states that once foreswore them. Far from a sign of strength and resolve, such tactics are an indicator that states are in many ways growing weaker, unable to maintain the semblance of a global order. Their strength is sapped by private contractors — paramilitary organizations like Wagner Group; surveillance outfits like Palantir; and digital infrastructure providers like Amazon, Google and Starlink — which owe states and their citizens no particular allegiance.

It’s a scenario that calls to mind the violent anarchy of Europe’s Free Companies, when badly behaved mercenaries pillaged Europe in the 14th century while the continent’s impotent and bankrupt noble families stood aside and watched. The difference, of course, is the degree to which modern tools of subjugation are far more powerful than those employed by earlier warlords and empires. “Today, states and militaries are far better resourced,” Kemp said. Micro-targeted propaganda can be more potent, and the ubiquity of digital surveillance makes “caging” — the elimination of exit options — far easier and wider-reaching.

“The rapid rise of a global billionaire class has placed control over many of the instruments of violence into private hands.”

This dynamic has taken on a dangerous new dimension with the growing role of artificial intelligence in warfare. Convinced that such weapons represent a key strategic advantage in a new anarchic age, many state militaries are deeply integrating with private AI systems, to extremely mixed results. 

When an Iranian girls school was targeted by cruise missiles and more than 150 people, mostly children, were killed, many in the United States hid behind the ambiguous reasoning of a privately operated AI. The Trump administration has yet to formally admit accountability for the strike. In a world where it seems increasingly plausible that states could become superseded by software, even warfare with bombs and bullets becomes gray.

Room At The Edge

Is this erraticism part of the growth of an expanding empire, or the spasms of a dying one? Kemp believes the latter — but cautioned that “the future is not set.” America’s gamble on AI may manage to entrench its supremacy, he said. “It’s unclear whether that would be for better or worse.” Or, Hoyer suggested, the rapid empowerment of these mercenary companies could give rise to new elite competition. Historically, in such cases, lesser powers — the democratic public among them — can become more decisive in who survives in the end.

This world of gray is unlikely to last. Hoyer said such moments rarely remain stable for long, and gray zones tend to escalate. “If you keep amplifying the ‘us-versus-them’ logic,” he warned, “those gray zones often turn into hot zones.” The danger, of course, is that those gray zones are now essentially everywhere and all at once. If they turn hot, Kemp posited, it “could spark into global, or even nuclear, war.”

For those of us on the old frontiers of the American world order — the liberal middle powers, like Canada, whose relationship to this new American empire is unclear — we face a future filled with uncertainty and threat. How we proceed depends greatly on whether we see our frontier society as a weakness or a strength.

On frontiers throughout history, there have always been those who prefer the certainty of empire to the freedom and uncertainty of living outside its reach. These types can often hold onto old customs and paradigms long after the writing is on the wall. Today, those who talk about the rules-based order or international law can sound like Romano-Britains in the fifth century, appealing to an absent emperor in a long-since fallen capital.

But others would quickly accept whatever new imperial order is being offered. In the Canadian case, David Carment, a political scientist and fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, calls them “continentalists” — believers in the benefits of what the current U.S. Department of Defense calls “Greater North America.” 

“There’s still that view that we’re best off being a junior partner to the U.S., because all other outcomes are far worse,” he told me. These continentalists would minimize our diversity and close off our remaining frontiers with the world in the hope of making our situation a little less gray. “There are some parallels to the apparatchiks, the leftovers from the Soviet Union, who saw their future connected to the USSR, even though it was collapsing,” Carment said.

The only alternative, many Western leaders seem to presume, is the retrenchment and rebordering of our own increasingly marginal states — usually in the form of regressive policies targeted at migrants and dissidents — to try to close those internal frontiers that the last three decades of globalization have reopened. But these policies do little to address the erosion of state power more generally. If anything, they tend to accelerate the sale of data, infrastructure and access to the mercenary management of private capital. While this continues, it’s unlikely states will ever be able to reassert their dominance as they would like to pretend.

In my country, where nationalist appeals have usually fallen on deaf ears, it is revealing that Carney has chosen to lean into the gray. In pursuit of ambitious trade deals with China and India, he has ignored what are certainly widespreadinfluenceoperations both countries are carrying out on our soil. By muddying Canada’s place between empires, he is calculating that being a frontier — with all the violence that implies — remains preferable to becoming a periphery.

“In a world where it seems increasingly plausible that states could become superseded by software, even warfare with bombs and bullets becomes gray.”

For now, at least, it’s hard to disagree. We may be subject to price shocks from tariffs and repeated threats of annexation, but Canada still offers the freedoms that frontier life has long promised: room for dissent, for difference, for maneuvering between empires.

In short, our exit options remain surprisingly plentiful. And at a time when gray zone dynamics extend across much of the world, perhaps that’s the best any of us can expect.