The Longest Undefended Border in the World. Past Tense.
How America spent two centuries building trust with its neighbors and eighteen months burning it down.
America doesn’t need enemies on its borders. It has spent two centuries ensuring it wouldn’t have them — and that security has been so complete, so durable, that most Americans have forgotten it was ever built at all.
That’s the danger of success. You stop seeing the architecture because it’s been load-bearing so long it feels like gravity.
The relationship with Canada alone required surviving the War of 1812, two competing visions of what North America should look like, the pull of competing empires, and a hundred years of careful, unglamorous diplomatic work that nobody writes songs about. The relationship with Mexico required surviving a land grab that México has never fully forgiven, a revolution that spilled across the border, a century of asymmetric economic integration that benefited one side considerably more than the other, and still produced something functional enough to call a partnership.
Neither of these relationships was inevitable. Both of them were chosen, repeatedly, by…
