if what trumps wants is hemispheric dominance, which is the monroe doctrine and not "manifest destiny", and he's looking to make a deal with the russians to get it, then the solution is to look towards other actors in our own hemisphere, not to poke monroe in the eye and pine for a return of colonialism by calling the french back into louisiana. vive la nouvelle-orleans et saint-louis libre? let us instead advance the good neighbour policy of fdr, retooled for canada, and look to make friends in the south.
the reality is that almost everything we buy from the united states could be grown or manufactured in mexico and already is and is already on our shelves. i guess it depends where you shop. i'm poor, so i do almost all of my shopping at walmart, and they don't import anything from the united states, it's entirely from mexico.
there are large countries in south america with advanced economies: peru, argentina, chile. brazil has a lot of the same problems as america, except far worse, but is a very populous nation with tremendous potential. it might be a secret nuclear power.
we are better off waiting this out and expecting it to be short-lived, but if this goes on for a while and the americans really want a new civil war for control of the hemisphere then we'll have to understand that and build alliances in the hemisphere to contain them with. right now, it's a little too early for the canadian government to be talking about an american containment strategy, but it needs to be ready, as a contingency plan.
right now, we should just slap massive export taxes on the giffen goods and perfectly inelastic commodities to try to milk them of their own stupidity and wait it out.