Renaming a Lake Is Easy; Renaming Reality Is Not

A president signs an order and a great lake changes its name – but only if you look at it from his side of the frontier. In the United States, official records and Google’s maps now speak of “Lake America.” In Canada the same water remains Lake Ontario, fortified by a giant sign and ministers vowing it will be “today and forever” so. This is not a comedy sketch, though one Canadian leader compares it to a show of jokes; it is a very modern struggle over something very old: who has the right to baptize the world, and what that baptism is worth when others refuse to answer to the new name.

The effectual truth, as I once wrote in The Prince following W. K. Marriott’s translation, is that “how one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live” that we must judge by results, not sermons. Here the deed is twofold: a renaming and a 50 percent tariff on $20 billion of Canadian goods, justified by the claim that Canada has been “ripping us off for years.” The survival incentive is clear enough. In a quarrel over trade, the ruler seeks to appear protector of his people, punishing a neighbor and wrapping the punishment in patriotic theater. To maintain the state, he must maintain the story that the state is strong.

On the surface, this is executed with notable virtù in the realm of appearances. The order binds the Department of the Interior, the official naming system, and through it the world’s most consulted mapmaker. For Americans looking at their phones, the lake is indeed “America.” The same logic is applied to the nearby gulf, which becomes the “Gulf of America” for U.S. users, while Mexicans see their old name and others see both. In The Prince I observed that men “judge more by the eye than by the hand,” and here the eye sees a world subtly recolored in national tones, as if cartography were an extension of the flag.

But every new name is a claim of jurisdiction, and every claim awakens those whose interest is touched. The Canadians answer with their own sign, their own words of “sovereignty” and resistance to “a bully,” and with tariffs “dollar for dollar.” Here we see what in the Discourses on Livy I praised when I wrote, with Ninian Hill Thomson as my translator, that tumults between orders can produce liberty. A neighboring people, feeling their dignity assailed, finds unity in opposition. Their leaders exploit the moment, of course; yet beneath the speeches there is that popular constancy I always trusted more than any prince, the refusal to let another name one’s own world.

The president has not come unarmed to this reform. His “arms” are not soldiers but administrative machinery, trade weapons, and the deference of powerful auxiliaries like the mapping company that follows official U.S. sources. This is the proper lesson: unarmed prophets fail. A mere tweet would have changed nothing; an executive order tied to the naming registry, backed by tariffs that bite certain interests, obliges both his own bureaucracy and some foreign actors to react. Still, these are partial arms. They can compel usage inside his jurisdiction, and they can punish commerce across the border, but they cannot force a foreign people to think of the lake as American when they look at their own maps and their own shores.

The maneuver’s strength and its weakness share the same root. As theater it is bold, even amusing to an old Florentine who has seen worse follies dressed in graver robes. There is decisiveness here, a refusal of the middle course that I have always mistrusted; the president does not half-rename or whisper his grievance. Yet theater feeds on escalation: each side must top the last gesture. A trade war “dollar for dollar,” crossed with dueling signs and clashing digital labels, soon becomes a test of reputation from which it is hard to retreat without seeming conquered. When names harden into honor, compromise looks like humiliation.

So the question becomes whether this spectacle conduces to the stable greatness of either state. If the tariffs extract concessions and the domestic public feels newly respected, the lake’s name will stand in memory as a clever emblem of firmness. If instead the Canadian response stiffens, allies grow tired of double names on their screens, and economic pain accumulates without clear gain, then the same gesture will be remembered as confusing fortuna with virtù – mistaking one’s power to alter signs at home for a power to command reality abroad. I have learned that waters do not change course because a prince renames them; they change when he builds dykes that others cannot ignore.