Rarely have there been two better neighbors than the United States and Canada.

We like each other. We share the world’s longest unfortified border. We’re partners in NORAD, the joint defense against Russian, Chinese and North Korean ICBMs.

The U.S. and Canada automakers are interdependent. Canada has been our No. 2 export market, worth $426 billion yearly. The U.S. is by far their largest trade partner, consuming $451 billion in Canadian products — a trade balance favoring us.

The arrival of Quebec license plates in South Florida used to announce a seasonal change, like leaves changing up north.

But lately there are fewer of them.

Only a blundering idiot could spoil such an alliance and threaten damage to Florida’s economy. But Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed “very stable genius,” has done just that.

Threatening Canadian sovereignty

To hear Trump’s trade negotiator tell it, Canada walked away at the last minute from an offer too good to refuse.

From Prime Minister Mark Carney’s standpoint, Canada had no honorable alternative. At the 11th hour, he said, the U.S. wanted to restrict Canada’s ability to trade with other nations, a threat to its sovereignty that would reduce Canada to America’s 51st state.

Trump immediately executed his threat to levy 50% tariffs on hundreds of Canadian goods, including clothes, holiday ornaments and 36 kinds of plywood, yet another kick in the chops to U.S. builders and would-be homebuyers. Trump even singled out dog leashes and collars.

Canada had no choice but to respond in kind. Now people on both sides of the border will pay for a senseless trade war instigated by a petulant and vengeful president. It looks like payback for the failure of Trump’s haughty demand to make Canada our 51st state. With 41 million people, Canada is bigger than California, and it has more total land area than the U.S.

Trump’s belligerence has done Canada a favor. Support in French-speaking Quebec for independence from Canada has fallen to 30% — the lowest in years, Reuters reports (separation narrowly failed in a 1995 referendum).

Trump divides, they unite

The pro-separation Parti Quebecois has led in polls ahead of an October provincial vote. Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, the party leader, said it would not call for another referendum while Trump is still president. To his credit, he said Quebec’s future “must not be hijacked by the upheaval of American politics, the outbursts of an unpredictable president or by a campaign of fear.”

It is highly commendable for Carney, the national premier, to stand up to America’s bully. No other nation is so exposed economically to his wrath, yet none has shown the spunk of Canada in dealing with Trump’s threats.

Too bad Carney’s gumption doesn’t rub off on Congress. It will not stop Trump’s vainglorious, hideous ballroom project, curb the cruelty of his mass deportations or stop the ruination of our national defense in a war with Iran that he seems clueless of how to manage, let alone win.

His interference with the annual U.S. and South Korean joint military exercises puts our troops in grave danger from Kim Jong Un, the North Korean dictator whom Trump admires so inexplicably.

Scheming to placate Trump

His Fox News green room Pentagon hatchet man has just fired the leaders of the once-independent military paper Stars and Stripes, which has been a huge morale booster for the troops since World War II, when Bill Mauldin’s cartoons poked fun at the brass and stuck up for the dogfaced infantrymen Willie and Joe.

Now the Navy is reneging on its promise to name an aircraft carrier for Doris Miller, the heroic Black mess attendant who manned a machine gun at Pearl Harbor. It is scheming shamefully to rename it for Trump, a draft-dodger better known to the military as Cadet Bone Spurs. How nauseating! Congress should stop that, too.

Trump’s Postal Service has issued a 95-page rule to implement his restrictions on mail voting, despite a federal court order against that voter suppression scheme.

The regulation said it would take effect this year only if the Supreme Court rules his way on pending litigation. It calls for refusing to count mail ballots in states that don’t share voter data with the government. It is all about manipulating the election to control Congress.

He threatens to sue the highly respected Center for American Progress for $5 billion over its criticism of his National Guard deployment in Washington. The courts are overdue for sanctioning his frequent abuse of the legal system.

The Department of Homeland Security, which doesn’t seem willing or able to keep its agents from killing unarmed civilians, proposes to equip them with gloves that give electric shocks.

It’s enough to make you consider moving to Canada — a place where they stand up to Trump.

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The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.

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