The whole world is being transformed.

The United States as everyone has known it in living memory is gone. In its place is Donald Trump’s America, an amoral, ruthless, venal, arrogant power that pursues its immediate self-interests and self-glorification with casual disregard of its old friends and allies. Or even its own long-term interests.

And America as we knew it is not coming back. Trump’s re-election was the final proof that an older and deeper tradition in American history — isolationism — has revived and fused itself to America’s habitual exercise of power wherever it chooses. The product of that fusion can only be called gangsterism. And half the American political class has fully bought in. Even if a lifetime of cheeseburgers were to fell the president tomorrow, and even if America’s internationalists — to revive a term popular in post-World War One politics — were able to wrest power back from the gangsters in two years or four, the risk of the United States again going rogue would remain. And that is enough to break the world as we knew it because what made America the keystone of the international order was certainty and predictability: Any American president, of any party, would stand for certain principles; any American president would reject certain words and deeds; any American president would honour an agreement signed by any American president. Trump has shattered all of that. So the world as we knew it is gone.

But here, I only want to consider responses to this revolution in Europe and Canada.

The Europeans have grasped the gravity of what has happened. Their words are proportionate to the moment. So are their actions.

“We are living in the most momentous and dangerous of times,” is the first sentence of an epoch-defining press release from the President of the European Union, Ursula von der Leyen. “I do not need to describe the grave nature of the threats that we face. Or the devastating consequences that we will have to endure if those threats would come to pass. Because the question is no longer whether Europe's security is threatened in a very real way. Or whether Europe should shoulder more of the responsibility for its own security. In truth, we have long known the answers to those questions. The real question in front of us is whether Europe is prepared to act as decisively as the situation dictates.”

That’s five-alarm rhetoric, but Europe’s problem has long been the gap between its words and its deeds. This time really does seem different, however. That press release announced the EU is launching its “ReArm Europe” plan, which will see the EU invest roughly USD$873 billion (CDN$1.26 trillion) into European military defences.

That is titanic money. You know how, for generations, people always said with awe that the United States spent more on its military than the next five or six or seven countries combined? The EU’s plan will spend USD$30 billion more than the entire American military budget last year.

The story is the same at the national level. For many years, European members of NATO promised to raise their military budgets to the NATO floor of two percent of GDP yet did little to deliver. But in 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine focused minds and that started to rapidly change. Donald Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine, and hostility toward Europe, has accelerated that process. So has intelligence that Russia’s shift of its industries to a war footing has resulted in faster rearmament than Europe expected and a re-armed Russian attacking elsewhere in Europe is a real threat — a danger that radically escalated when Trump clearly aligned himself with Putin on Ukraine and Europe.

Now European members of NATO are treating three percent as the new floor. In a widely publicized speech at a NATO meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen declared, “conditions for peace are to be set through strength and I think that’s the most important task for Europe right now.” Denmark is now spending about two-and-a-half percent of GDP on defence and will soon get to three percent. But Frederiksen added, “three percent will not be enough. It’s simply not enough.”

European countries who know Russia best are moving even faster and harder. Poland is closing in on five per cent, and pushing allies to match. Latvia is moving to five percent. Lithuania is targeting six percent.

Most importantly, Germany and France are acting. France is now discussing the extension of its nuclear umbrella to other European countries, including Poland. And the incoming German chancellor Friedrich Merz negotiated an agreement with the SPD to lift the debt cap — Germans fear debt to a fault — on a historically massive package of infrastructure and military spending.

Then there’s Canada.

My country has at least as much reason to be concerned with Russia and its imperial revanchism and militarism as Europe. We are a founding member of NATO and treaty-bound to fight for Europe should Putin attack Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, or any other NATO member. We are also an Arctic country with a huge stake in a zone whose geopolitical importance is growing rapidly — a zone Russia has already put enormous resources into controlling and exploiting, while Canada has done close to nothing. The probability of Russian encroachment in the Arctic inches up every day.

But our situation is actually worse than Europe’s because the United States has not simply reviled and abandoned us. It is targeting us: The President of the United States has repeatedly and explicitly called our country “artificial” and said his goal is to take our sovereignty and erase Canada from the map.

We are Ukraine to Trump’s Russia. Or if you prefer a less dire analogy, in this dangerous new world order, we are as vulnerable as Poland.

So how are Canadians responding?

There is surprisingly little denial of this stunning new reality — among experts or the population at large — despite the fact that what’s happening now would have sounded like science fiction a mere six months ago. (A friend who’s a Canadian soldier sent me this new review of Canada’s strategic situation with the remark, “never in my life did I think a Canadian Strategic Outlook would read like a Tom Clancy thriller. But here we are. Welcome to Dystopia.” I told him, several weeks ago, “the good news is you won’t have to learn a new language to fight in the coming war. The bad news is…”)

There has also been a heartening rush of patriotism. As Joni Mitchell sang, “don’t it always seem to be that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.” The threatened loss of our loss country has reminded us of what we have. And we want to keep it.

But listen to Canadian politicians and the good news ends: Most Canadian politicians sound like they got here via a wormhole from 2017.

They scarcely mention the Canadian Armed Forces and defence spending at all and when they do they usually talk about NATO’s two percent floor.

Canada currently spends around 1.35 per cent of GDP on the Canadian Armed Forces. For many years, Justin Trudeau refused to commit to raise that to two percent, and even said in private that Canada would never do that. Under severe pressure from the US and Europe, he finally relented and said Canada would get there sometime after 2030. (While complaining bitterly, which hardly inspired confidence in his words.) But all of that is ancient history — as in, it takes the story up to the end of 2024 — so what are politicians saying now?

The same. Almost word-for-word.

Oh, some have suggested we might get to two percent a little faster with a nudge here, a tweak there. But they are still talking about getting to two percent. Reluctantly. Eventually. And that’s true of Liberals and Conservatives. No major politician that I know of has ever suggested we do more than that.

Compare that to how the Europeans are talking. It’s night and day.

And to reiterate, this is what politicians say about defence when pressed to say anything. When not pressed, they say nothing. As in 2017 — and every other year for generations — the Canadian Armed Forces isn’t a top issue. It isn’t even a mid-tier issue. It is, at best, one of the long list of things that may get a mention in an election platform but is otherwise ignored.

Think I exaggerate?

The election campaign of 2006 happened at the same time that the Canadian military was preparing to take charge in Kandahar, Afghanistan, its biggest mission since the Korean War. In that campaign, there was a leaders debate — in which the military and its mission were never mentioned. That’s a story from 2006, but it’s also the story of the last 40 years.

Judging by what politicians want to talk about, the really important stuff in 2025, according to the Conservatives, is axing the carbon tax and delivering other tax cuts, sorry, tax relief. The Liberals, by contrast, are laser-focused on pharmacare and dental care and finessing the carbon tax; there may have been references to the military during the Liberal convention this weekend — the one that said goodbye to Trudeau and crowned Mark Carney leader — but if there were I blinked and missed them.

It’s hard to overstate how foolish this is.

The United States is a whisker away from leaving NATO, or at least casting so much doubt over whether the US will honour NATO commitments that it becomes a dead letter. If that happens the Europeans will create a new mutual defence alliance. Will Canada be invited to join? That seems unlikely. As you may know, Canada is in North America. Next to a belligerent United States. And having Canada in the new alliance would compel the Europeans to respond to aggression by the United States against Canada. That’s a big risk. And what would they get in return? A member whose military has been starved for 40 years. A member whose leaders talk like it’s 2017. A member with no plan to restore its military as European countries are restoring theirs.

What would the Europeans conclude? Big risk for little gain.

Au revoir, Canada.

Then what? Our nation is threatened by our former friend and ally. And for the first time in the entire history of Canada, we would be part of no mutual defence alliance. We would be utterly alone.

And still our politicians think they can buy a few planes and ships and stop talking about all that military stuff they so plainly have no interest in?

Utterly delusional.

Hard power matters. It always has but we Canadians, happily ensconced in the safest and most prosperous geography in the world, with a neighbour who had heaps of hard power and didn’t mind using it on our behalf, convinced ourselves it didn’t really matter. Not to us. We are righteous. And isn’t that a form of soft power? And isn’t soft power a substitute for hard power? Or even better than hard power? Let’s be honest: An awful lot of Canadians felt morally superior to Americans even as we were sponging off their hard power for decades.

Like I said, delusional.

But are today’s politicians really that clueless? I’m not so sure. Perhaps our politicians understand the danger of the trap we find ourselves in but they don’t speak plainly about it in public because they don’t think they can get Canadians behind what indisputably needs to be done — a foundations-up reconstruction, restoration, and expansion of the Canadian Armed Forces. Remember what the Danish prime minister said? “Three percent will not be enough. It’s simply not enough.” That is exactly right for Canada, too.

And that would be a massive change.

To do what we must do, Canada will have to more than double our defence spending as quickly as possible. Then grow the budget further. Then maintain it at that level. Permanently. If we do not, we risk finding ourselves alone in the world — and our very existence dependent on the whims of one impulsive, belligerent man — or his successor, as chosen by his slavishly obedient, impulsive, belligerent political movement.

What would spending three to four percent of GDP on defence mean in practical terms? We wouldn’t turn into Prussia, much less North Korea. In 1960, Canada spent 4.2% of GDP on national defence. We were peaceful and relatively prosperous. And we had a top-tier military.

But spending at anything close to that level would entail major sacrifice. Those tax cuts the Conservatives talk about endlessly? Forget it. The new social programs Liberals keep creating? Those days are over.

Along with the hit we’re about to take economically thanks to Trump, and the already-perilous state of our finances, even maintaining the status quo will be hellishly difficult. We will have to take on a mountain of debt. But this is a war for existence, and that’s what a nation does in war.

The bottom line is simple: We will have to make serious sacrifices. There’s no way around it. We either make serious sacrifices or we bend the knee to the fascist in the White House.

That’s the choice we face.

But have you heard the word “sacrifice” from any politician? Pierre Poilevre says he’s got a plan to sort out the military: He’ll build a base in the Arctic and pay for it by cutting foreign aid. It’s basically free! I only single out Poilievre for illustration purposes. This sort of happy talk — we can do we all we need to we, have all we need, and getting it won’t hurt a bit — is wretchedly typical of all Canada’s top politicians. The closest Mark Carney comes to talking about sacrifice is to say that with Trump Canada faces a “challenge,” which makes it sound like something we can handle with gumption, a little elbow grease, and maybe a 50-50 fundraiser.

The worst offender is Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who categorically ruled out putting an export tax on oil and gas no matter what happens even though that is obviously the most powerful weapon Canada has in a trade war. You see, she explained, it would hurt Canadians. And Canadians must never be asked to sacrifice in this fight for our nation’s existence, apparently. (It also seems not to have dawned on the premier that by saying this, she is effectively telling the White House that we don’t have the stomach to suffer, so they simply have to ratchet up the pain to get what they want. I’m no expert in game theory but I’m pretty sure that’s a bad approach.)

Winston Churchill famously said, in 1940, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” But he was far from the first to use such language. The Italian nationalist revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi once declared, “I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor food. I offer only hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death. Let he who loves his country with his heart, and not merely with his lips, follow me.”

Being transparent about hardship and sacrifice is a classic way leaders rally people to a cause. It works for the simple reason that leaders who do it show trust for the people they seek to lead. And when leaders trust people, people trust leaders.

Do Canada’s leaders understand the gravity of this moment? And the scale of sacrifice it calls for? I don’t know. I hope so.

But more than that, I hope they trust Canadians enough to tell them the truth.

Leave a comment

Share