Article originally appeared on www.zerohedge.com.
Authored by Julian Spencer-Churchill via RealClearDefense,
Canada’s defense minister Bill Blair has declared, by strangely including future spending on its arctic surveillance network, that “I believe it brings us inevitably to over 2 per cent of defence spending.” This is an old Canadian trick of appealing to American anxieties of missile attack, satisfying the Canadian public’s fantasies about an Arctic presence, and avoiding deploying anything larger than a brigade, anywhere, ever. The official NATO estimate of Canada’s defense effort is only 1.33% of GDP. Canada is currently the world’s ninth largest economy, and the most productive major manufacturer committed to unilateral disarmament. A combination of incipient anti-Americanism, which creeps in as early as grade school history education, coupled with a federal government focused narrowly on the material well-being of Canadians, disincentivizes political leadership from spending political capital on international relations. From the perspective of a Canadian, U.S. politics oscillates wildly from expensive international …
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