ArcaMax

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Incoming US President-elect Donald Trump keeps threatening to dropkick countries like Canada that don’t meet their defense spending obligations as members of the transatlantic weapons lobby known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) out of its protection racket. Please, just do Canadians the honor, already.

Members of the alliance, North American and European nations, are supposed to spend 2 percent of their GDP on weapons. Canada only spends a reported 1.37 percent. “Look, if they’re not going to pay, we’re not going to protect,” Trump said at a campaign rally earlier this year.

Does this also mean that countries that don’t pay also don’t have to ride shotgun in US-led Thelma and Louise- type overseas adventures, like the one in Ukraine right now? Because that one has just seen anonymous officials attribute to US President Joe Biden an authorization for a NATO-operated American long- range missile to strike hundreds of kilometers inside Russia — all in total absence of any actual declaration by Biden himself or war powers resolution vote against Russia in Congress. The same missile attacks have given Russia the perfect excuse to “test” a new hypersonic “Oreshnik” missile by hitting a “practice” target in Ukraine, leading to quick back-of-napkin calculations suggesting that European cities could be hit within minutes.

Why on earth would Canadians NOT want to stay involved in this “security” system that looks like it’s on the verge of igniting a full-blown world war?

NATO schizophrenically can't decide whether Russian President Vladimir Putin is a madman or a paragon of reason.

On one hand, they suggest that he would have already rolled tanks up to the drive-thru window on Paris’ Champs-Elysées if it wasn’t for NATO flooding Ukraine with weapons — only 10 percent of which, committed by Congress, actually end up on the frontlines, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, as Reuters reported in October.

Once the cash gets washed from US taxpayer funds into the defense industry’s coffers, whatever happens after that is apparently just an epiphenomenon.

On the other hand, NATO officials have casually shrugged off NATO-targeted missile strikes on Russia. Because, apparently, Putin is also a relatively reasonable guy who wouldn’t dare touch a NATO country even when his country is hit directly by the alliance’s missiles — but only because NATO is so loaded up with weapons.

Both narratives, however contradictory, have the common denominator of serving equally well as sales pitches to churn out more arms. And there’s no end in sight, because NATO’s slogan is to keep it up for “as long as it takes” for Ukraine to “win” – meaning forever, apparently. How convenient.

As NATO met for the kickoff of its latest major meeting, a Parliamentary Assembly from Nov. 22-25 in Montreal — the city in which Justin Trudeau's own electoral district is located — the Canadian prime minister just happened to be more than 300 miles away working on his friendship bracelet collection in Toronto at a Taylor Swift concert. Here's one possible explanation: “The Trudeau leadership has been of incredible arrogance,” US Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) and president of NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly had said in an interview with Politico just a few days earlier. “The Trudeau policies are the freeloading policies of a NATO of decay. If everyone has the policies of Trudeau, there would be no NATO,” he said. “There are going to have to begin to be consequences for countries who cheat.”

Like what? You'll deprive him of Beyoncé tickets?

Canadians have already spent $3.2 billion USD on weapons in the US-led NATO war against Russia in Ukraine just since 2022, according to the government’s own website. Much of it — including ammunition, surface to air missile systems, and artillery — is listed as sourced from the US government.

This doesn’t include all of the resources spent on the training of Azov neo-Nazi fighters in Ukraine in the buildup to this conflict, long before Putin announced the “de-weaponization and de-nazification” operation in February 2022 to undo NATO's work. “Canadian officials who met with members of a Ukrainian battalion linked to neo-Nazis didn’t denounce the unit, but were instead concerned the media would expose details of the get-together,” Canada’s Ottawa Citizen reported in November 2021.

So are we really going to keep pretending that Canada blowing an extra 0.6 percent of its GDP on this charade to further enrich the U.S. military industrial complex and fund its endless joyrides along the regime change superhighway would make Canada any safer?

No one’s saying that Canada could unilaterally defend itself, but few NATO countries could. Seems like the best plan for peace is just not to go around knocking on the doors of foreign competitors on the other side of the planet and shoving your weapons collection in their faces.

The US desperately needs Canada in NATO more than Canada needs NATO itself. Because for all its might, NATO is still that super insecure guy who can’t stand the idea that someone might not be eating lunch at their table.

This concept was already proven when former French President and WWII General Charles de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO’s integrated military command structure because he feared that Washington would infringe on France’s military sovereignty. This didn’t stop NATO from trying to camp out on France’s doorstep anyway, begging for whatever it could get. NATO itself cites “secret arrangements for cooperation with NATO in wartime, so the Allies were sure that they could count on France in the event of a crisis or war.”

France was somehow still able to survive for decades without an official NATO marriage.

Sounds like a great deal — for France. No obligation on spending or to be dragged into costly wars. Which would explain how France was able to invest instead in infrastructure and nuclear power, becoming an economic and industrial powerhouse in that era.

NATO has become so obsessed with the concept of an Atlantic alliance stretching across the entire globe that it maintains a kiddie table of “global partners,” (aka weapons clients), that includes much of the rest of the planet, from Eurasia and Oceania to the Middle East and Africa.

Even Ukraine wasn’t a NATO member, yet the alliance moved right in and treated it like a militarized flophouse. Does anyone seriously think that Washington would let Canada out of this club?

NATO and the US will ultimately settle for whatever Canada decides that it wants to do. Trump and the various think tanks and lawmakers serving the military industrial complex can threaten to punish Canada all they want, but Canada has a Trump card to play here on US-Canada trade advantages by threatening NATO withdrawal before Trump even has a chance to make good on his threats. The only bad news for Canadians is that it falls on the Swiftie currently running the country not to blow the opportunity.