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At the NATO meeting going on in Brussels (July 11-12), Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tries to outsmart the US master of deception, Donald Trump, with old-fashioned Canadian rhetoric. [1] But no such luck for Canada.

Trump appears to up the antes for the NATO members by asking to increase their contributions to 4% of GDP from just asking to fulfill their current commitment of paying 2%. This seems to be the classic bargain; ask for double in order to settle for half.

Trudeau basically replies, forget the money; let’s focus on the work NATO has to do better. And he goes on suggesting

“to promote the peace, security, and strength of our true democracies and those democratic principles, which are under threat everywhere around the world it seems.”

We have to admit that he is totally in sync with his minister of foreign affairs, Chrystia Freeland, on this.

Never mind that it doesn’t make any logical sense to have the largest military organization in the world to “promote” peace, or “security”, or “true democracies”, when the opposite is precisely what is happening in front of our collective eyes. If there are any “democratic principles…under threat”, it is at the hands of the NATO member states, including Canada.

However, Trump’s bait was thrown and Trudeau bit it for the second time. The first time was when Trump called him “weak” following the G-7 meeting about a month ago.

The insecure Trudeau must have been preparing for this in order to show that he is strong, and surely wanted to sound very tough on the first day of the NATO meeting calling on the US emperor. But he didn’t realize that now he will have to put Canada’s military (and budget) where his mouth is! Canada is already spending 1.3% of its GDP on defense. Defense from what? We may ask. Are Canadians ready to forego our own peace, security and democratic principles in order to interfere and cause havoc in foreign sovereign countries? Are Canadians prepared to fork out more money for the military? Remember this question when the next budget comes down the pipe in Parliament.

And now Trudeau cannot and will not turn back on his implied pro-war commitment because he really dug in further by saying that the NATO alliance is “as necessary now as it was at the height of the Cold War.” I am sure that Chrystia Freeland must have added this statement in his speech.

If Trump had designed his tactic, I would start to believe that he is really a good “negotiator”, but actually I believe that the Trudeau government foreign policy is really out of sync. 

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Nino Pagliccia is an activist and writer based in Vancouver, Canada. He is a Venezuelan-Canadian who writes about international relations with a focus on the Americas. He is editor of the book “Cuba Solidarity in Canada – Five Decades of People-to-People Foreign Relations” http://www.cubasolidarityincanada.ca. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Note

[1] https://sputniknews.com/world/201807111066267572-trudeau-vs-trump-nato-summit/ 

Featured image is from CTV News.

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