Canada to do more for NATO?

That’s the word from MP Bob Nault, head of the House of Commons’ foreign affairs committee.

The thinking is that if the US scales back its contributions to NATO, or abandons it altogether, Canada will step into the breach. If nothing else, that statement gives some sense of the overweening hubris running amok among our military types.

Last year the US spent 600 billions plus on defence. Canada spent 20 billion. But Canada will step into the breach! Now that’s called punching above your weight!

I think the best thing that could happen to NATO is that it take the same dive into the dumpster of history as the Warsaw Pact did twenty-five years ago. NATO has been in busy-work mode for a quarter of a century, and it’s really hard to see where much of that busy-work has done any good.

Afghanistan?

Libya?

Endless exercises in provocation on Russia’s borders?

The best thing Canada could do for Canada is to detach itself from NATO. We don’t need to spend more lives and dollars destroying other countries. This will of course be met with howls of outrage from the Naults of the world.

What about our obligations to our allies?

What about our shared values?

Bullshit and double bullshit. Think about the “shared values” of the NATO alliance for a moment. There may have been something to that fifty years ago, when NATO was essentially a combine of white Christian European nations plus the Turkish military. Today many NATO countries take positions on any number of issues that do not resonate at all with values that we consider Canadian. Since the dissolution of the USSR, the only “common value” binding us to our allies is a lingering Russophobia.

As for those obligations to our allies, the two most powerful of them, the US and Turkey, are at this moment engaged in illegal military operations in Syria. What should be our obligation, if any, to allies who flout international law?

It’s time Canada disengaged from NATO and pursued a truly independent foreign policy.