Canadian defence without an American alliance?

The costs and cultural shifts involved with losing our American ally would be massive.

President Trump’s return to the White House presents a critical challenge to the United States’ military allies. Whether the United States merely distances itself from its alliances, threatens allies with economic or military coercion, or acts in ways other liberal democracies can’t stomach, the prospect of weakened security relationships with Washington looms large. Canada is especially vulnerable here.

Canadian defence policy is predicated on our alliance with the United States. We defend the North American continent alongside the United States under NORAD. The CAF rely on American capabilities and assets when deployed on significant operations overseas. Our higher-end military technologies and capabilities are primarily American. These technologies and capabilities can depend on United States proprietary intelligence data to maintain an operational advantage over adversaries. Our intelligence is derived mainly from the United States. The list goes on.

In light of these realities, leftists aren't necessarily wrong when they suggest that the Canadian military is a branch of the American Empire. Centrists, such as yours truly, may quibble that it isn’t an empire we’re supporting but the ‘rules-based international order’. Yet that’ll be increasingly hard to maintain when breaking said rules seems central to the Trump administration’s approach to world politics. Regardless of which interpretation is more accurate, the fact remains that the Canadian military is inexorably tied to its American counterpart.

How did we get here? We went down this path because it seemed like a great idea and, as importantly, a bargain. Geography meant that Canada and the United States had to cooperate to defend North American aerospace against the Soviet nuclear threat during the Cold War. At the time, Canada still held its own in Western Europe. However, when the Cold War ended, Canada had to deal with a financial crisis, which led Ottawa to slash the defence budget. This was also a time when technological change was accelerating as the digital age really started to take off. Analysts spoke of a revolution in military affairs at the time, with the United States leading the pack.

The best move for Canada (and its mediocre defence budget) was to double down on American research and development and the United States’ global presence. The CAF would be an underfunded, small but still combat-capable force that would be fully interoperable with the technologically advanced and globally deployed American military. In practice, this meant emphasizing American capabilities and interoperability standards while demanding that the Canadian industry do the maintenance, get offsets, and build some big-ticket items, notably ships.

This approach allowed Canada to make ‘plug and play’ contributions to NATO or American-led missions in Kosovo, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, Libya, and against the Islamic State in Iraq while spending less than 2% of its GDP on defence. Canada’s contributions were valuable, but they nonetheless depended on the support of our larger ally.

Canadian defence policy still rests on this bargain. Our underlying objectives are: 1) contribute to international peace and security; 2) defend North America alongside the United States; 3) defend Canada. The first of these is code for participating in NATO and American-led coalition operations. That’s how Canada contributes: next to its larger allies, and the United States above all. Objectives 2 and 3 are more explicit. The defence of the continent, and by extension Canada, is explicitly done in cooperation with the United States. Indeed, in the event of a major natural disaster in Canada, we would call in assistance from the United States, just as the Americans call on us when they face environmental calamities.

Considering how dependent Canadian defence policy is on the United States, how would we re-establish a greater degree of independence and self-sufficiency if our alliance with the United States is hollowed out, used as leverage against us, or falls apart entirely?

The first thing to accept is that greater independence and self-sufficiency would take time…a long time. Military capabilities can take decades to develop and field. Moreover, once capabilities have been acquired, the sunk costs of abandoning them to go in a different direction are huge. You can’t simply swap out your F-35 buy for a Gripen fleet, for example. Nor can you ditch the combat systems planned for our new warship without massively delaying a project that’s already well late to need. These and other shifts away from American technologies and capabilities would take years and iron political will across various governments.

Second, greater defence autonomy would be very, very expensive. Setting up unique Canadian capabilities and support networks would require investments that Ottawa hasn’t been prepared to make in decades. Even shifting away from American to European-led networks would involve major transaction costs.

Third, and most importantly, the cultural shift involved with moving away from the United States as our military north star would be incredibly difficult to achieve. Contributions to American-led coalitions and operations have become core to how the Canadian defence community understands its primary purpose and measures its performance. Working with the United States to protect the rules-based international order is so central to the Canadian military worldview that it's unclear how crazy Washington would need to become before we start to rethink it.

Indeed, faced with the stark reality of Trump 2.0, the Canadian defence community has become the dog in the burning house meme. “This is fine,” we tell ourselves, because the consequences of it not being fine are too difficult to contemplate. Instead of asking “What are we going to do?” we’ve retreated to the comfort of “This too shall pass”.

Maybe it will pass. Maybe Trump’s threats are more rhetorical than real. But we’d do well to start thinking about what changes would be required to our defence thinking and posture if it doesn’t pass. We should at least come up with a plan B.