1 MIN AGO: Trump Blocked Canada at NATO — Carney Changed Everything

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]The permanent joint board on defense was created on August 17, 1940 on the boardwalk of a small hotel in Ogdensburg, New York. Franklin Roosevelt and William Lion Mckenzie King shook hands and agreed that the United States and Canada would defend the continent together. The agreement was one page. It survived the Second World War, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the September 11 attacks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 12 American presidents. It survived every disagreement the two countries ever had.

[00:00:42]On May 18, 2026, the Pentagon walked away from it. The notice did not come from the Oval Office. It came from a post on the social platform X written by Elbridge Colby, the United States under secretary of defense for policy.

[00:00:59]A strong Canada that prioritizes hard power over rhetoric benefits us all.

[00:01:04]Colby wrote, "Unfortunately, Canada has failed to make credible progress on its defense commitments. do is pausing the permanent joint board on defense to reassess how this forum benefits shared North American defense.

[00:01:20]86 years of continental defense architecture paused by tweet. You may have read the headlines. You may have heard the spin. What you have not been told because the cable channels do not have the time to tell you is what Mark Carney did in the months before the announcement and what it means for the order most men of our generation grew up inside. There is a paragraph in the Canada European Union Security and Defense Partnership signed in Brussels on June 23, 2025 that the White House did not read closely enough. I will return to it later in this video because once you understand what it commits Canada to, the Pentagon's May 18 decision looks less like a punishment and more like a reaction. Mark Carney is 60 years old. He is a former governor of the Bank of Canada. He is a former governor of the Bank of England, the only person in history to have led both institutions.

[00:02:25]He is a man who spent the 2008 financial crisis on a telephone line that ran continuously between Ottawa, London, Washington, and Frankfurt. He understands in a way few elected leaders do what it costs to be on the receiving end of an unreliable partner. When he became prime minister in early 2025, he inherited a Canadian defense budget that had drifted below 1.5% of GDP.

[00:02:55]four submarines of which only one was seaorthy and a procurement pipeline routing roughly 70% of equipment spending to American suppliers.

[00:03:06]He inherited a country, in other words, that was structurally dependent on the United States for its own defense at the precise moment the United States began treating it as an adversary.

[00:03:19]Here is where the structural picture begins to clarify.

[00:03:23]On June 9, 2025, in a speech at the University of Toronto, Carney said the line that made every chancellory in Europe sit forward. Only one of our four submarines is seaorthy.

[00:03:37]Less than half of our maritime fleet and land vehicles are operational. More broadly, we are too reliant on the United States. He said Canada would hit the 2% NATO benchmark by March 2026, 5 years ahead of schedule. He did not say it as a concession. He said it as a divorce announcement. Our goal is to protect Canadians, not to satisfy NATO accountants.

[00:04:05]Two weeks later, on June 23, he was in Brussels. Ursula Vanderlean, the president of the European Commission, welcomed him at the Beerlemont.

[00:04:15]Antonio Costa, the president of the European Council, sat to his left. The Canada European Union Security and Defense Partnership was signed that morning. It opened the door to Canadian participation in Rearm Europe, a 800 billion $125 trillion Canadian dollar continental rearmament program and to safe the security action for Europe loan facility which extends $150 billion euros in defense loans across the alliance.

[00:04:46]The door is open, Vander Lion said at the closing news conference on December 1, 2025. The second agreement was signed. Canada became the first non-European partner inside the safe program. That is the paragraph the White House did not read closely enough. Now consider what that means in plain terms because mature viewers understand structure when it is named. For 85 years, Canadian defense procurement flowed south. American manufacturers Lockheed Martin, Rathon, Boeing, General Dynamics built the equipment that defended the northern half of the continent. Canadian dollars supported American jobs.

[00:05:33]American supply chains were tied to Canadian readiness. The permanent joint board, which met semianually since the McKenzie King era, was the institutional expression of that bond. Carney did not announce that he was leaving NATO. He announced that he was rerouting the money. And the money, gentlemen, has always been the alliance. The historical pattern here is not subtle. And a man who lived through the 1960s will recognize it immediately.

[00:06:05]In 1966, Charles de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO's integrated military command. He did not leave the alliance. He left the command structure. He demanded American forces and NATO headquarters leave French soil within 12 months. They did.

[00:06:24]The headquarters moved from Fontaine to Casto in Belgium. Henry Kissinger, then a Harvard professor, wrote in 1965 that the rupture had been visible for several years to anyone willing to read the communicates in their original form. The structural lesson of 1966 was that a middle power when it concludes the senior partner is no longer reliable does not announce its departure. It rearranges its dependencies first and lets the architecture catch up. Carney has read 1966.

[00:07:01]The men around him have read 1966.

[00:07:05]The Pentagon on May 18, 2026 finally noticed Christian Leiprect, professor at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, has been one of the steiest voices in this debate. In his June 23, 2025 analysis for CBC News, he cautioned that the EU partnership was not in the strict sense a replacement for NATO.

[00:07:30]There is no operational military command attached to rearm Europe or safe. He is correct. But Lupre's point cuts both ways. The agreements are not a substitute for the alliance. They are something else. They are an industrial reorientation and industrial reorientations outlast political cycles.

[00:07:52]Submarines ordered from German yards in 2026 will be delivered in the 2030s.

[00:07:59]Fighter jets sourced from the Swedish or French production lines rather than from Fort Worth will shape Canadian air doctrine for 40 years. The men who signed those contracts now are deciding the shape of North American defense a generation forward. The American response when it came was not strategic.

[00:08:21]It was performative. Elbridge KBY's social media post on May 18 included a map of the continent and the caption delivering on shared continental defense begins by recognizing our shared geography. The implication was that Canada had forgotten where it was. The reverse is closer to the truth. The Pentagon official, who briefed Canadian reporters in Washington 3 days later on background said the suspension was prompted by Canada's reconsideration of its planned purchase of Americanmade F-35 fighter jets and the absence of a detailed plan to reach the new NATO 3.

[00:09:04]5% spending target by 2035.

[00:09:08]The Globe and Mail, which agreed not to name the official, reported the briefing on May 21. The F-35 program is worth roughly $19 billion dollars to Loheed Martin. The decision to look elsewhere is what triggered the public rupture.

[00:09:24]The board was the pretext. The procurement contract was the substance.

[00:09:30]Take a moment with that because the timing matters. The permanent joint board on defense survived the Cuban missile crisis. It survived the Vietnam era cooling. It survived the softwood lumber wars, the NAFTA renegotiations, and the first Trump administration's tariff fights. What it did not survive was Mark Carney telling Lheed Martin that Canada was going to consider alternatives.

[00:09:58]Andrew Coin writing in the Globe and Mail on May 21, 2026 identified the question almost no American outlet was asking. This is not about the level of Canadian defense spending. Coin wrote it may however be about the composition, specifically how much of this new Canadian defense spending will be directed America's way. That is the doctrine line worth carrying home from this story. Alliances are not held together by treaties. They are held together by procurement. Imran Bayumi, an associate director at the Atlantic Council's Scowcraft Center for Strategy and Security told The Hill that meeting the higher NATO target will be far harder than the 2% milestone.

[00:10:48]He is correct and the difficulty is the point. Carney has committed Canada to three 5% of GDP on direct military spending by 2035. For a G7 economy, that is on the order of $80 billion in new military spending over the coming decade. Where that money is spent is the question the Pentagon was asking. And the answer increasingly is not south.

[00:11:15]This is the part that affects you directly. If you are an American man of 65, your retirement accounts almost certainly hold exposure to the major defense contractors through index funds, through pension allocations, through dividend paying industrials.

[00:11:35]The contracts those companies have written off the assumption of Canadian dependency are for the first time in two generations in question. If you are a Canadian man of the same age, the equation runs the other way. Your tax dollars instead of crossing the border will increasingly land in shipyards in Hamburg, in aerospace facilities in Stockholm, in armored vehicle plants in Leyon. The continental economy you grew up inside, the integrated supply chain that ran from the Great Lakes to the Gulf and back is being unstitched. one defense procurement contract at a time.

[00:12:16]And whichever side of the border you are on, your grandchildren will inherit a North America in which Ottawa's defense industrial base looks toward Brussels and Berlin before it looks toward Washington.

[00:12:31]There is a photograph that ought to be hung on a wall in the West Wing. It was taken in Ogdensburg, New York on August 18th, 1940. Roosevelt is in a dark suit.

[00:12:43]McKenzie King is to his right. They are standing in front of a presidential railway car. The agreement they signed that weekend was 61 words long. It established the permanent joint board on defense. It was the foundation of every continental defense arrangement that followed. NORAD in 1958, the DEW line radar network, the Arctic patrols, the joint air sovereignty operations that ran every day for the next 66 years. 86 years from that handshake to a social media post. That is the arc this story belongs to. Mark Root, the secretary general of NATO, said in Brussels in March 2026 that without the present American administration, the full alliance would not have hit the 2% target by year end 2025.

[00:13:39]He meant it as praise. Read it again.