Pentagon WALKS OUT on Canada — Carney's €150B EU Deal Just Made Trump IRRELEVANT | Conway Explains

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[00:00:00]I want to be up front with you before we even start. This is an analysis video. I have a point of view and by the end I'll have argued it openly. I'm not going to pretend I'm a neutral wire service and then steer you somewhere. You can disagree with me. I'd actually prefer it if you pushed back. So, let's get into what happened and then I'll tell you what I think it means and why.

[00:00:18]On Monday, the Pentagon announced it's pausing its participation in something called the Permanent Joint Board on Defense. If you've never heard of it, you're not alone. Most Canadians haven't and that's part of why this story is being underestimated. The announcement didn't come through a formal diplomatic channel. It came through a series of posts on X from Elbridge Colby, the US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.

[00:00:42]His words, quoted directly, "Canada has failed to make credible progress on its defense commitments and the department is pausing the board to reassess how this forum benefits shared North American defense." That's the core of it. A social media thread, not a demarche. Here's why I think this matters more than the muted coverage suggests. The Permanent Joint Board on Defense was created in 1940 by Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Mackenzie King at Ogdensburg, New York in the middle of the Second World War. It has operated continuously for 86 years. It is, by most accounts, the oldest bilateral defense institution in North American history. To understand why a pause is significant, you have to understand what the board actually does and doesn't do. It's an advisory body that doesn't command troops. It doesn't own bases. What it does is coordinate.

[00:01:27]Senior Canadian and American defense and diplomatic officials sit at the same table and plan continental defense together. The clearest product of that decades-long habit of cooperation is NORAD, the joint command that has watched the airspace over both countries for roughly seven decades. So, when people say it's only advisory, who cares, that that misreads it. The value of an institution like this isn't in any single meeting, it's in the fact that it exists at all, that the channel is open, that planning happens routinely rather than in a crisis. Pausing, it doesn't break continental defense overnight.

[00:01:59]What it does is remove a shock absorber.

[00:02:02]And a former US defense advisor now at a Washington think tank put it bluntly to reporters. He called the cancellation a needless provocation that sends the wrong message to Ottawa and to other American allies. I think that framing is closer to right than the this is symbolic relax framing and I'll explain why as we go. Now, here's where I want to be careful because this is exactly the kind of story where it's easy to inflate the stakes for drama. Let me give you the deflating fact, too.

[00:02:29]The last publicly released readout of a board meeting from either government was November 2024 in Ottawa. So, this body was already not especially active in terms of public output. That cuts against the the sky is falling reading and I'm including it deliberately because if I only fed you the alarming half, I'd be doing the thing I told you I wouldn't do. The honest position is somewhere in the middle. The board's day-to-day output was thin, but the symbolic and structural value of keeping the channel open is real and that's the part being walked away from. But before I get to what this is actually about, and I don't think it's primarily about defense spending at all, you need the rest of the context first. Where we left off, the stated reason is that Canada hasn't made credible progress on defense commitments. Here's my problem with taking that reason at face value and I want to walk through the evidence rather than just assert it because you should be able to check this yourself. Canada's defense spending is not where the gap is. Prime Minister Carney announced in March that Canada had hit the NATO benchmark of 2% of GDP and hit it years ahead of the previously expected timeline.

[00:03:31]He also committed Canada to the higher target agreed at the NATO summit on track toward 3.5% by 2035.

[00:03:40]Framed around a multi-year half-trillion-dollar defense investment plan covering submarines, aircraft, drones, sensors, and radar. When CBC asked Canada's defense minister for a response to the US move, he replied with a list of concrete commitments, investments across the north, new under-ice submarines, procurement programs. So, the factual picture is that Canada is spending more, not less, and it has met the headline number the US has spent years demanding. Even one of the news outlets least sympathetic to the Liberal government acknowledged Carney has significantly increased defense spending past NATO targets. So, if the official reason is spending, the official reason doesn't line up with the official numbers. That's not me editorializing, that that's the arithmetic. So, what is this actually about? Here's where I'm moving from fact into interpretation, and I'm flagging that switch on purpose. Look at what Colby attached to his post, not a spending spreadsheet. He attached a link to a transcript of Carney's speech in Davos in January, a speech where Carney argued that the rules-based world order built after the Cold War had ruptured, and that middle powers negotiating one on one with a hegemon negotiate from weakness. Colby's own line was that the US can no longer avoid the gaps between rhetoric and reality. When the document you staple to your announcement is a speech rather than a budget, the speech is the subject. My read, and you can weigh it against your own, is that this is a response to Canadian foreign policy posture and rhetoric far more than to a defense spending shortfall, because on spending the US case is weak and Washington knows the numbers. This is the causal chain as I see it, laid out so you can find the weak link if there is one. Trump's broader pressure campaign on Canada, the trade conflict, the repeated 51st state talk, pushed Ottawa toward a deliberate hedging strategy, build options that aren't the United States. Carney's Davos speech was the public articulation of that strategy. The reassessment of Canada's F-35 order, after Canada had ordered 88 of the American-made jets in 2023, is the procurement expression of the same hedging. Carney's outreach to other partners, including a high-profile trip to China to sign a strategic partnership, is the diplomatic expression. The pause of the defense board in this reading is Washington answering Canadian hedging with the signal of its own and reaching for one of the few continental defense levers that's symbolically heavy but operationally low cost to suspend.

[00:06:02]Whether you find that chain convincing depends on whether you think the timing right after the China trip and amid the F-35 review is coincidence.

[00:06:11]I don't think it is. You're allowed to.

[00:06:13]Now, here's where the story turns because there's a real argument that this hurts the side that initiated it and I want to give that argument its full weight rather than wave it past.

[00:06:23]Let me genuinely steelman the US position first because an honest analysis has to start there or it isn't honest. There is a coherent argument from Washington's side and it goes like this. Alliances are not charity. Burden sharing complaints about NATO members under spending are not a Trump invention. They are decades old and genuinely bipartisan voiced by American administrations of both parties going back well before this one.

[00:06:48]From that vantage point, an ally that publicly questions the entire structure of the Western order while simultaneously reassessing its purchase of American built fighter jets and signing a strategic partnership with Beijing is from a US strategic planning standpoint behaving like an unpredictable partner. And if you're the person responsible for American defense strategy, planning around an unpredictable partner is harder than planning around a reliable one. So, pausing an advisory forum becomes a low cost way to communicate displeasure without touching NORAD, without touching any actual war fighting structure, without putting a single soldier or sensor at risk. That is not a stupid argument. We'll resume the conversation when the posture is clearer is a defensible position for a planner to take. I want you to sit with that for a second before I push on it because if you only hear the rebuttal, you're not actually evaluating anything. You're just being handed a conclusion. Here's where I think that argument breaks down and I'll lay it out step by step so you can find the flaw, if there is one.

[00:07:44]Continental defense is not a favor the United States does for Canada. It's geography. The northern approaches to the continental United States run through Canadian airspace and through the Arctic. That is not a Canadian talking point. It's a map. And here's the detail I keep coming back to. Colby himself attached a map of North America to his own posts and wrote in his own words that delivering on shared continental defense begins by recognizing our shared geography.

[00:08:08]I'm willing to take him completely at his word on that sentence, which is exactly why the decision is so strange to me. If the problem is shared geography and shared defense, you do not improve a shared problem by reducing the number of rooms where the two military sit down and plan it together. You don't make a joint problem easier to solve by having fewer joint conversations about it. A former Canadian official who actually attended these board meetings while holding a senior security post said plainly that the lack of joint coordination will affect the United States, too. A military historian at Royal Military College who has actually written about the board's history said the move generates more friction in the system than anyone needs right now.

[00:08:46]These are not partisan talking heads chosen to fit a narrative. One is a former insider describing a room he sat in. The other is an academic describing an institution he studied. When the people closest to the structure are the ones describing the cost, that's worth more than louder voices further away.

[00:09:01]Now, the comparative perspective, because Canada is not the first US ally to face this kind of pressure. And the historical pattern is genuinely informative here. When the United States has used access, cooperation, or institutional participation as leverage against allies, the consistent second-order effect over time has not been quiet compliance. It has been hedging. Allies don't simply fold, they diversify, because the lesson they internalize from the episode is that dependence on a single guarantor is itself the risk being exposed. And we are arguably watching that exact dynamic unfold in real time, in public. A former Conservative Party leader, uh and I want to underline that because this is not a Liberal government partisan. This is someone from the opposition side of Canadian politics publicly suggested that the US pulling out of the military board makes it more likely Canada turns to other countries for major weapons purchases. Sit with the incentive structure that creates. If the message received in Ottawa is American cooperation is conditional on rhetorical alignment, then the rational Canadian response is not to go quiet and hope it blows over. The rational response is to accelerate precisely the diversification that the Davos speech was about in the first place, which means the move carries a real risk of producing more of the very behavior it was apparently designed to punish. That is the core reason I think this reads as a strategic misfire rather than a clever squeeze.

[00:10:22]But I'm going to hold the full version of that argument for the final stretch because it only fully lands once you see where it leaves Canada concretely. In fairness, there is a counter read I should put on the table honestly because the incentive argument isn't airtight.

[00:10:36]Maybe the pressure works. Maybe Ottawa quietly softens its tone. The rhetoric cools, the board quietly resumes participation in a few months, and in a year this is a footnote in a longer relationship that has survived rougher patches than this. That outcome is genuinely possible, and anyone who tells you it's impossible is overselling. I just think the structural incentives cut the other way more strongly than the compliance scenario assumes, and in the last part I want to show you exactly why that's where I think the evidence points and what it actually means for people who will never attend a defense board meeting in their lives. Let me close the loop I opened at the very start. The reason I said this story is being underestimated. It's underestimated precisely because the board's recent public output was thin. The last published read out of a meeting from either government was November 2024 in Ottawa, so it's easy to glance at this and say a barely active advisory body paused. Who cares? But that reading mistakes activity for significance. The significance was never in the meeting minutes or the frequency of readouts.

[00:11:37]It's in what the pause signals about the trajectory of the entire relationship.

[00:11:41]And the trajectory is the thread that ties every piece of this together.

[00:11:45]Here's the full synthesis laid out so the chain is visible and you can test each link. The stated reason, defense spending, does not survive contact with Canada's own numbers. Canada hit the NATO 2% of GDP benchmark ahead of the previously expected timeline, committed to the higher target agreed at the alliance level on a path toward 3.5% by 2035, and framed it around a multi-year, roughly half-trillion-dollar investment plan spanning submarines, aircraft, drones, sensors, and radar, and even outlets unsympathetic to the current government acknowledged the spending has risen past NATO targets. The document Colby actually stapled to the announcement was not a budget table. It was the transcript of Carney's Davos speech, which tells you the real friction is about posture and rhetoric, not arithmetic. The structural facts, shared geography that Colby himself emphasized, an institution running continuously since 1940, NORAD sitting downstream of decades of exactly this kind of routine coordination, tell you the thing being suspended is a relationship maintenance mechanism, not a war-fighting one. And the incentive analysis tells you that using cooperation as a lever against an ally has historically tended to accelerate that ally's hedging rather than reverse it. Put all four together and here is my honest assessment, stated as plainly as I can so you can reject it cleanly if a link didn't hold. The pause is more likely to harden Canada's diversification strategy than to soften Canada's rhetoric. That's the thesis.

[00:13:09]I've tried to earn it rather than assert it. Now, let me translate this into something concrete because strategic friction stays abstract until it actually touches your life, and this does. The most direct channel is procurement. Canada's reassessment of the 88 aircraft F-35 order Ken placed in 2023, reopened after the change in the US administration is a multi-billion dollar decision and a modern fighter by is never just aircraft. It's decades of maintenance contracts, spare parts pipelines, software dependency, pilot training infrastructure, and industrial offset agreements, and those land as real jobs in real Canadian communities and real supplier firms. If Ottawa shifts even a portion of major defense procurement toward European or other partners, that decision reshapes which workers, which regions, and which companies benefit for a generation.

[00:13:56]And it's a decision that's harder to reverse the longer it runs. The second channel is slower, but ultimately larger. Defense stability and economic confidence move together more than people assume. Investors, allied governments, ratings analysts, and multinational corporations all watch whether the Canada-US relationship is stable or fraying because that relationship is the backdrop against which trade, investment, and currency expectations are priced. Uncertainty in the security relationship feeds indirectly, but really into the same broad economic environment in which Canadian mortgages, jobs, and consumer prices sit. None of this detonates this week. Nobody's groceries cost more on Tuesday because of a paused advisory board. But the direction of travel is the thing that compounds, and the direction just received a very public nudge in front of every ally that was watching. So, where does this realistically go over the next 6 to 12 months? I'll give you both sides as honestly as I can because I genuinely do not think the outcome is determined. The US side read is that this is a negotiating tactic, uncomfortable by design, but reversible. If the Canadian tone shifts, a path back exists, the board resumes, and the relationship absorbs another bruise the way it has absorbed others. I take that scenario seriously, and you should, too. But the Canadian trajectory read, which I find more persuasive given the incentive structure I walked through, is that this accelerates a hedge that was already in motion before Monday. More diversification of defense suppliers, more partnerships built deliberately outside North America, and a slow erosion of the old working assumption in Ottawa that the American security guarantee is effectively unconditional.

[00:15:32]If that reading is the right one, the irony is sharp. A move apparently intended to pull Canada back into line may be remembered as one of the specific moments that pushed it further towards standing on its own feet. I want to be honest that I could be wrong about which path wins. Relationships between neighbors this deeply intertwined have a long history of surviving worse. What I've tried to do is give you enough of the actual verified facts and the named voices on both sides that you can build your own view here rather than simply borrow mine. So, here's my question to you, and I genuinely want to know the answer.

[00:16:03]Do you read the defense board pause as leverage that eventually works and quietly resolves, or as a self-inflicted acceleration of exactly the independence it was meant to discourage?

[00:16:12]Tell me where you think the chain breaks, because the place it might break is the part I can't stop turning over.