It's never too late. We don't find ourselves yet in the type of conflict where there is a direct potential, and I dare say our allies have become very attuned to this, particularly after the Ukrainian war started in 2014. We see this in the Nordics. We also see that with our Indo-Pacific friends in terms of how they have been responding.
I also always remind my students that if we look at determination to act.... I point out to them that at the time of Tiananmen Square, Canada had a larger defence budget than China. Our defence budget was about $21 billion or $22 billion, in those dollars at that point. If you look at SIPRI's figures, and it's always difficult to know with any certainty, but we think that China's defence budget was about $17 billion. So we see the manner in which political determination will ultimately make all the difference. Now, of course, China has a much larger economy, and we can get into that.
What would I recommend? First and foremost, to deal with the Russian threat, we have to become much more serious at following through with what we say we're going to do. In other words, the map of modernization of NORAD and North American defence is a sound one, but the question of putting off the $38.6 billion to when the next election comes, I think, is trying to play sleight of hand in this context. We have to get serious. We have to say this is as serious as anything that we face in climate change, with the pandemic, and that means making the expenditures as soon as we can.
On the Chinese side, what we need to be doing is getting as serious as we have been in the past with our European and American allies and making our Indo-Pacific friends into allies. I think the only way we can respond to all of the types of threats that we have heard in terms of what China poses in the long term...will only able to be complete if we have a NATO variant of some form of alliance, not just friendship but alliance, with those who are like-minded in terms of being able to respond.
Politically, we need to be trying to help with that. We won't lead—no one will take us seriously on that—but we can at least be supportive of it, and we can definitely turn around and start actually getting the expenditures we need and—this is even more chilling—we need to be thinking about these worst-case geopolitical threats that we now face. They're not science fiction.