The potential is there that in following the wash-up in NATO, two things will happen. Either NATO will survive and have to change...
One of the Canadian recommendations is the simple introduction and implementation of a Canadian recommendation that unanimity can exist in Brussels at the very highest political level, unanimity deciding where we're going to go, what we're going to do. Then once you drop down below Brussels and you get into the field, the people who are carrying the majority of the weight make the decisions. It's just that simple change that would overhaul NATO's chain of command dramatically and make it much more efficient. It's simple to say but difficult to implement.
You can't have in Kandahar province a debate going on as to whether everybody there agrees with what the commander wants to do.
So that's one of the options: that NATO will actually pay attention to a lot of national input like ours, and in particular to the Madeleine Albright study that's taking a look at the restructuring of NATO, and will reform itself and hopefully stop expanding.
After the debacle in Georgia, can you imagine anybody trusting that NATO's going to come to their rescue, including Canada? They couldn't even get there. While they were fighting a relatively minor insurgency in Afghanistan, we were facing the Soviets coming into a country that could have been a NATO country and we were all going to go to attack Russia because of that? I mean, give me a break.
Or it fails. It disintegrates as a result of the European Union coming closer together and coming up with some force. But boy, do they have their problems, too. Germany, France, and the U.K. don't necessarily agree on how that should work. If that fails, then you'll recognize these names: the idea of a standing coalition of the willing—the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand—and funnily enough, a number of the new free satellite countries from the old Soviet Union that have really been pulling their weight in Afghanistan. So I can see something like that happening.