No, I'm not. I'm a historian, Gary. Come on.
First of all, I totally agree. You can't have a military designed to do everything, and I think our very best example is the Americans themselves in January 2012. They're very clearly responding to the economic reality by redesigning their own military to be a lot more specific in terms of what they can respond to.
There are two answers to that question. One is, what strategic interests do we have that are so vital that we would contribute to an international military force of some kind? One has to think about certain sea lane choke points, for example, and one also has to think about the extent to which we can actually make a contribution. I'll give you a concrete example. The Strait of Hormuz is as important to Canada as it is to the United States and about half of the rest of the world, for obvious reasons, but do we have a capability to operate in the Strait of Hormuz? And is there anything we could do there that would actually add to efforts to keep the strait open?
We could talk about certain passages, for example, into the Caribbean—the Windward Passage, the Mona Passage, and so on. We declared the Caribbean to be a pretty important Canadian national interest over the last 10 or 15 years. Do we have the capability to operate in certain areas of the Caribbean, should there be some political threat arising from within? I would say the answer is we have a lot more capability there than we do in the Strait of Hormuz.
Then, another one is this. What do the people of Canada think about something at a particular given time? An issue that may not be on the horizon today will all of a sudden catch the public interest and the public will demand some kind of response from the government two or three weeks from now. And who knows what that might be? For example, nobody could predict 9/11 a week before it happened and yet the Canadian response after that was a fairly strong one.
I think what we haven't really done in this country is say, these are vital Canadian interests and we're prepared to take part in international operations, whether they're UN, NATO, or whatever they are, because they're key to our requirements. I think they have to do with the lives of Canadians. They have to do with the ability of Canadian enterprises to do business in important places overseas, and I think they have to do with certain aspects of what we'd call international morality and the maintenance of certain norms—a responsibility to protect, if you will.
I think we need to try to boil those things down in ways that have a practical reflection on how we design our military, and what our military should be for. I don't think we've done a very good job of doing that. We knew in the Cold War what our military was for, and then for the last 20 years or so I think we've been wandering around and not really making a significant effort to design a Canadian strategy or a Canadian defence policy.