We didn't have to do a lot of thinking between 1945 and 1990. We knew where the bad guys were. We knew what they we're going to do, more or less. We knew what we had to do to respond to them, and we knew what all our allies were going to do. The rules were all written. We didn't have to do a lot of strategic planning, if any, although there was some strategic thinking that was going on in NDHQ about all kinds of things at the time. Basically, we fit into a slot, and there we were.
That world changed dramatically in 1990, and it's still changing. So, even though we are part of the Five Eyes, part of NATO, share defence with the United States, operate within the United Nations, and so on and so forth, we have a lot more room to manoeuvre than we did in the period of the Cold War.
I think we have to do a lot more thinking about what our place in the world is than we had to do back then, because our role has not been predetermined to nearly the extent that it was during the Cold War period. We can disagree. We can tell the Americans we're not going to participate in that operation, but we are going to participate in this one. That would have been inconceivable during most of the Cold War. I think that our ability to act more in a Canadian national interest, and less in an interest in coalition with our allies, is much greater today than it was in the past, and much greater today in 2012 than it was in the past.
When you look at what the Americans are projecting for their own military, it leaves a vacuum that we can help to fill or not, depending on our own national interest. Again, that leaves more room for us, if we choose to exercise the greater degree of freedom that we have.