Thank you, Chair, and honourable members.
We have circulated our opening statement, so we will not repeat that in the interests of time. George Petrolekas and I will have a very few brief opening remarks just to kind of set the scene, and then we're in your hands.
Your subject, and we don't want to sound patronizing, is an important one, because in fact it's our assessment that Canada has reached the stage at which it's probably important to go back to some first principles on the security and defence policy and look at our interests a bit more carefully than has been traditionally required of this country.
Beginning with NATO, there's a major NATO summit this weekend in Chicago, as you know. They're becoming almost annual events. This is the 25th such summit since they began 55 years ago. The last NATO summit, which was in Lisbon about 18 months ago, issued a strategic concept of 2010. Strategic concept papers tend to be broad political guidance for the indefinite future, reflecting recent international developments and trends, that require NATO to look at itself and look at its direction and look at its priorities. NATO has issued seven such strategic concepts since it was founded in 1949.
The strategic concept of 2010 is important because it was the first one, although it came a little late, to try to take account of such transformative events as 9/11, our engagement in Afghanistan, the major dissension within NATO over Iraq, and all of the concerns that have arisen since that time about what the western democracies are trying to do in places where they're heavily engaged to rebuild war-torn societies.
SC 2010 stipulated that NATO has three functions. Typically NATO doesn't declare itself quite so specifically and so definitively. This one was a little different, and therefore interesting. It identified the requirement to, firstly, defend members against all threats; secondly, address the full spectrum of international crises; and thirdly, develop partnerships with others, other countries outside of NATO, other organizations beyond NATO.
This is a stretch for the alliance, which for the most part, particularly for its European members, has seen itself in the business of defence—item number one in the three tasks—and defence specifically of the territory of Europe. For NATO to formally now espouse a much larger mission, to be cognizant of and to do something about international crises writ large, for, during, and after, implies obviously a role in nation-building. And that, as you would imagine, is a hugely controversial issue today. It has been for quite some time. The controversy has been heating up for quite some time.
The notion that the alliance to cement that approach ought to be developing more formal ties with countries outside of NATO and with organizations outside of NATO implies that NATO is getting ready to go abroad and to stay involved in these issues. There's a good deal of angst within the alliance about what these aspirations as identified in the paper actually imply for policy.
The background obviously is that the financial crisis has afflicted the economies of every NATO member one way or the other, and has imposed on them defence budget cuts—at the low end about 9% or 10%, and at the high end about 28% or 30%. You don't cut your defence budgets by those amounts without cutting your military capabilities.
So at the very time that NATO is espousing a rather more forward-looking and enterprising approach to itself and the world around it, the NATO members themselves are probably less equipped to do that, and they're less inclined.
Why are they less inclined? It's because they are war weary. They've been at war one way or the other for 10 years. NATO has 28 members. A lot of governments within NATO, or opposition parties to those governments, are very skeptical about whether the alliance should be doing very much more of this.
I will stop and let my colleague, Mr. Petrolekas, take the story from there.