What I'm going to talk about, overall, is the need for sea-power, which is simply an ability to use or deny the seas for your national purposes. Even though Canada has strong national economic interest in seaborne trade, and new threats have arisen in the form of piracy, when we look to the future of the RCN, it's not a question of protecting the sea lines of communication between Canada and its trading partners. First of all, most trade moves between Canada and the United States. Second, the seas on which it moves are basically secure.
The purpose for which we really maintain the RCN that we knew in the Cold War and beyond is a focus on multilateral operations with our allies, principally the United States Navy, in a transoceanic capacity where we use the RCN to project Canadian force over the seas into the littoral waters and near seas abroad. So it's a transoceanic navy.
This is seen for us as important in terms of overall national security, in terms of Canadian global identity, and in terms of providing assistance in humanitarian operations. Looking to the future, it's possible, and I think likely, that the relative importance of our own near seas on the east and west coasts, and especially in the Arctic, as you've heard, is going to become more important, requiring greater maritime attention. This will simply come alongside what has basically been a transoceanic orientation for the Royal Canadian Navy.
Overall, I think we face, in a certain sense, a very favourable maritime position in terms of our maritime security. This is particularly true for the main focus of the RCN: overseas operations. This position is that Canada and the government will retain a large measure of discretion when it comes to using its military maritime assets. The character of overseas threats, the nature of the operations, and the interests of our allies and our partners mean that Ottawa can often choose the nature of Canada's transoceanic naval commitments with regard to where it deploys those forces, the size of the contribution, and the duration. Canada may, for example, decide not to fully follow the United States in rebalancing towards the Asia-Pacific area, but instead pivot eastward toward the North Atlantic and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which still requires a maritime presence and capacity close to Europe.
For Canada, if we look at the future sea-power and what the RCN will need, it will need ships that can project power overseas. However, in the actual operations, we have a great deal of discretion, meaning that in a certain sense it's a matter of adjusting our commitments to meet our existing capabilities. They'll still provide Canada with flexible and credible instruments of policy, provided we bring our commitments in line with the capabilities that we're likely to have in view of the length of time it takes to build maritime forces and in view of the condition of the current maritime forces. Overall, we face a favourable maritime security environment.
Thank you.