National Defence committee  Thanks very much, Mr. Chair. I agree, really, with everything that Dick Fadden has just said, but I'll look at these issues from the perspective of eight years altogether at NATO headquarters. I was there as the deputy permanent representative from 1998 to 2002, which was dur

National Defence committee  That's a good question. The U.S. was initially reluctant to do anything in Libya. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said famously at the time that for the U.S. to involve itself in another Muslim country, it would have to have its head examined, so he was opposed. Secretary Clin

National Defence committee  Correct, and very few allies did. I think the number of those who did the strike was somewhere around seven or eight countries, something like that.

National Defence committee  Absolutely. If I might, the air campaign in Kosovo was a mirror image of the Libya air campaign, to the extent that Canada was one of, I think, six countries that actually did the strike mission. After the U.S., Canada led most of the sorties in the Kosovo air campaign.

National Defence committee  Yes.

National Defence committee  I agree with that point. The problem with the 2% is, what counts as defence spending? That's relatively elastic.

National Defence committee  —so you know what that's all about. In addition to that, is what you have deployable? You may spend the 2%, but if it can't leave your own territory, it's useless as an alliance commitment to collective defence, for instance. Also, if you don't have the political will to deplo

National Defence committee  I might add a little bit to that, on a couple of points. Tactical nuclear weapons have been a subject of U.S.–Russia negotiations for some time. It was to be the next stage of negotiations following the strategic agreement. The Russians have never wished to go down that road. The

National Defence committee  It's frightening. If I might, I'll just put a fine point on it. It would take about a week for any of us, including the U.S., to know if one of those deployed weapons in the back of a truck went missing in a period of crisis. That's scary. Then, as Dick has said, there is North

National Defence committee  It is an issue that was raised with Russia when there was a NATO-Russia council. Since the invasion and acquisition of Crimea, the first time since World War II that a European power has grabbed a piece of territory of another country, the NATO-Russia council doesn't exist anymor

National Defence committee  There's effectively no formal relationship between NATO and Pakistan. There have been ongoing discussions with Pakistan because of Afghanistan. Certainly, U.S. chiefs of defence staff have regularly met with their Pakistani counterparts, and the nuclear weapons issue was always a

National Defence committee  They're not strong enough. I'll just go right to the point. NATO has a liaison office in New York, for instance. It's staffed at a very junior level. It's very modest. Certainly Afghanistan demonstrated that although NATO and the UN can work together effectively, those relation

National Defence committee  Well, the conversation has changed over the last year, because there is now an edge to it. As I said, there is a kind of quid pro quo: if you don't pay, you don't get the U.S. In a public statement in Pensacola in December, President Trump said, “I told the people of NATO standin

National Defence committee  The consequence of this public discussion about payment and collective defence is that it completely undermines deterrence. In the past, it was always assumed that there was a political commitment, let alone article 5, that if an ally was attacked, they would have the support of

National Defence committee  Our best friend right now in Washington is General Mattis. He was the strategic commander in Norfolk when I was at NATO. I spent years on—