National Defence committee  Maybe I'll just make a couple of comments, Mr. Harris. We want to make sure that the Arctic does not become a war zone. The best way to ensure that is to remove temptation. When you have these outlandish claims made by the Russians to vast portions of the Arctic, when they are seeking to get energy without much regard for the fragile ecology, when they disregard international law in a blatant fashion, which they have, then it is really essential that we take reasonable steps that include both hardware and software, so to speak, to try to prevent that kind of emboldening of a regime in Russia, which is behaving more and more like a rogue state rather than a responsible member of the international community.

National Defence committee  I'm sure you and others understand that NATO was never meant to only be a military organization. It was also a political organization, and politics are to be broadly interpreted. If you look at the criteria for joining NATO, there are political criteria and expectations. Energy, especially in the case of Russia, is also politics.

National Defence committee  Wise policy-makers always adjust to new situations. The question is whether the Obama administration is prepared to do that. I'm sure you know that the agreement was for a much heavier and much more layered missile defence in eastern Europe. In Poland and the Czech Republic, the governments took a great deal of heat domestically to agree to that.

National Defence committee  Cooperation in procurement is a worldwide phenomenon. No country has a capacity to do everything themselves, not even the United States. They import UAVs and others. We do need to cooperate. We have companies such as Bombardier, BlackBerry, Bell that have capacity. The problem is that when we have relatively very low defence spending and very low acquisition, and we do that in Canada particularly in terms of our needs, then we have less of a say.

National Defence committee  We know that another dimension to warfare in the 21st century is cyber-warfare, and there is increasing potency to that, with vast resources being devoted to cyber-warfare by all states, to an extent, but mainly by states like China, the United States, and Russia. In a sense there is the problem that you have to guard against cyber-warfare.

National Defence committee  Thank you, Mr. Chisu. It's an important question which is very difficult to answer. You ask about China and I don't think I have the time to go into great detail, but China does cooperate with Russia. It acts indirectly in the Arctic. It is a country that wants to ensure energy supplies.

National Defence committee  My colleague has mentioned the United States as the world's superpower. The success of the United States in terms of innovation—Silicon Valley—is not accidental. There is a connection to the military. A lot of the inventions did come out of DARPA, and they had an impact. This is not to suggest that the only way to get innovation is by having very heavy military expenditures, but there is a valuable connection.

National Defence committee  Thank you very much. I just want to briefly mention the term “political magical realism” which draws on a literary term, “magical realism” where you see in Russia this bizarre combination of fantasy and reality—increasingly more fantasy—with Mr. Putin engaging in a kind of bizarre behaviour as well as very tough repression.

National Defence committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you to the committee for inviting me. You have a longer version of my comments that are being translated, and by the brevity of my calling—professors tend to be much more long-winded—I will try to condense them as much as possible. My topic is North American defence, Arctic security and Russian imperial delusions.