National Defence committee  I confess I'm very old school on this. One of the best conflict analysts of this past quarter century wrote a piece in the early 1990s describing conflict prevention as alchemy for the new world order. Politics is politics. We intervene badly in it. We don't understand the socie

National Defence committee  Yes, absolutely. You can't have the kinds of effective peacekeeping responses that you need in these kinds of conflicts without the airlift and oversight support that Canada is providing, but it's the beginning, not the end of what needs to happen from serious troop contributors.

National Defence committee  Yes, I would strongly support the notion of longer-term commitments. I would hope that Canada would learn from its first experiences in Mali—which would give it a wider context in intelligence terms and policy terms about what the situation is—evolve its contribution and stay eng

National Defence committee  I'm sorry, I don't know what you're referring to in terms of smart pledges by Canada. Are they conditional pledges of aid, or...?

National Defence committee  I would say two things, both hard. One, which could come out of these kinds of discussions, is a clear sense of bipartisan support for this. I'm in Washington, so I'm not exactly in a strong position to talk about bipartisanship, but as a general matter, when a country can commun

National Defence committee  I would offer two perspectives. One, Secretary-General Guterres just announced a few months ago a series of reforms integrating some of the regional desks in peacekeeping. Those are perfectly valid managerial reforms and aren't really going to move the needle in terms of policy.

National Defence committee  Thank you. There's a debate inside the Secretariat. There's a debate in the membership about the question of what it means for UN peacekeeping to be engaged in contexts where there is a terrorism dimension. It's not comfortable for the UN. There's uncertainty about it. There are

National Defence committee  A lot of the recruitment tools they have use AI-enabled software that's much more sophisticated at trolling through social media and identifying people who might be suitable for approaches or recruitment or mobilization. It's similar to the kinds of things the Russians have done

National Defence committee  Absolutely. I don't think there is any domain of peace and security left where cyber and AI aren't central to the dynamics of who is gaining and who is losing capability. That has to be central to any discussion of international security in the coming period.

National Defence committee  To be honest, I don't have a full sense of the kinds of division or responsibility of Canadian parliamentary committees, but certainly across the spectrum of committees that are worried about public safety, foreign policy or international security policy. They should be thinking

National Defence committee  With regard to the Canadian ambassador to NATO specifically, I don't think so, but several other ambassadors, including the American ambassador on several occasions, yes.

National Defence committee  I would say, to a modest degree. I mean, I think you know perfectly well that policy at NATO is really set in capitals. Foreign and defence ministers are pretty heavily involved in shaping policy for NATO, both on specific operations and in general terms. Ambassadors can ampl

National Defence committee  Is that in the context of peacekeeping, or more generally?

National Defence committee  Let's look at it on two levels. I think we're already at the beginning of a phase of strategic competition among the United States, China, Russia and others for the use of AI and cyber-weapons and the integration of that into military affairs and strategic economic competition. T

National Defence committee  It's an ongoing concern. Some of the things we saw in the Central African Republic were particularly egregious in these terms, with a number of the contributors there. The acid point here always comes back to the fact that the UN itself doesn't really have either the legal autho