NATO and its enfeeblements

I’ll start with this observation from my Ankara Summit postmortem in the National Post1: It doesn’t require too close a reconnaissance of the sea surface to notice that in the flotsam of the Transatlantic Alliance, quite a few of the bobbing heads are banker-statesmen treading water while NATO’s American flagship steams off towards the far horizon.

Right at the moment in history when we need another Churchill, or an Eisenhower, or a Lech Walesa or a Vaclev Havel, this is who you’ll find among NATO’s post-American top tier:

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is the former head of the German subsidiary of Blackrock Asset Management, the world’s largest financial asset manager. Finnish president Alex Stubb is a former vice-president of the European Investment Bank.

French prime minister Emmanuel Macron came into politics as a Rothschild & Co. investment banker, and then there’s our own Mark Carney. He’s a former head of the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada, and he emerged from Justin Trudeau’s senior advisors to succeed him at the Liberal Party’s helm while he was chair of the board of Brookfield Asset Management.

I’ll be getting into all that and the unmentionable herds of elephants in the NATO meeting rooms this past week, but there are some non-NATO stories I’m watching and some other things that have been keeping me busy, which I’ll have more about later.

Tales from the crypt, reprised

The whole Long Overdue Reckoning Miasma2 keeps pulling me back in, and it was a rare thing this past week when the former CBC journalist and now astute media critic Tara Hanley hosted me on her podcast, because it wasn’t suffocating or dreary. And if I must quote myself, what the hell, I will. The point: This wasn’t even about residential schools.

“I think that’s the thing that we shouldn’t allow to be lost in this. This is about journalism. It’s about the collaboration of very powerful, influential, well paid editors and journalists, with the prime minister and his cabinet, in igniting and inciting a period of mania and hysteria in this country.”

It’s all here. . .

You’d never know it from the headlines, but Canadians are distinctly unhappy. For some weeks I’ve been occasionally returning to the 2026 World Happiness Index data,3 published by the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre, and I’ve been a bit perplexed at how little attention it’s been getting and the odd way it’s been reported, the Globe and Mail notwithstanding.

Marco Navarro-Genie has had a run at it4 and he sees what I saw and he’s done something useful with it. It’s not just that Canada was in fifth place out of 147 countries before Justin Trudeau came to office and that we’ve since slipped to 25th place. We used to be as happy as the Scandinavians. Quebeckers still are, but if you look a the data for Canada without the Quebec numbers, the rest of us have dropped to 35th place.

If you tweeze out Canadians under 30, we’re in 58th place. For Canadians under 25 we’re in 71st place. Young Canadians used to be the happiest cohort in the country, and now they’re the most miserable. Similar trend lines can be discerned for LGBTQ people and Indigenous people and “racialized people,” the very constituencies the Trudeau Liberals put at the top of their policy agenda. Remember Canada’s “feminist” cabinet?

Here’s Nacarro-Genie: “Well-being data for Canadian women during this period reflect, in part, what happens when the political project nominally dedicated to women’s advancement treats the category of woman as a matter of bureaucratic discretion.”

Also this, the bullseye: “Housing was the defining policy failure. The Trudeau government ran immigration at volumes that reached more than one million net new residents per year at its peak, without proportionate investment in housing supply, infrastructure, or public services. The result was a structural pricing shift that permanently altered the calculus of young adult life: whether to rent or own, whether to start a family, whether to stay. The World Happiness Report registered exactly this. Young Canadians rate their own lives at seventy-first in the world. Housing policy produced that result.”

Okay back to NATO, and sorry to disappoint everyone but Mark Carney is just as unprincipled and as disruptive to the “rules based international order” as Donald Trump is. The big difference is that the United States matters.

There’s a lot of fuss being made about a Wall Street Journal inside-baseball account last week about Carney’s comings and goings, and it presents him as the NATO statesman leading the alliance out of Trumpism’s mercurial American hegemony. The headline: The Canadian Who Steered Europe Away From the U.S.5

I can buy that, although there’s not much in the WSJ pieces that will strike Real Story subscribers and my National Post readers as especially newsworthy. But as I’ve pointed out ad nauseam, Canada’s Liberals were striving to rekindle their decades-old intimacies with the police state in Beijing months before Donald Trump’s return to the White House.6

Despite the impression he took pains to give at Davos back in January, it wasn’t the “rupture” of Trumpism that inspired Carney to embrace Xi Jinping’s “new world order.”

Carney is an establishment Liberal of the kind that turned the Liberal Party into the political wing of the Canada-China Business Council. Only hours before Davos, Canada became the first NATO state after Victor Orban’s Hungary to establish a comprehensive “strategic partnership” with Beijing, situating Canada as just another unprincipled “middle power” that wants to be in every camp, all at once.7

The thing is, President Trump plays the same both-sides game, but with a vengeance. The major role he’s played in the Ukraine crisis has been to transform the United States into a war profiteer.8

In the effort to put on a brave face about the Ankara summit much has been made of Trump’s surprise announcement that Kyiv will be permitted to manufacture its own Patriot interceptor missiles. Well, not so fast.

It’s not clear whether Ukraine will have to partner with RTX or Lockheed Martin, the two main Patriot-system defence contractors. Kyiv will also have to build its own Patriot factories, making them priority targets for Russian missile attacks. This isn’t some gift or loan the White House is offering Ukraine, and the whole process is expected to take several years. Ukraine needs those systems today.9

Meanwhile, NATO is increasingly run by wiseguy bankers. The statesmen directing NATO’s reconstuction are expected to know a thing or two about money management, and perhaps they do. In Prime Minister Carney’s case some might say the expectation hasn’t been met, owing to a 2025-26 budget deficit of nearly $80 billion and an anticipated debt mountain of $300 billion by 2030.

Still, it does explain Carney’s signature NATO contribution, the Defence, Security and Resilience Bank.10 In Ankara, Carney was pleased to announce that of NATO’s 32 member states, Albania, Belgium, Greece, Latvia, Luxembourg, Romania, Turkey and Ukraine have expressed interest.

President Donald Trump knows how to have fun with figures too. The $21 trillion the president says his America First policies have hormswoggled and strongarmed into the American economy is more than twice what the White House figures show, and a detailed Bloomberg analysis concludes it’s more like $7 trillion in what might be actually-existing investment pledges.11

To be fair, the president has certainly done quite well for himself and his family. Forbes runs a real-time Trump wealth tracker that shows his personal wealth has nearly tripled to $6.3 billion12 since Inauguration Day, mostly in cryptocurrency and meme coins and weird things like that.

Canadians have little cause to sneer. Prime Minister Carney’s financial entanglements are such that the Parliamentary ethics office requires him to give the impression that he’s unaware of any decision-making process that involves any one of 103 companies in which he has a vested interest. So far, Carney has had to recuse himself from 17 “situations,” including $3.1 billion in housing loans, the federal government’s nuclear energy plans and any talk of exporting electricity to the United States.

Yes, of course. Sorry. Here’s a lede:

Now that U.S. president Donald Trump has invoked “national security” to slap tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Canada, Mexico and Europe, and called for Russia’s Vladimir Putin to be readmitted to the G7, the 70-year-old North Atlantic Treaty Organization, already the object of Trump’s contempt, is looking shakier than at any time since the end of the Cold War.

The fun part: I wrote that lede for a Macleans magazine analysis eight long years ago.13 NATO is even shakier now.

The point here is that it’s about money and conflicts of interest and a leadership vacuum on both sides of the Atlantic, and forgive me if I notice that the most consequential decision at the Ankara summit may have been the decision against committing to another one before Trump has vacated the White House.14

Nonetheless, everybody tried so hard to put on a brave face in Ankara, and everybody did their best to avoid unpleasant subjects. It looks very much like the White House, for instance, will ignore Israeli concerns and reverse several years of sanctions against Turkey’s acquistion of military hardware. It also looks very much like Ukraine’s “big win” at Ankara was mostly mirrors and smoke.

The United States did sign on to the symbolic reiteration of NATO’s “all for one” Article 5 in Ankara - perversely ensuring Ukraine will remain outside the alliance and Vladimir Putin will have an incentive to keep the war going. But so long as Donald Trump is the U.S. president, and so long as the NATO states fail to bring forward a suitable degree of coherent, convincing resolve, it’s not at all clear what it will take to rein in Putin.

Russia’s clandestine operations targeting European NATO states have quadrupled over the past two years, involving everything from reckless incursions into European airspace to arson attacks and the sabotage of critical infrastructure — all just barely below the threshold that would trigger Article 5. After Ankara, it’s anybody’s guess whether NATO could summon the backbone to respond forcefully and finally in the event of a crisis.

Another thing nobody at Ankara wanted to talk about: China’s role in bankrolling Russia and collaborating with the Kremlin, at the highest levels, in Putin’s war.

Real Story subscribers and National Post readers will know something about this, as in The War We’re Not Supposed To Talk About, and The Walls Are Closing in, followed by this exclusive Reuters investigation: Russia approved secret China military training at top level, sources say.

Enough for today.