欧博百家乐Kelly McParland: Scorning Trump's Golden
Everything is golden in official Washington these days. The Oval Office is a study in decorative touches direct from pre-revolutionary France. The frames around the portraits are golden, as is the gilt around the ceiling. The flourishes on the fireplace and the knick-knacks on the mantel — maybe the president’s latest golf trophies? — are as well.
The skip-the-line immigration visas Donald Trump is peddling at US$5 million a pop are known as “gold cards” because that’s the colour they come in. Naturally, they bear a photo of the president as well.
Which is all fine if your design taste runs to over-the-top knock-offs of 18th-century Versailles. For Mark Carney, whose tastes appear somewhat more sober, it adds another layer of complexity as the prime minister seeks to negotiate a new relationship with America’s president while avoiding entanglement in his burgeoning megalomania.
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Among other things, Carney needs to address the president’s enthusiasm for a defence system he’s labelled … what else? … the Golden Dome. Names shouldn’t really matter when it comes to what is, in fact, a serious matter. It’s no longer possible to pretend that Canada is immune to the risk of some addled tyrant deciding it’s a good idea to launch a missile or two in the direction of the U.S., with geography dictating that the quickest route would take it across Canada. Some means of detecting, intercepting and destroying any such mad attempt is not a ridiculous idea.
It doesn’t help, however, when the overwhelming impetus behind the project comes in the form of Donald Trump. The president is easily infatuated by anything he deems “big” and “beautiful” and that covers a lot of real estate — gifts of free luxury airliners from Middle East potentates for example. The protective shield he envisions for America qualifies in spades.
Whether it’s practical, affordable or even possible are other questions, though not the sort that ordinarily preoccupy the current White House. Trump wants the dome built in three years at a cost he identifies as US$175 billion, both of which seem unlikely, the space-based aspects alone having been calculated by the Congressional Budget Office at US$550 billion. But it wouldn’t be wise for Carney to tell him as much at a time when Ottawa is entering talks aimed at diluting the numerous tax, tariff and other damaging measures Trump has already sent Canada’s way.
This is especially so given Carney’s pledge to rebuild the country’s military and send a message to the world that, at long last, Canada takes its national defence seriously. The Liberal campaign platform committed to everything from new submarines and icebreakers to the creation of an account to “end the chronic lapsing of defence spending.” Previous governments have pledged similar plans to elevate the military from its slide into impoverishment, to little effect, but for the first time in decades Canadians seem to accept the need for the country to possess a respectable military.
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It was entirely sensible, then, for the prime minister to carefully avoid greeting Trump’s Golden Dome with the sort of derision Liberals have been quick to dish out to previous renditions of spaced-based defence proposals. Projects mooted under presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were rejected at least partly from Liberal fears of being associated with Republican leaders unpopular with progressives.
Dislike of U.S. presidents is fair enough, and this one in particular, but shouldn’t be used to reject proposals that might actually be in Canada’s interest. There is nothing absurd about a system that detects approaching threats so that they can be met before arrival, any more now than when Britain erected the first ground-based radar system against approaching German aircraft at the outbreak of World War Two.
The Trump version, predictably, goes far beyond anything tried elsewhere and is accompanied by the usual outpouring of flamboyant verbosity. Israel’s Iron Dome protects just a fraction of the territory the U.S. is considering, while the notion of turning space into just another arena for warfare is a new and frightening step for a planet that already dances too often with means of self-destruction. That defence firm Lockheed Martin calls Trump’s dream “a Manhattan Project-scale mission” is hardly reassuring given the horrors that atomic weaponry unleashed.
Deploring the reality of threats from Russia, China, North Korea or others does nothing to remove them, however. Canada can either let our defence capability continue to wither, hoping potential dangers never materialize or that the U.S. will save us, or we play what part we can in making clear to potential adversaries the futility of any act of aggression.
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The far north is Canada’s most vulnerable region. Joint warning systems already exist under Norad, the North American Aerospace Defence Command. Ottawa has pledged $38.6 billion to upgrading and modernizing Canada’s part in the network. In March, Carney announced a joint project with Australia for the development of Over-the-Horizon Radar technology, to “provide advanced early warning and long-range surveillance, enabling faster CAF detection and tracking of a wide range of threats in our Northern air and maritime approaches.”
It’s a start. Unfortunately, we’ve let our defences erode for so long that playing catch-up is that much tougher a task. Ottawa is pledging a serious effort to reach NATO’s defence spending benchmark of 2.0 per cent of gross domestic product just as the alliance is preparing to raise it to 5.0 per cent. Whether the dome needs to be a part of the build-up remains to be seen, but Carney will have to convince America’s volatile president that Canada is giving the question honest consideration. That would include ensuring his caucus and cabinet are aware of the need to treat it that way, in public and otherwise.