John Robson: Canada Must Not Only Have a Strong Military, but Also Rearm Intellectually

Commentary

It is of course good news that the Canadian government intends to do something serious about defence. It’s not so good that a great many commentators mistook the announcement for the achievement, given our government’s crumbling capacity to do anything. But before I get near the specifics, let me emphasize the urgent necessity of rearming intellectually. If we don’t understand that the world is a dangerous place where we have real enemies, we’re very likely to come up with a defence plan that spends a lot of money on anything and everything except a real, effective capacity to break things and hurt people.

Such talk may well get you denounced as a warmonger or even bloodthirsty for stating plainly what defence is for. But as Will Rogers once said, and I used to challenge students to evaluate it on exams, “Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘Nice doggie’ until you can find a rock.”

Many disagree. And it matters, because this aphorism embodies a number of assumptions without which we literally cannot rearm.

First, “diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments.” (That one’s from Frederick the Great.) Second, a number of regimes out there are vicious. Third, they must be stopped with fort mayne. Though when I Googled that spelling, the wretched “AI Overview” came back with “The user is likely asking about Fort Malden, a National Historic Site located in Amherstburg, Ontario.” He is referring to settling a problem by strength in a lawless environment.

No. The user is not. But many people weighing in on Canadian defence policy do seem to regard military force as a quaint though distasteful relic from the days of infantry squares with muskets and bright red woollen jackets. Like the outfit that just sent the prime minister a letter saying of the American “Golden Dome” initiative: “we believe that participation in this unproven, costly, and destabilizing scheme would undermine Canada’s strategic interests, global reputation, and longstanding support for arms control and multilateralism.”

You get the idea? They do not consider being strong enough to hurt our enemies an important strategic interest. They believe diplomacy is the art of admiring oneself in the mirror, trusting paper promises, and mouthing platitudes en masse. Moreover, a critical aspect of this worldview is to regard anything we do to make ourselves stronger as “destabilizing.”

It’s a strange mindset because it holds simultaneously that we are so strong that nothing can really hurt us and indeed we scare everyone, which is why they snarl, and that if we dare start groping even for a pebble, the massive ferocious growling hound will spring and rip our throats out. But in practice, both halves come down to we must keep saying “Nice doggie” no matter whether it is already rending our flesh or merely plainly about to, and never, ever, reach for a rock.

It has been tried repeatedly, with disastrous consequences. Yet it remains very widespread. When Israel finally struck hard at Iran, which has been trying to wipe Israel off the map for decades, reputable news outfits reflexively said things like “Israel’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear and military facilities marks an escalation in the conflicts in the Middle East” or “Israel’s Attack on Iran Stokes Fears of a Wider War.” Euronews even wrote, “Almost 48 hours after the eruption of hostilities between Israel and Iran…” ignoring even their major exchange of fire last year.

One finds it also in the way often-legitimate criticisms of, say, the F-35 program from the left are never accompanied by a desire to acquire actual weapons. At best, they may suggest engaging in job creation labelled defence procurement. As Canadian governments too often have, and not only because of electoral considerations.

The biggest issue is that our elites generally don’t believe there’s a wolf, or that a rock would help if there were. When Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the people of Iran as friends, saying “Brave people of Iran, light defeats the darkness,” it does not strike them that Iran’s president would never address Israel’s people that way, let alone wonder why not and what it means.

As noted above, in evaluating any Canadian government policy today, we must beware of the habit Matt Gurney characterized as thinking “the announcement is the plan.” It matters a great deal that our politicians, and much of our chattering classes, do not take seriously the gap between words and deeds and cannot tell an aspiration from a plan, on files across the board from housing to law enforcement, climate, and security. But it also matters that far too many do not seriously believe the world is a dangerous place in which, to survive, we must become far more dangerous than we currently are.

So as I say, we must rearm. From head to toe. And crucially, we must rearm inside our heads before strapping on a helmet can matter.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.