Sometimes a punchline arrives a few weeks after the joke.
A little less than three weeks ago, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney made the globalist media swoon by standing on a stage in Davos and declaring the sudden new limits of American power. For years, Carney said, American hegemony was a stabilizing force in the world, so other countries tolerated America’s many failures to live up to its declared ideals — in Carney’s words, “the gaps between rhetoric and reality.”
But no more. In the age of a certain bad orange man, America has lost the trust of its erstwhile allies. “This bargain no longer works,” Carney announced. “Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” The time to end Canada’s reliance on American power has arrived, as an urgent strategic challenge that can’t be avoided. The world order has ruptured, and America’s out.
Pivoting away from America, Carney declared the coming emergence of a new security alliance, a coalition of “middle powers,” that would challenge an arrogant hegemon. Canada, the prime minister warned, had decided to “fundamentally shift our strategic posture,” aggressively changing policy “to build our strength at home.”
Idiots celebrated. Professional dullard David French declared in the pages of The New York Times that Carney had “marked out a path of allied integration and cooperation that could create, in essence, a new great power rival to the United States.” American power in the world used to matter, until it was killed in a single year by Donald Trump being boorish, after which Canada came up with a replacement.
So a notice published in the Federal Register on February 9 is at least a little funny. A formal Arms Sale Notification prepared by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency announces the proposed transfer of $2.68 billion in American weapons and other military equipment to Canada, that bold new rival to American power. Along with thousands of bombs and JDAM guidance sets, the proposed deal with Canada would provide “classified and unclassified software and software support; classified and unclassified publications and technical documentation; United States (U.S.) Government and contractor technical, engineering, and logistics personnel services; and other related elements of logistics and program support.”
Canada’s brave new challenge to American military power requires American tech support. American military contractors will send bombs and guidance systems, with engineering and logistical assistance, to the leading nation in Mark Carney’s new anti-American coalition of middle powers. Not that it matters: “The proposed sale of this equipment and support will not alter the basic military balance in the region,” the announcement declares. Someone tell David French. Gently, I mean.
A similar announcement from a week earlier describes the proposed sale of another $1.75 billion in American weapons to Canada, starting with “Twenty-six (26) M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS).”
Both proposed deals were being negotiated well before Carney arrived in Davos, which means that the Canadian prime minister gave a tub-thumping speech about building strength to challenge arrogant American power while knowing that he needed to use American weapons and ongoing technical support to do it.
