The Decibel - How Canada fits into the high-stakes NATO summit

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

This week, Prime Minister Mark Carney has been in Europe for a series of meetings that are focused on strengthening ties. On Monday, he was in Brussels, Belgium, to sign a new defence partnership with the European Union. Mr. Carney then went to The Hague, in The Netherlands, to attend the NATO summit. Between the war in Ukraine and U.S. involvement in the conflict between Israel and Iran, a lot is at stake.Kerry Buck was Canada’s ambassador to NATO from 2015 to 2018. She’s on the show to talk about why Mr. Carney is trying to move Canada closer to Europe, how the NATO alliance is dealing with growing threats and what’s at stake for Canada.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

Prime Minister Mark Carney has been working to strengthen Canada's ties with Europe. And as the most European of the non-European countries, Canada looks first to the European Union to build a better world. On Monday, he was in Brussels, in Belgium, to sign a new defense partnership with the European Union. And so today this is a new era of cooperation. Then Carney went to The Hague in the Netherlands. That's where he attended the NATO Summit. NATO is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It's a political and defense partnership

with 32 member states, including Canada, the US, the UK, and most of Europe. The summit wraps up on Wednesday. And there was a lot going on in the background, including the war in Ukraine and America's involvement in the conflict between Israel and Iran. So today, we're talking to Carrie Buck. She was Canada's ambassador to NATO from 2015 to 2018. We spoke on Tuesday morning, Eastern Time.

She'll talk about why Carney is trying to move Canada closer to Europe, how the NATO alliance is dealing with growing threats, and what's at stake for Canada at this summit? I'm Maynika Raman-Wilms and this is The Decibel from the Globe and Mail. Kerry thank you so much for being here. Oh my pleasure. So we're seeing members of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, coming together in The Hague this week. What would you say is at stake for this NATO summit? Well, I think that this particular NATO summit is probably the most fraught and consequential summit since, maybe since NATO was established, but at least since the Cold War. Wow, that's significant then.

And I don't want to be dramatic about it, but the fact is that there's a lot at stake. So NATO relies on the collective defense guarantee, the notion that if one ally is attacked, the other allies will come to their defense, right? And this guarantees contained in Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, it's the center of political gravity of the alliance, it's the center of the alliance's deterrence. It's what sends a message to potential adversaries to stay away. So when President Trump said during his first term, and again during the campaign, that the US wouldn't come to the aid of another ally, or that Russia could do what it wanted, he undercut the scaffolding on which NATO's built.

That's the core. So this NATO summit has to come out with a message of unity and that message of unity is an important signal to potential adversaries, maintains deterrence and if there's a conflict, a rift in that unity, it's like sending a message to potential adversaries while it's open season. And then, you know, there's a risk of NATO

starting to crumble. That's why I said NATO's kind of on a knife edge this summit. But it's not just the summit over the next day and a half. It's what happens afterwards too, right? And I also want to ask you more about Trump. But I think the thing that's on a lot of people's minds, of course, is the situation with the US bombing nuclear sites in Iran that we saw over this past weekend. Does that change things for this NATO summit? Well, NATO doesn't have a role in the region. It doesn't have a role around the

Iran-Israel conflict, so there won't be any decisions from the NATO summit. You know, normally you might get a political consensus statement from a NATO summit about a really big geopolitical crisis like this. Like a statement they all released, they all signed on and agreed to essentially? Yeah, exactly. That would be the normal course of events. But I think that would be very hard to achieve this time around. There are a number of differences among allies, I would guess.

I'm not inside anymore, but I've been watching how countries have positioned themselves. So I think what will happen is that there'll be a discussion about Iran-Israel conflict. I think that a number of leaders will wanna hear directly from President Trump what his rationale was, what his calculus was, and what his evidence basis was for striking Iran's nuclear facilities, what the battle damage assessment is, did

they really take out the three facilities, how do they know, and what the US administration expects will follow. And this will be happening in the backdrop of a ceasefire that is or isn't holding. So it's going to be a kind of fluid discussion with some differences amongst leaders. So what's really important is that how those differences surface at the summit, right? If it's at the table directly among leaders at individual press conferences right after,

or somebody tweets from a plane after the meeting, that can have a difference. Because from what I saw of President Trump at his first two NATO meetings, if he hears rejection from allies at the NATO meeting around his handling of Iran-Israel conflict, the negative impact would reverberate at the summit and possibly at NATO longer term go well beyond the question of Iran. There are broader security questions that NATO allies are going to have to worry about

and they will be worrying about already over the medium term, right? So if a hot war continues, air and missile defense to protect their populations, counterterrorism might become more important again because Iran has used proxies for years to commit terrorist acts and it can be expected that they could continue to do the same. So these are some security concerns that are certainly on their minds as they're meeting here. You did talk about the significance of Trump here and kind of the unpredictable nature of how this is all going to go with him. How much of the conversations at NATO comes down to Trump and his nature? The management, the stage management, the choreography of this particular summit is all and only about Trump.

So it's expected that the meeting will focus almost exclusively on defense spending. That's to respond to a really long standing U.S. complaint, but they're bearing a disproportionate burden of defense spending. So it's not new, but President Trump amplified it, made it more pointy and more fraught right off the bat during his first term, right? This is the defense spending of each country is supposed to put up 2%. Canada has been below that, but Carney has committed us to that this year now. He has.

So on defense spending, what I expect to have happen at the summit is a decision amongst allies to increase that target to 3.5% of GDP and to add 1.5% of not directly defense spend, but defend, how do I call it, enablers. So I'll explain that what that means. So first up the percentage to 3.5 percent and we'll see how long the timeline is for this. My understanding is that the current draft of the agreement at NATO summit is out to 2035. We'll see if that holds, if it survives contact with the leaders at the table. So that'll be an important and difficult shift, I think, for a lot of allies. And then the 1.5% on defense spending is meant to be about things like infrastructure. So currently, if there were an attack on the Eastern Plank of NATO in Europe, it'd be really hard to move American and other allied tanks to the front because the roads are all different sizes and the bridges won't.

So you see that kind of stuff. So infrastructure, but also stuff that's really interesting for Canada around cyber resilience, for instance, how do you harden the protection of your critical infrastructure like energy grids, telephone system banking, what have you, so that a cyber attack from a malign actor abroad, Russia and China does this stuff all the time, that we're more resilient to it and that can fit in the 1.5%. Things like opening up air strips and roads in our Arctic. If they're going to be used as part of our military movement, we could count those in

the 1.5%. Okay. So this increase though from 2% to 5% essentially, I mean that seems like a pretty big jump, even if it does give us kind of a 10-year timeline there. How doable is this for Canada and for other NATO countries as well? I actually think it's quite doable for Canada but not immediately. The 1.5% depending what falls into that basket and it'll be negotiated and monitored pretty carefully so it doesn't

become a grab bag. I think that's really important and I think that we will be able to meet that without great difficulty. On the 3.5% it depends on the timeline to be honest, but what Canada is doing right now is catching up on under investment in defense that we've engaged in for decades and decades because we have relied on the American security guarantee to protect our own sovereignty. And that's a pretty vulnerable place to be in regardless, but particularly with a less predictable American president, it's a very vulnerable place, which is why we have the prime minister announce that he was

going to diversify defense relationships and they've started to do that in that important meeting with the EU yesterday. So it sounds like a consequence of us kind of under investing in our defenses is that we've had to be more reliant on the US. Is that the case then and now we're trying to diversify that? Well, it kind of went hand-in in hand. We were confident and comfortable that we could rely on the U.S. to step up, and so we under invested. We also felt we were protected by our geography.

There aren't as many direct threats coming to us. Even now, they're not direct, direct. There aren't troops amassing at our borders yet. So we felt protected by our geography. But the problem is today's kind of threat vectors, they're things like missiles, cyber attacks, hybrid disinformation attacks, attacks that can come from space, and things that are what we call sub thresholds, so things that don't look like attacks, but certainly are aimed at our sovereignty,

things like China mapping our Arctic sea bed. So geography doesn't protect us from these kinds of threats anymore. So we really do need to get rid of the complacency and start to step up on defense. Okay. But you'd asked about whether this, so it was about Trump and I I said yes, all the choreography and the main menu item on defense spending is about Trump, but it's actually about our

own sovereignty, our own defense. It's something we have to do anyway. Is he forcing us earlier? Yeah, and there's a risk that there'll be security gaps created by the U.S. pulling out too soon of, you know, Europe with their troops, that kind of thing, before Europe can step up fast enough. So there's all sorts of risks, but the commitment to more defense spending is actually a good news story for NATO. And yes, he's driving it sooner than it would have happened politically,

but we needed to do it because of the security environment. We'll be back after this message. Kerry, let's talk more about these security threats that you were referencing a little bit earlier. A few weeks ago, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said that Russia could attack a NATO country within five years. And as you mentioned earlier, NATO has this provision, Article 5, that if one member country is attacked, it's the responsibility of all member countries to come to its defense.

Have we seen examples already of Russian aggression towards NATO member countries that we might need to be worried about? Oh, yeah. And it started happening pre-2014, but it really accelerated in 2014 when Russia entered Crimea. Right. This is the Ukrainian peninsula essentially that it took, yes. Yeah, yeah.

So that's when the Russian war on Ukraine began, and then of course accelerated three years ago very, very much. So at the same time, what we saw was a real multiplication of Russian, call them sub-threshold attacks, directly on NATO allies. So that included assassinations inside NATO territories. And when you say sub-thresholds, so it doesn't meet the threshold for Article 5 to be invoked then? Right.

So just before the G7 summit that Canada hosted. That would have been back in 2018 then in Charlevoix, Quebec. Right. Theresa May was coming to that summit and she had just experienced a Russian assassination inside the UK using poisoning. And she comes to the G7 summit hosted by Canada and Trump says well Russia should be let back into the G7. So you see there's a difference of opinion that is really really hard to manage. Those are the Novichok attacks essentially. Yeah exactly. Yeah that happened in the UK okay. Yeah but there's other things so there are attacks on maritime cables, communication cables right And some of those have been traced back to Russia. Some of them might have been traced back to unflagged vessels of Chinese origin,

etc., etc. Cyber attacks, disinformation attacks, trying to increase polarization inside allies, citizenry. And the list goes on. And why is this concerning? Like with these subthreshold attacks, why do we need to be worried about that? Putin's been very clear that one of his projects is to undercut NATO. Foreign Minister Lavrov has said it publicly, Putin has said it publicly, which is a funny turn of events. I mean, there's a lot of commentary in the West saying that, you know, Putin's doing all this stuff in Ukraine because NATO expanded. Well, back in 2000, Putin did an

interview on BBC where he said, I would never see Europe as an enemy of Russia, and I would even consider having Russia join NATO. His anti-NATO rhetoric started to increase around 2008, just around the time he started investing more in the Russian military. And around the same time when he started using much more nationalist rhetoric inside Russia, I think it was to shore up his own power. So he's painted NATO as an enemy for his own political internal purposes, and it's quite useful to him, but it's also quite tempting to him if NATO shows vulnerability to continue with these kinds of subthreshold attacks. And the fact is that they do cause damage.

Foreign interference in our elections cause damage. Estonia was subject a number of years ago to a full-on Russian attack on their critical infrastructure and they had to shut down their banks, their central banking agency, all their government websites and the list went on could have been, well it was really damaging in the short term. Estonia came out of every building but it causes damage even if it doesn't amount to an Article 5 armed attack. It still causes damage to our politics, to our security, and to our economies across the Alliance.

Okay. Let me ask you more directly about Canada. We talked a little bit about Canada's situation earlier, but this week on Monday we saw Canada sign a security and defense agreement with Europe at a meeting in Brussels. Why is this important, Kerry, for Canada to be kind of more connected in this way to Europe now? Kerry O'Hare, Chief Executive Officer, US-U.S. Security Council Well, two things.

We have to diversify our defense relationships. Prime Minister Carney said that 70 or 75 percent of every military procurement dollars spent in the U.S. That makes us vulnerable economically, but potentially also on the security front. So important to diversify and European allies make absolute sense for us to be the primary port of call for us to diversify our defense relationships. A lot of them are in NATO alongside us. We can do more with Europeans in a way that complements NATO and doesn't undercut it. And that was very clear in the communique

that came out of Prime Minister Carney's meeting with the EU. And they are really ramping up their defense spending. So it'll be an important market for the Canadian defense industry as well. A lot of work to be done to get our industry into that market, a lot of work to be done to figure out exactly where we deepen our cooperation with the EU. But it's really important.

But the meeting with Europe yesterday went beyond that. It was very interesting. The documents that came out of it went through the whole kind of tour around the world of geographic and thematic issues of security concern, Middle East, Iran, women, peace and security, space, counter-terrorism, cyber, you name it. Normally a NATO summit would do all that, but this time around, because they don't want to increase

the risk of a conflict or undercutting NATO policy positions, NATO's not gonna issue that kind of communicate from the summit. But Canada EU did yesterday. So in a way, it's saying here are the countries with whom we share values. And we will deepen that relationship and use it to strengthen NATO.

And then over at the NATO summit, we won't even put those questions on the table because we don't want to undercut NATO unity and create a rift. And we don't want to backtrack on important NATO policy positions like condemning Russia and supporting Ukraine. This is really interesting and important that we're kind of seeing this workaround in a way. If they know they can't get these things through at the NATO summit, they're doing it at the Canada-EU meeting instead.

Is this again because of Trump and the lack of unity they would have with him there? Yes. The worst thing for NATO would be to have a public rift and to ask questions and get the wrong answer and backtrack on NATO policy positions. So the questions aren't being asked. There'll be a one page communique if that from the summit. The best outcome at the NATO summit would be a communique that commits to increased defense spending at a standard that satisfies the U.S., that also recommits the entire alliance to the mutual defense guarantee in Article 5, and then, and this would be icing on the cake, but perhaps the risk is too great, say something about continued support to Ukraine

and say something about Russia. The word aggression wouldn't be used, I'm sure. They wouldn't agree on that. But something condemning Russia. That would be like the biggest, best gift coming out of this NATO summit. And I contrast that with the NATO summits I negotiated in the past, and there we'd have like 29 page documents covering all of the work that NATO's meant to be doing.

That work will still go on, but it won't be discussed at the leaders level. Wow. Okay. Carrie, we've talked a lot about increasing spending. So increasing our defense spending to 2% of GDP this year, eventually up to 5%. We've also talked about these new partnerships with Europe. This is going to cost a lot of money for Canada. Will the Canadian public see value in this kind of spending? Well, you know, I've been tracking polls and Canadians are starting to understand that the world is less secure for us.

We can't count on geography. It's not just about the US, but it is a lot about the US. And those polls have been showing a rise in Canadians' willingness to maintain or increase defense spending for quite a while now, surprisingly. I thought there'd be a real wake-up call for Canadians when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but not as much as I expected.

I think we have, in a way, President Trump to thank more than President Putin for Canadians' wake-up call, that we really do need to take control of our own sovereignty, and that has to include increased defense spending. I'd argue increased diplomacy, too, understanding that, you know, Canada needs to engage in the world more. For decades, we've seen our relationship with the U.S. is absolutely existential and the other stuff is kind of optional. And so we've funded things accordingly.

I think it's time to reinvest in defense and diplomacy because we really do need to diversify and understand that aligning our foreign policy, our international policy, our defense policy with the U.S. is not always in our interest and will become decreasingly so. Kari, just last minute here before I let you go. Earlier in the conversation you mentioned how we can measure how this summit went by seeing what happens after the NATO summit as well. What will you be looking for? Well, there are a few things that are going to happen after. First on European security, the US is undertaking a review of its military, global military posture, including its forces

and assets in Europe. And as early as the fall, this might come out. And if the US decides to pull back from Europe too quickly or too deeply, Europe isn't ready now and won't be for between five and 10 years to engage in any kind of sustained defense of the European theater. So that would cause a security gap inside NATO that would be quite worrisome and would undercut deterrents. So I'm going to be watching for where the US military review goes and see what their timing is, etc. Then on the Canadian front, I'm going to be watching very carefully for

efforts to speed up our procurements so we can actually get the money we've committed to out the door. But I think more importantly, start to take almost like a whole of Canada approach to beefing up our security and defense that would have to include significant defense investments, but also security investments to make us more resilient against things like foreign interference, cyber attacks. The list goes on. So we need to step up.

I hear good messages from the government about the need to step up. I don't think we should underestimate how difficult it's going to be to turn the Canadian kind of machinery of state around to deliver on this. Kerry, fascinating to hear your insights here. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here. Thanks very much. I appreciate that. That was Kerry Buck, Canada's former ambassador to NATO. That's it for today. I'm Maynica Ramon Wilms. Our producers are Madeleine White, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adri Adrian Chung is our senior producer and Matt

Fraynor is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you tomorrow.