The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Andrew Coyne: the US slides towards dictatorship and Carney clings to Canada's peacemaking past

Episode Date: August 26, 2025

In the past week alone there has been an FBI raid on John Bolton's home and a threat to investigate former New Jersey governor Chris Christie due to his criticism of Trump. Every day there are new indicators to suggest the US is rapidly descending into dictatorship, with the President using the power of his office for his own ends. How can Americans stop this momentum? Andrew and Rudyard then turn to Canada's ongoing trade war with the US. Mark Carney's repeated attempts at being a reasonable interlocutor engaging in good faith negotiations is met with provocation from the US President. Andrew suggests the PM try to manage chaos and stall for time instead of trying to reach a deal. This is a problem that shouldn't be solved; it should be managed. In the final moments of the show Andrew and Rudyard talk about Carney's visit to Ukraine and his offer to send Canadian troops as part of a future security guarantee. Is it time for Canada to accept its defense limitations and its inability to act as the peacemaker it has always aspired to be? Or should we welcome this offer as an opportunity to fulfill our long neglected NATO obligations?Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There's no easy path to a resolution of this. We shouldn't be trying to reach an agreement. We shouldn't be trying to reach a deal. We should be trying to manage chaos. We should be trying to play the string out, stall for time while Trump's approval goes down. The longer you can delay it, the fewer the options he's going to have. Welcome to the Monk Dialogues. Roger Griffiths here, chair of the Muck Debates, joined by Andrew Coyne for the latest in our series of weekly conversations.

Golden Mail columnist, best-selling author, dog owner extraordinaire. Andrew, revealed to the audience, you've told me how many dogs do you have in your house right now? We have three lovely rescue dogs that we are going to find homes for eventually, but we're helping them to adjust to life in North America. They're from Tbilisi, Georgia. Okay. Well, in the next show, you can give out a 1-800 number, and we will get these dogs off your hands, should you wish.

I know they're eating you through house and home, but we appreciate you coming down in the studio today. Lovely boys. I want to start with the news over the last week out of the United States, which is I think gotten everyone's attention. It was the dual raids on John Bolton, a former monk debater, as it would happen, on his office and his home.

And then, I don't know, you might call it a spat, but the president reacting yesterday, Sunday, to Governor Chris Christie, former longtime ally and friend of his, who spoke some fairly banal words on one of the Sunday morning yak shows in the United States. And the president, in a sense, saying it's time for Chris Christie to be investigated related to a bridge. I don't need to go into all these details. But Andrew, is this a bit of a turning point? Are we seeing something here where the law in the United States is being weaponized in a way that is new even for this president?

I wouldn't say it's a turning point, but it's maybe a point of acceleration. The United States is no longer a prospect or a possibility or a chance that it's turning into a dictatorship. It is rapidly descending into that state. Every day brings several new indicators. It's really across the spectrum, whether you're talking about putting armed troops in the street and threatening to do so across the country. so not only in D.C., but in Chicago, in New York, et cetera, in L.A., whether you're talking about freeing all the people, pardoning all the people who committed political violence on the president's

behalf while prosecuting and or firing the people who went after them, who tried to bring them to justice, you look at the lengthening list of the president's personal enemies, people who have attempted to bring them to justice, Whether you're talking about the New York Attorney General, Letitia James, whether you're talking about Jack Smith, the special counsel, who was on the January 6th file, et cetera, whether you're talking about John Bolton. And now, as you say, Chris Christie, those are not, that's not an idle threat. If I were Chris Christie, I'd be listening very carefully. So it is, he is creating all the hallmarks of a dictatorship. Is he there yet? No, but it's, the point is rapidly approaching when you go past the point of no return.

I think people have to really ask themselves the question. now is if you were hoping, first of all, if you were hoping the courts were going to stop them, I think it's clear this government is prepared to ignore the courts and just basically to say how many divisions does the Supreme Court have. If you were hoping that the midterm election at 2026, we're going to stop them, we're seeing increasing signs that they're trying to, they're going to try to fix that election, whether you're talking about the redistricting, whether you're talking about fiddling around with the mail-in votes, et cetera. So whether we're going to have a free and fair election in 26, I think, is in question. So not only the

guardrails being broken down, but so are the sort of, you know, emergency, break glass, these kinds of provisions. So if I were an American, I'm a Canadian, I'm very worried, but if I were an American, I'd be extremely worried about how do we stop this momentum? Because it's very clear where it's heading. I don't think anybody should dilute themselves. Your most recent book, The Crisis of Canadian Democracy, focuses a lot on, you know, the institutions and how we approach those institutions and how we come.

to think about them, to apply that to the United States, what's going on, Andrew? Because you're right, it does seem to follow a disconcerting pattern that we can look back through history, where democracy is kind of shuffled off like a tired old jacket or something. We profess that it's our most important asset. It's our greatest treasure. It is the purpose to which our society is dedicated. Yet again and again through history. I think you're right to connect those dots as you just did to show that in the United States,

this sloughing off seems to be happening right before our eyes. Why? There's a lot of deep roots of this. First of all, there has always been a certain section of the American electorate that is ready to sign up for authoritarianism. Historians will tell you this goes back decades. So that tendency was always there amongst a certain force of the population, particularly centered around questions of race. Add to that, this unique phenomenon of Donald Trump, which no system is built to withstand. He is a singular figure in world history. We've just never dealt with anybody who is so completely devoid of conscience or of, you know,

not bound by any restraint of any kind, just lies thousands of times a day. I mean, not literally thousands of times a day, but, you know, constantly. So that is, presents a particular challenge. Our systems aren't really set up for that. At some level, they, you know, I always come back to the example of Richard Nixon, you know, when the Supreme Court said you got to hand over the tapes, Nixon handed over the tapes. So, you know, that's a function. You've got people around Trump who have come to this position over the last few years who are, you know,

sometimes described as post-liberals, they're post-democrats. They believe in literally feudalism. They believe in literally absolute monarchy. One of these guys was on Tucker Carlson the other day, explaining carefully to a sympathetic interviewer, that, you know, the great thing about Absolute Monarchy was that when the king owned everything, it had a vested interest in the prosperity of the country, which I guess is why Europe, you know, under Absolute Monarchy, festered for decades in its own filth, and it was only when you started getting liberal democracy happening, that you started seeing the economy

take off as well. So there's a very strange crew of people around Trump who've attached themselves in some cases to some of the billionaire class that have arisen in recent decades. Patrick Denina is one, I think. Exactly. These people around Peter Thiel, that's a phenomenon that contributes it, which is the phenomenon of the instant billionaires. To be a billionaire in the past meant you had to spend decades working with other people, motivating large numbers of people, living in the real world because that's what it took to make your money. And it took you a long period of time. Now you've got these people who make a billion dollars because they had an idea for an app. And they come out of that experience thinking they are world geniuses who've rethought democracy. or rethought market economies or what have you. So that's a contributing function. But then as you're seeing, when you add all these things together, you have a very intricate system of checks and balances in the United States. The constitutional architecture, for a long time, was very sound.

And a lot of us used to believe it would keep the crazies from getting into power of the United States. But Trump has managed to pick the lock through his own shamelessness, through the degree to which a large portion of the Republican base had become alienated for American society. institutions, with the help of these billionaires, with their crazy millionaire visions of remaking democracy, it's a pretty potent mixture. And we're seeing that these institutions are only as strong as the people involved in them are. If senators don't exercise their power of advising and consenting, if judges don't apply

the Constitution in any kind of coherent fashion, Congress just does do it to its job, then all the checks and balances aren't worth anything. Yeah. if we think about this ruling that may be coming from the appeals court on whether the president's use of tariffs are in fact legal, whether he is using his duly constituted executive powers or not. I think there's as the very respected U.S. trade court ruled he wasn't. And I think everyone looking at those judgments have thought that there's a very good chance that he'll suffer at the appeals court. and then the Supreme Court, obviously, we'll have to pick this up soon after. Do you think that could be the moment where the rug is pulled,

where this president would get onto a bully box and point to what he sees as his success with tariffs? And there is an argument. Upwards of $300 billion of new revenue will be coming into the Treasury this year. S&P Global, the rating agency, just came out with a report in the last week, in a sense saying that the U.S. debt and deficit picture, well, still not great, looks better as a result of this tariff revenue. We're seeing Scott percent, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, pressuring the court as this, as hearings go on in the appeals case, that the court would be undoing a source of revenue that could plunge the United States into financial catastrophe. whether one believes that or not. We've got some swamp land in Florida that we can say you. But the point, though, Andrew, is that they're setting this up to be existential, that the country simply cannot live without tariffs, the economy will collapse.

And do you see this a garden path being charted out here by the Trump administration as to where they're trying to lead the court? Absolutely. They're trying to take the court hostage, or they're taking the economy hostage and telling the court they have to do what they say or the economy gets it in the head. it's preposterous. Yeah, they've raised some revenues by basically putting enormous taxes on American consumers. The economy will not collapse if they cease doing so to those consumers. It will actually be some benefits to the terms of the economic growth. Yeah, you take a hit to the Treasury. The American Treasury can withstand the loss of these windfall revenues that they hadn't thought of until six months ago. So it's vastly exaggerated, but even to the extent that there's any truth in it, you can't just, in a know, do a crazy economic thing involving completely unconstitutional tax raises and then say, well, you have to ratify it, you know, ex post facto, because otherwise we go to ruin. No, you have to do things constitutionally. And it's on you if there's bad consequences that follow from that.

But you know what's going to happen here, Andrew? He's going to get up with Scott Besant and others and say, we are all that's standing between you, the American people, and another Great Depression. That's right. We've talked before about how the markets can be a discipline on them in terms of tanking when they do really stupid things. They may have a difficulty if the markets celebrate, as I think they would, the removal of these tariffs. It'll be hard, I think, for them at that point to predict rack and ruin to the American electorate. Their true believers will believe it because they believe everything.

They feed them. But whether they could get any kind of critical mass. But anyway, you come back to your original point, depending on where they think the point, think the political ground is firm or soft, they may take, they may decide this is where we take our stand and we basically ignore not just the lower courts, but the Supreme Court at the court would or rule against them, or they may pick an issue to do with immigration. What's interesting is they've been so ham-handed and so over the top and so dictatorial on all of these issues that they are now underwater, so to speak. They are negative approval ratings

on even the issues that Trump were favorable to Trump, on immigration for, going to say. So it would be hard to give up the Republican advantage in immigration, but they have on trade. What's also interesting, we may have talked about this before, is the polling data is showing there's been a surge in support for free trade in the United States since Trump. There's been a surge in support for immigration in the United States since Trump. So people are having a good look at the alternative to these policies that they might have grumbled around about in the past and going, well, if this is the alternative, I don't want that. So, you know, Trump in some ways continues to be a great gift to liberal democracy because he's showing us what the alternative is.

Yeah. Stay on tariffs just for a moment longer and bring Canada into the conversation. We saw late last week Mark Carney remove reciprocal tariffs, the few that were remaining on U.S. goods, ostensibly to acknowledge that the United States were not taxing Kuzma-compliant Canadian goods going into the U.S. market. This was, you know, either a shrewd decision or reversal, depending on. on your perspective that followed on other shrewd decisions or reversals, such as, you know, scrapping the digital services tax. There's some buzz out there about C-11, the online streaming act. In fact, the online news act might similarly be a part of what's in these negotiations. We've seen today, though, Andrew Monday, just 72 hours after the Carney government's move on

reciprocal tariffs, a proclamation by the president that he will be announcing or is, is in instigating an investigation of softwood lumber imports and lumber imports in the United States generally under his, you know, national security, national emergency cause and threatening larger, even more severe tariffs on the Canadian softwood industry that's facing tariffs of 30 odd percent as it happens now. If you're the Carney government, what are you thinking about about this? where each step that you try to take towards being a reasonable interlocular, who is engaging in some kind of process to lead to some kind of conversation that one might hope it's someday and arrives at a, quote, deal, close quote. And instead you're getting, you know, slapped across the face almost on a weekly basis as if your actions don't even matter. Yeah, or even worse than that. Trump is in this mode very much similar to his mentor and inspiration of Vladimir Putin, which is he responds to every concession that you grant him with a greater provocation.

So every time Trump does something, you know, basically looks the other way or gives Russia more time or says we don't need to do this or that because they would upset the Russians, Putin always responds by doing something more outrageous in Ukraine, killing more people. He doesn't stand down when Trump stands down. He gets worse. And so Trump follows the same playbook. Every time you make a concession to him, for him, it's an opportunity to display dominance. This is the difficulty for anybody.

I don't care what party you are or what person you are. Anybody who's in the prime minister's office of Canada, anybody who's a government leader of any country right now, you're not dealing with a rational actor. In most trade negotiations, yeah, there's tit for tat. Yeah, you slap a tariff on your industry. I'll slap a tariff on this industry. But it's with a view to trying to get to something. sort of equilibrium, usually, where we reach, you know, generally we're trying to reach

some equilibrium where it's where we're relatively free trading. Most countries believe in at that extent. They have sensitive sectors politically that they don't want to mess with, et cetera, but they're broadly in favor of free trade and they're broadly in favor of some kind of stable equilibrium. With Trump, it is, and I sincerely and truly believe this, it's about his psychological needs and not about policy. And so, you know, he delights in displaying dominance, in getting a chance to slap people around, as you say. He does it to his own industries. He does it to his own workers and consumers, et cetera,

and he does it to his trading partners. So if I were in the prime minister's office, I think I would be saying to myself and to others, there's no easy path to a resolution of this. We shouldn't be trying to reach an agreement. We shouldn't be trying to reach a deal. We should be trying to manage chaos. We should be trying to play this string out,

stall for time while Trump's approval goes down, The longer you can delay it, the fewer the options he's going to have, particularly if we get into an adverse court judgment. It'll be a moment where it will test his resolve, his nerve, is he willing to go into the land of utter lawlessness over a trade thing? Maybe he is, maybe he isn't. But if he doesn't, then you've won a significant victory in the court case, and you should certainly be trying to buy time until then. So I'm of the camp that says this is not a problem that can be solved. This is a problem that has to be managed. And some issues, that's what it is.

So just to think about this a little more, because I think you're absolutely right, that you're managing chaos. But if he is slowly peeling you like an onion, so you give away the digital sales tax, you give away the reciprocal tariffs, you give up on the online streaming act, the News Act, the Online News Act is at the window, dairy subsidies. Some of these things you and I would probably like to see go away, but regardless, he's peeling you like an onion. Is that a strategy? Or are you better to try to bring this to some kind of crescendo sooner, faster? Because right now, I don't know, from the outside, the prime minister shares very little with us. It seems as if we're kind of shambling along. There isn't really a negotiation going on. There's some acts of contrition and recognition or abuse like today that happen. And there's this Kuzma kind of hanging out there six months,

12 months off, that we seem unwilling to bring up to accelerate, I guess because we're scared of the consequences. Yeah, again, I would push that back as far as I can. Right. But as you push it back, he's forcing you to give up more and more. So when you eventually arrive at Kizma, what if you have nothing left? What if he has stripped the cupboard bear at that point? because you've been forced through 1,001, you know, cuts to give up everything that, in a sense, he wanted.

So you end up where he wants to go because you're being passive as opposed to being assertive. It's a valid question. I'm not sure we're there yet. And maybe we will get there. But I think we've got a lot of things, a lot of cards we can still play in that regard. There's lots of policies we have that are irritants to the Americans. And as you said, I would not weep it to see the end of the Online News Act or the Online Streaming Act or Supply Management or any of these other things. So I take your point.

I'm just not sure what lesson you can draw from it. There's nothing saying you can't put things back on at some point. They could raise tariffs if they choose in the future. Sometimes it pays to mimic your opponent's strategy. Sometimes you can be unpredictable yourself. if you feel the time is right. I think a lot of this is going to depend upon polling data from the states, upon probing particular wheat

points within the United States, the Trump Coalition, are there particular states or particular industries that would scream blue murder if you put a tariff on them? We've tried some of those things in the past. It's got some mixture of results, but it doesn't mean you can't replay the same playbook. I just think, you know, I see nothing wrong. I'm not trying to validate, you know,

maybe there's better choices they could have made. But I don't see anything wrong or inconsistent in saying we're going to put tariffs on at one stage in negotiations and take them off at another stage because that's the thing. It's a game played over months and different strategies might be more apt at different points. I quite liked, not everybody did, but I quite like the prime minister's analogy about how you might, you know, send out the goons in the first period to, quote unquote, send a message and then put your skill players out and have a different strategy in the third period. Again, when you're dealing with somebody as irrational as Trump, I'm not a fan of retaliatory tariffs generally, right? When you're dealing with rational actors, I tend to think the costs imposed on your own people are not worth the strategic gains. If you're dealing with a guy who's all about strutting his stuff and beating his chest and showing how dominant is, a shot across his bow early in the game to try and say, you know, we're willing to take some pain here to send you a message. might well have been worth it.

It might be worth doing it again at some point. So I don't think they foreclosed any options. I just don't know if we've really shown him that we're willing to take any pain. And that's, you know, that may be a fair criticism. Maybe we should have left the tariffs on or come in harder and faster. Because what was announced during the election was, in fact, never really implemented. And then the reciprocal tariffs were much smaller than what was stated in the election. And then they kind of went away.

I think you could make a case. I'm not sure I would make the case, but it's inconceivable that that, that, that, maybe they should have come in harder and faster. And really sending a message that you're willing to endure pain yourself, I think is really important in these kinds of things. If you're enjoying the Monk Debates podcast, come over to our website at triple w monk debates.com. That's MUNK DebateswithanS.com and check out our free monk membership. As a complimentary monk member, you get all kinds of great perks and benefits access to our weekly email, summarizing our best debates,

advance ticketing privileges at our main stage debates, special news information, and offers all courtesy of the monk debates. You can grab your complimentary monk membership again right now at triplew monkdebates.com. Simply look to the top navigation on the website and follow the links. Thanks in advance for joining our community. Before we get to the Ukraine,

it is interesting to look at China, India and Brazil, all of which in it faced significant U.S. tariffs, all of which, and I think, you know, to the credit, I mean, there's many reasons not to like Modi's government in India, but they have said that there are certain things that are important to them and they're not going to concede on those things. And they seem willing to, so far, except that there is a disagreement and that high tariffs on Indian goods will remain in countervailing Indian duties on American products. will be there. And more importantly, America is peeling India off into the Russia-China coalition because India has always been a large purchaser of Russian military equipment. So there's larger geopolitical strategic losses. And you could say the same thing with Brazil. Brazil and China are now doing more trade with each other than ever before. Which is crazy for an American foreign policy standpoint. Yeah. It's a completely loose. But let's stay on foreign policy and wrap up the show on what's

happened in the Ukraine's, particularly Mark Carney's visit there. And maybe you and I'll have a little bit of disagreement on this just for fun. Mark Carney announced just recently that he would, if there are, again, a whole series of hypotheticals, it's a bit like the recognition of a Palestinian state. If there was a peace agreement or a cessation of hostilities or a frozen conflict or some scenario, Canadian boots on the ground could go in as part of a peacekeeping force. A great sentiment, a nice idea. There are 57 peacekeepers, Canadian peacekeepers. is deployed in the world today. And I guess my criticism is that when Canadian leaders do this,

and to be fair, it's not just Mark Carney. Every single leader prior to him has done this. There's a great nostalgia in this country about Pearson, about Canada's the indispensable middle power. There's many of us who I think are living in the past, living decades ago, when we actually had a significant military, when we were in the councils of military and security

within the G7 and NATO. We are no longer. It really doesn't matter. There's very little that we can offer to Ukraine other than money and arms. Do you think that the prime minister made a mistake that he's doing the right thing on NATO spending, but he still is unable politically

to kind of shear himself off from the nostalgia that envelops, especially his party, the liberal party, when it comes to peacekeeping, defense, and security. They're just deeply out of touch with where Canada is and what its actual capacities are. I don't disagree with a lot of that as a general idea. I'm not sure I agree with it as applies to this particular question. First of all, there are so many other steps that are going to have to happen that are very unlikely at this point before we're ever talking about a peace deal or peacekeepers or a security guarantee in Ukraine. So it's all pretty notional at this point.

If we did get to that stage, what people have been talking about is something that's quote-unquote, Article 5-like. Now, we've discussed this before. If you're prepared to have Article 5 like, why aren't you prepared to have Article 5 if you really mean it? But if you do mean it, if the idea is this is going to be a NATO operation, NATO peacekeepers, NATO defense forces, to me, that's not like peacekeepers in Salon or something. That's like NATO in West Germany during the Cold War. And part of the point of this exercise is precisely to put your people in harm's way. That's the trip wire.

That's what shows you mean it. Is you're not prepared, you're not just saying don't cross in there because some other country soldiers will be killed. You're saying if you're if you go on this, you're going to be killing our soldiers and we will be duty bound to come to their defense. So it is making the the willingness of NATO countries and and some Britain and France, as I understand it, have also said they've been prepared to put troops in there. to make it credible, you have to have your own people in harm's way. So I don't oppose the idea at all of having Canadian soldiers. I take your point that we have a vastly depleted military, to be fair to the current government, they are indeed, at least have said they're going to increase recruiting, increased pay of soldiers,

increased spending on defense by vast amounts, which is a huge undertaking in itself, and easy to say you're going to do it. They haven't begun to say how they're going to do it or what they're going to spend it on, but the first step has got to be making the commitment. So, you know, it's hard for me to slam them for having an inadequate military if they're in the process now at long last of rebuilding it. So your point is well taken that we're starting from a very weak place. Your point is absolutely well taken that we have coasted on an undeserved reputation for being

available for peacekeeping when we haven't been. Even if you're a personian peacekeeper, and a lot of people, including me, said we should have been much more about being a robust NATO ally than just showing up for, as blue helmets. But to me, this is, I look at this as fulfilling NATO-type obligations, even if it's not, strictly speaking, Article 5, NATO operation, but it's going to be one in all but name. I would support that.

You know, we have 2,000 trips deployed in Latvia. It's a brigade-level deployment. It's the largest deployment that we're capable of this point. We can only field a brigade. Recently, Canadian soldiers who were part of that mission, we're having to buy their own food and expense the Defense Department because we were unable to provide a commissary for our own troops to feed our own troops. So I guess my point is, Andrew, that I think Canada needs to understand that it does have capacities. It can have a role to play, but it's not, you know, this somewhat kind of macho, again, nostalgic image of boots on the ground.

It's not, we've lost that. It's like sitting on a couch for years eating potatoes and drinking, you know, Coke. Eventually, you can't run a marathon. And we can't run 2K, let alone a marathon. So I guess what I find, you know, again, it's ungenerous because he is a politician and politicians will do politicians' things. But in some ways, Mark Carney's proposition was that he was not a politician, that he would speak to us in a more, you know, some might say technocratic, others might say, kind of honest way about who we are as a people and what we can accomplish together. And I think what happened in Ukraine, maybe no coincidence that this visit happens on the heels of him being

excluded from those meetings at the White House with the European powers earlier in the week. You could say, well, we're not a European power. But ostensibly, if we were a significant power NATO, we would have been at the White House last Monday, I think, to be part of those discussions because there would have been some part of a security guarantee that we could have offered that was meaningful. So I just, to me, it's a disappointment maybe that we once again have a prime minister who understands the power of nostalgia, I think especially amongst his boomer coalition, who love to live in this world that, again, has gone away where Canada once was important, respected,

was a meaningful contributor to the collective security of the West. Again, I agree with all of what you're saying. but I just don't see why that's an argument against doing the right thing here. So, yeah, we've been hypocrites and free riders in the past. You're right to say, how are we going to make this a meaningful contribution? But at this point, it's triage. Okay. So if it requires moving some troops from the Latvian thing, for example, this is the hottest of hot.

Okay, then it's purely symbolic. It's 50 Canadian troops who may get killed in an event they get killed by a Russian artillery shell. we declare war on Russia. Is that what you're saying? Well, what I am saying is that a credible threat for the Russians? On its own, of course not. But I don't know if it's going to be 50 or not. I think the point is for any kind of lasting peace in Ukraine,

there have to be security guarantees. For security guarantees to be credible, they have to involve boots in the ground by somebody. If they have to be boots in the ground by somebody, I think if the alternative is we say, you guys all put your people in harm's way, we'll be back, you know, providing cybersecurity or something in support of it. That, to me, sounds like more like where we've been for the last 30 or 40 years. I think that's realistic.

Showing up, well, I would say putting your troops in harm's way as part of a broader support package, you can call it symbolic. Blood is the currency of these things. It's the willingness to endure casualties that ultimately. makes arguments in the international council. So I can take all your points, but it seems to me the alternative that you're suggesting is we should just stay home. And I don't see how that advances us as a robust NATO partner. So we're caught at the point where we're about to embark on a big military buildup.

Which will take a decade or more. Which will take years. So really nothing that can help this conflict in any meaningful way in any short period. So we can't do enough. So we shouldn't do anything? No, we should do something. Well, we gave $2 billion. That's something.

Okay. Anyway, I can take all your points. I just don't see it as being an argument saying, don't send anybody because that would be hypocritical. Everybody's going to have to contribute something we can contribute in a variety of ways. But if one of the ways that we contribute is that we actually put boots on the ground and share in that risk, you can call it symbolic? It's not symbolic to the people involved.

Well, I agree. And they're poorly equipped. They can't even feed them. Give them. Let me say one of the things. So let's deploy them into a warza. We can't even feed them in Lathia. Well, let me say one other thing just that I hope you'll agree with is our commitment

to defense should not be just the amount that we spend, but spending it better. Part of the reason why our troops are so ill-equipped when we actually do some of things is because we're wasting such vast amounts on procurement. So fixed procurement ought to be part of this whole thing. And I must say, I've been seeing pieces recently singing the praises of the National Shipbuilding Strategy. I'm at a loss to understand how anybody can look at the transfer. rack record of that and say this is the way we want to continue down the down this back. Well, and some have argued that past governments, the Harper government, the Trudeau government

didn't invest in national defense because they had no confidence in the defense department to actually use those investments and to be able to deploy them. I mean, that's how bad it is. Yeah, I mean, that's right. They would appropriate money for them and then the money wouldn't even get spent. But when it is spent, it's been on these boondoggles. Yeah. And I don't absolve the government of that responsibility. That's not just the bureaucrats. That's also the politician's hands in the, in the kitty. Here, here. Well, I appreciate the good spirit that you engaged in our little debate. It's a fun debate to have it.

It's fun to have you in the studio. I'm going to release you to your dogs. Not the dogs of war, the dogs of Tbilisi. And thank you again for coming on Monk Dialogs. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for watching this edition of Monk Dialogs. If you're over on our YouTube channel, join the over 85,000 subscribers who are enjoying Monk debate content on YouTube. We'd love to have you as a member of their group.

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