The Paul Wells Show - NATO's James Appathurai on sabotage and zombie viruses

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

Toronto-born James Appathurai is one of the top civilians in the administration of NATO, the Western military alliance. As Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Innovation, Hybrid, and Cyber, he helps the alliance respond to a terrifying range of emerging threats, from new weapons to attacks that can hardly even be detected. In a rare interview from NATO headquarters in Brussels, Appathurai tells Paul Wells about all these threats, and about Canada's fast-changing role in NATO.For more from Paul Wells, read paulwells.substack.com

This week, James Apatherai, a guy from Toronto at NATO headquarters in Brussels. Sabotage, disinformation, political interference, cable cuts. I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to the Paul Wells Show. I put this podcast on hiatus a year ago. It's a long story. I've put out the occasional episode since then, randomly when I had something I thought you should hear, but I've been concentrating on writing,

which, incidentally you can always find at Paul Wells.substack. Go check that out if you haven't. But while my writing and my podcast audiences overlap, the podcast audience has always been a little different from my readers. I missed that audience, and you let me know that you missed me too. So over the summer, I started figuring out a way to bring this podcast back. Writing is easy. Podcasting's hard. I need help, which means I needed money.

I am grateful to my presenting sponsors, Camaco, and the transition accelerator. I'll tell you more about both of them a little later. They get what I'm trying to do here. They're happy to let me make all the journalistic decisions. And so away we go. What am I trying to do here? I just think there's less room than there should be in our jumbled lives

for serious, honest conversation about the things that matter. So around here, we're going to try to make room for that kind of conversation every week. My focus is on leaders, thinkers, and creators who are grappling with today's big questions. Can we get along? Can we build good things? Can we prosper and be fair and honor the people who are trying to help? Will Canada be okay?

Will anything? I live in Ottawa. I've never stopped being impressed by most of the people who do politics here. So politics is always at the heart of what I do. But you won't hear a lot about strategy or political parties here. Party work is honorable work. Party loyalty is not cheap or laughable. It's just that you can find lots of people talking about that stuff somewhere else. This show is about the bigger picture, I hope.

Paul Well's show is presented by Camaco, a nuclear energy company proudly operating in Saskatchewan and Ontario for nearly four decades. Energy security, national security, and climate security are driving increased demand for safe, carbon-free nuclear energy. With Tier 1 uranium assets, critical fuel manufacturing capabilities, and best-in-class reactor technologies like the AP-1000 reactor, Camico plays a large role across the nuclear value chain to deliver power to the grid. Camico is thriving as a global leader and Canadian nuclear champion. It's meeting the moment for nuclear new builds at home and around the world. From ground to grid, Camico is powering Canada forward. While Welsho was presented by the Transition Accelerator, the energy transition is disrupting global power,

and Canada needs to act now to secure its place in the emerging clean economy. With its rigorous independent analysis and uniquely strategic approach, the Transition Accelerator is putting Canada on a path to win, economically and geopolitically. Visit Transitionacceler.cairator.ca.a to learn more. Okay, on to my first guest for Season 4. James Apathorai is, wait for it, the Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Innovation, Hybrid and Cyber at NATO, the Western Military Alliance. That means that he's in charge of all the ways war and conflict are changing, and boy, are they

changing. There's two things that are useful for you to know about James. First, he's from Toronto, U of T-Grad. So while he works for everybody in all of the NATO countries, he happens to be the most senior Canadian in NATO's civilian administration. And second, he's been working in Brussels for 27 years. He was NATO's official spokesperson in the early years of the Afghanistan War. He's seen a lot. And he was eager to come on this show and talk to Canadians about it. Here's my conversation with James O'Pathorai. Thanks for joining me.

It's a real pleasure. I am really looking forward to this discussion. I can't tell you how rarely I do one of these recording sessions wearing a tie, but I knew that you would be looking dapper. So I thought I would. I dressed up for you. If I'd known, we could have both been more relaxed. Now, I've known you for many years, going back at least to Afghanistan, but a lot of my readers are not going to know you at all.

You are NATO's Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Innovation, Hybrid and Cyber. And you've been doing NATO for almost as long as I've been doing this. I guess let's start with how you began at NATO. And then we'll skip many years in between. And then we'll talk about what you're doing now. But go. So, I mean, I studied political science and history, came out of university and spent a year and a half at C.

CBC as a real junior journalist, and I was bad at it, and they knew I was bad at it, so it wasn't going to last very long. And then happily was accepted into the Defense Department, so I spent five years there in a great program that takes you from one job to the other, did some UN peacekeeping, worked on cabinet things, went over to the foreign ministry, went over to what was called CETA at the time, to do development stuff, just briefly. So I had a really good tour of public service in Canada. And then a speech writing job came open at NATO to be speechwriter for the Secretary General, which I was accepted for. And then went from there to spokesman of NATO and then Deputy Assistant Secretary General, as you described. Now, 1998, which is the year that you joined NATO, was a – was a – an action-packed time for the alliance because it was preparing for its first big expansion. The invitation had gone out to Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary.

And I assume that that was part of the reason that you were part of the staff intake at that time. I don't know that that was necessarily connected because, you know, Canada was a longstanding member. But I do remember it very clearly because, you know, it was, first of all, very emotional. I was at the flag-raising ceremony when their flags went up. And I really felt like as a young staff or like, oh, something big is happening here. Because it changed the character of NATO, changed the security parameters for the organization. Also, it changed things, or it started to change the way the Russians looked at European security and at us.

because the countries that were joining NATO were trying to lock in the security and the independence that they had pretty recently gained from the Russians and for a lot of people in Russia, they didn't like that. And I think we can see from President Putin, he was one of those people. And I was in the Munich Security Conference.

You might have been there to Paul in 2007 when Putin gave this famous speech about, in essence, the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Union. A view not shared by the countries that have joined NATO, who were beating on our door to get the security that NATO has continued to provide to them. And just to jump to today, when they look at Ukraine, they're all crossing themselves and thanking themselves that they made it into NATO before the door got harder to get through.

This gets into what should theoretically be ancient history, which is a debate in the late 1990s about what NATO was for. But it has ended up being pretty much a straight line from that debate to the current conflict in Ukraine and a bunch of other conflicts. But it's an eternal question, isn't it? Why do the leading Western democracies have an alliance? Why did they keep it up? And the answer to that has changed over time.

It hasn't. It hasn't. So, I mean, you're right. It's gone up and down. And the sort of surface explanation for what NATO is supposed to do has changed a lot. And you mentioned Afghanistan and we've both been part of that whole effort. But, you know, there's this famous line from the first NATO Secretary General that NATO was about keeping the Americans in, meaning into your. European security, the Russians out, meaning out of our borders, and the Germans down, by which

he meant integrating this big country of Germany into a cooperative security structure so that the countries of Europe could feel comfortable with each one of them getting stronger because they're getting stronger together rather than worrying about your neighbor as they get stronger. That logic hasn't changed at all, and I'll put it another way. The history of Europe is war. It's nonstop war for 500 years. But the lesson of the 20th century has been that the geopolitical military and political presence of the United States in Europe has been essential for keeping this continent stable. In essence, NATO is an insurance policy to stabilize the countries that are in it and as a pillar of international security. And just

close on that thought. Unfortunately, the history of Europe is also Russian expansionism. So basically, for the last 500 years, Russia has been expanding for about 100 to 200 square kilometers every year on average from 1550 to now. Russia is an expansionistic country. And we're seeing it again. And blocking that in the 20th century and now the 21st century has been part of what NATO is all about. So keeping the Americans in, the Russians out and Germany down, these days were kind of one for three. The Germans are not currently a major subject to preoccupation, but it's, it's, we bumped into each other in Ankara at the most recent NATO summit. And there's constant questions about how in the Americans are and keeping the Russians out, well, we've done very well

keeping them out of NATO, although not spotless. But that fundamental definitional mission of NATO is still a challenge today. Yeah, and it was never going to be easy. But, you know, I'm maybe less concerned than others. Why? So first, keeping the Russians out, I think the proof that NATO deterrence works can be found in a little town on the Polish board. with Ukraine called Sheshov. You might have been there. Many journalists have been there. It's the place

through which much of the international military support to Ukraine funnels. And it's very visible. It's a gigantic armory with a train station attached to it. And it's right on the border. The Russians don't touch it. And they don't touch it because they don't want a force-on-force fight with NATO because they know they'll lose it. So the proof of NATO deterrence sits right there. But you're quite right. It's been a little bit spotty because the Russians are trying to push subthreshold. So people have read about this armed drone in Leipzig. There's all kinds of cable cuts and cyber attacks and disinformation and they're trying everything to worm their way in sort of beyond the military vulnerabilities to try to find other.

vulnerabilities in our system. And I can't say that they're not having some success. They are having some success. But it is a very low level of threat compared to what we could see. And if you want to know what we could see, look at Ukraine. And that's what it could be. So deterrence is still holding not all levels of deterrence at the lowest level. We're still working on deterring them. And we're doing that quite actively. But it's still working pretty well. In terms of the Americans being in, you know, we work on this every day. But the reality is there are still tens of thousands of American troops in Europe. There is an American four-star very actively preparing for the defense of Europe with clear plans,

with forces ready to move that are exercise, that are integrated. They're all there. They're all ready to go. The nuclear commitment of the United States to defend its European allies has never been questioned, not by the president and not by anybody else. So, you know, all those fundamentals are there. Then we get to the question of what comes next. And the bottom line is the United States wants Europe to be able to take care of more of its own defense.

Europe reluctantly recognizes that it needs to do that and it has the money to do it. So we're just in this transition period, which is sometimes not that easy to go through, creates a lot of friction. But the general direction of travel is what I'm trying to say, is one on which both sides of the Atlantic agree. It's just how we get there. And in what period of time we get there, that's a little bit uncomfortable sometimes.

And that's where we are right now in a period of some discomfort. Now, let's get to your current assignment, which you've been in since 2022. A fascinating bunch of mandates. Why don't you run through the, kind of briefly. Like, what's the elevator pitch for James of Path ride these days?

Yeah, I mean, I sometimes call it the island of misfit toys, which Canadians would understand. But, you know, in essence, I'd say we have kind of four main portfolios, one of which stands out a little bit from the others. It's the Rudolph.

One is cyber, meaning cybersecurity, how to protect the allies against cyber threats, including now against these advanced AI, models, this frontier AI models, but also how to go on offense on cyber to be more proactive in our defense. Second is what we call digital transformation. And there are kind of two or three main aspects to this. One is the front war fighting is digitized. Everything is connected. Even individual old shells are now getting connected. But every drone,

every military vehicle, the satellites, planes, everything. So it's great that at the last summit where you and I met in Ankara, that allies took big decisions on big purchases of equipment, including legacy equipment. None of that's going to work unless it's connected by a network. And so part of my job is to make that happen. But second is to move on AI. So I do strategy and policy for the alliance on artificial intelligence, data. meaning how do we get it, how do we use it, how do we defend against it?

Pretty complicated. And advanced technologies like quantum. And I don't want to geek out and bore people with quantum. We can talk about it more if you want. It has real strategic implications and it's moving out of the lab into operational applications. So it's actually I find very interesting. And then sort of the final bit is hybrid, what you and I have been briefly discussing. So that's the sort of odd man out.

My job here and the job of my colleagues is to help the alliance defend better against the sub-threshold attacks that we've been discussing, sabotage, disinformation, political interference, cable cuts, cyber attacks. And to do that in two ways. One is to try to blunt, deter, what Russia is doing now to shape the battlefield for if they want to escalate. So to make them less effective at this stage, so they're less inclined to go further. And secondly, it's to build up all the resilience we need, in particular for our critical

infrastructure against cyber attacks, physical attacks, etc. So deter, defend is our role on hybrid as well. You took the gig in 2022. Did you have a sense of what an astonishing growth industry you were getting into? I mean, at the time, yeah, you must have felt or seemed like sort of the odd job, man. But now it's central to everything that we talk about when we talk about security. So, you know, I'll be really open with you. I have sometimes been a little bit frustrated because,

I feel as if all these issues, and in particular the cyber and digital and AI and quantum issues, are so important that they need to be much more central to the thinking of political leaders and industry leaders. But my frustration has come from the fact that they're very complicated things to talk about. you quickly get into technical issues, which are of strategic importance, but are hard to understand. And as a result, political leaders just don't have the time with all the goodwill in the world. And even when they recognize that it's important to understand them, because it takes ages to get it. So I actually sometimes feel as if, for example, coming back to Ankara, you know, that buying more stuff that you

can stockpile gets a lot of political attention and money. But making it work with a cloud, with an architecture of networks, with common data exchange, that stuff's hard to get, and therefore it doesn't get the resourcing or political attention. It deserves until now. Now everybody gets it, and it is moving quickly up to political agenda. And then, of course, we come to hybrid. And it has escalated quickly. Everybody recognizes now that the Russian risk appetite has grown. And I think there are a couple of reasons. One is they're not achieving what they want on the battlefield in Ukraine as quickly as they want, and they want to broaden the battle space, undermine support for Ukraine, and shape for a potential escalation against NATO,

directly from the Russians. And I think you will have seen some of the warnings from our intelligence chiefs, from our political leaders that actually they're kind of worried that the Russians are now going to try something small with regard to NATO, but that means they have to prepare the ground through hybrid. So everybody is seeing that now. The Leipzig drone armed with military-grade explosives has really focused minds here. And as a result, I think, you know, also made my working day a little bit more complicated, but I'm gratified to see that cyber, digital, AI, and hybrid are now right at the top of the political agenda

after all these years. I mean, I've spent more time in NATO countries in central and Eastern Europe than a lot of my listeners have. But even I have had a hard time, I think I'm getting there, but wrapping my head around what hybrid entails. I mean, it's basically, using technology to sap the unity and the will to fight and the coherence of an antagonistic power. So it's getting Canadians fighting one among themselves or it's getting Americans to argue about stuff that has nothing to do with the work they should be involved in.

That's, are just sawing confusion too. I mean, is that a good way to sum it up? I'm sure you've got a better way. Well, no, I don't necessarily have a better way because everybody debates the term. and the Secretary General Herbert doesn't like the term hybrid, precisely for the reasons that we're now exploring, which is it's not clear, people don't really get it, what's in, what's out. The way I kind of look at it is, and maybe this is a bit geeky,

but if you look at Russian strategic doctrine, its purpose is for political victory. It's not for military victory. It's political victory. And that by using all the instruments of state power, that matches information and it's cyber and it's destabilizing activities by intelligence personnel. It's recruiting, you know, lonely boys in their basements through telegram, sometimes over video game chats to carry out sabotage. It's sabotage.

It's threats. And it's got multiple aims. So the ones that we focus on are undermining support for Ukraine and preparing and shaping the battle space, potential battle space, or escalation. So that's sort of our priorities. But you're absolutely right that the bigger game from the Kremlin is to see NATO paralyzed or dissolved. And the best way to do that is to create fear, is to interfere in the political system. and it's to be able to, you know, sow disinformation, make people confused. There's an amazing book by Peter Pomerantsev called Nothing is True and Everything is Possible,

which is an old Soviet expression, which people used to say they had no idea what was true anymore. They were constantly told multiple narratives. And in the end, they just gave up and said, you know, I have no clue what could be true. Anything's possible. It doesn't mean. matter and I'm going to tune out. And I think very openly, very clearly, that's a Russian tactic as well. When they shot down this airliner, you might remember, they didn't put out one narrative from the Kremlin saying, we didn't do it. They put out 33 narratives, we counted, all within a few days so that you just got sand in your eyes and you gave up. So it's sort of symbolic of what the overall hybrid effort is, and you described it very well.

While Wells Show is presented by Camico, a nuclear energy company proudly operating in Saskatchewan and Ontario for nearly four decades, energy security, national security, and climate security are driving increased demand for safe, carbon-free nuclear energy. With Tier 1 uranium assets, critical fuel manufacturing capabilities, and best-in-class reactor technologies like the AP 1000 reactor, Camico plays a large role across the nuclear value chain to deliver power to the grid. Camico is thriving as a global leader and Canadian nuclear champion. It's meeting the moment for nuclear new builds at home and around the world. From ground to grid, Camico is powering Canada forward. Is Canada the object of offensive hybrid action today?

Yes, there's no doubt. And that's certainly not only only from Russia. China is a particular offensive, if you want to use that word, cyber actor. And there are programs pretty well known, vault typhoons, salt typhoon, a whole bunch of typhoons. And they are aimed to do two things. One is espionage, implanting malware for espionage. But second, to be able to introduce grit into the system, to make things stop working. And I'll give you an example, not a Canadian example. I was in a port here in Belgium, supposedly having lunch with the CEO

who didn't talk to me the entire time and was just on the phone. And the reason he was on the phone, he explained to me afterwards, was there were Chinese, as we call them, threat actors, but it's cyber attackers, attacking a port here, that big one, that we use to transport or to receive

American and Canadian warships. And there was a NATO ship, going through the port. And these Chinese cyber attackers were trying to lock the locks, drain the water, and drop the ship in the port, which would wreck the port

and wrecked the ship. And the point the CEO made to me after the three days of them trying to fight this off successfully, was imagine this everywhere all at once in the event of hostilities, every airfield, every port, you know, your traffic systems,

your data centers, it's all going to be under attack, and there's a lot of malware in it. And I've talked about China, but Russia does it as well. A lot of the ransomware is actually cover for implanting malware in industrial control systems. And if you look at the colonial pipeline system hack from a couple of years ago on the east coast of the United States, which shut down fuel supplies, it's another good example of the kinds of cyber risks that there are right now. Any sort of undergraduate definition of warfare that I can recall, these are acts of war. Is there a question about at what level to respond? Like how hard to hit back? Yeah. And we talk about it all the time. I mean, I guess there's kind of two answers to

that. One is everybody should be comfortable that the hitting back is taking place in various ways. And that includes things that you can see. For example, a mass expulsion of 100 plus so-called Russian diplomats who were conducting espionage activities in our countries out. Big sanctions on the Russians. Pressure on the shadow fleet. We moved troops up into the Baltic Sea or military capabilities up into the Baltic Sea to help protect our undersea infrastructure, but which also, of course, is a posture shift, which they don't like. So we don't answer necessarily like for like. We want to put pressure on Russian pressure points to encourage them to cut it out.

Second part of the answer is, is it an act of war? So our policy here is that allies can, if they wish, come together and a hybrid attack or a set of hybrid attacks if they reach a certain threshold, can trigger article 5, which is our collective defense agreement. But it's up to allies to determine what that is, and it's a political judgment. And I say that not as a cop-out, but because it's important that it is political so that we don't box ourselves in. If on September 10th, 2001, and I was in this headquarters when 9-11 happened, if we had the day before tried to define what the threshold was. There is no way there would have been consensus

that terrorist flying planes into these buildings would have triggered Article 5. But if we had achieved consensus, that wouldn't have been in, and then it would have been harder to declare Article 5 in that eventuality. So we really believe it needs to be a decision taken at the time

based on what happened. So can it trigger Article 5? Yes, that's policy. the exact threshold is, we leave to the political decision of the moment. The question that comes to mind is, is NATO doing exactly the same thing in Russia, in China, trying to accept neighbor against neighbor, trying to confuse people? So I would say NATO is definitely not doing that under no circumstances. That's a matter of policy.

We do not do it. We want to be in line with international law, but also international. norms. And we do that not to be naive or innocent. And it's not that we don't have the capability as allies to do a lot, which the Russians do and which the Chinese do. But norms matter. And until, you know, push comes to absolute shove, it is really important that there is a group of law-abiding countries, including when it comes to cyberspace, so that these norms are preserved because it's not just us in the world also, it's others. And there will become a time when we are moving back towards international cooperation.

And we want to have these norms there. That being said, no one should doubt that we can do what we need to do. I wish NATO had been whoever cyber attacked all the high-end Porsches in Russia and made them stop working a little while ago. I thought that was a little bit funny. But we didn't do it and we're not going to do it. Talk about September 11, 2001. I mean, I spent a little bit of time at NATO headquarters, including in the new one.

It's got to be just endless routine punctuated by nightmares. There's got to be, like, you've had a few days in your career when almost absolutely the worst thing you could imagine happened. And my hunch is that you're aware of a few cases where we narrowly averted other situations. Sure. Must be a hell of a place to work. I mean, I think, and I really am not just saying this to you, I've said it to people around the headquarters. You do need to have a certain kind of positive spirit and robust constitution to work for a long time in this place,

because you get an enormous amount of information about what highly capable individuals, groups, or countries are doing to threaten you. So last night I had a dinner with nuclear policy and deterrence experts. These are people deep into the nuclear weapons world. Within 10 minutes of the dinner starting, they were discussing or using the word obliteration about us, not about others, just to make that point. And then it kind of went from there. And you know, you do see all of this.

And that just doesn't include traditional military issues, but also biochemical issues, the weaponization of artificial intelligence to make new biological or chemical weapons, which is a very realistic risk now as these frontier models come out, or even some weird stuff. So I called in some environmental experts to see how climate change was affecting not just us and the Arctic, but Russia and China. What are the implications for them? So this expert said, you know, the permafrost is melting in Russia and cities are starting to sink.

It's like, oh, yeah. And she said, and is releasing anthrax? I said, yeah, I knew that. And she said, yeah, and it's also releasing, and I didn't know what was coming next, zombie viruses. So zombie viruses come from the corpses of animals that had been frozen in the permafrost for two or three thousand years.

but are now for the first time surfacing and are inhabited by viruses against which we have no immunities because they've been frozen there. But now they're coming out. Our systems are naive and yeah. Hey, that's fun. Yeah.

Yeah, it's fun. I sometimes do a little side hustle with some Hollywood script writers and producers and one of them works on a show which you all know, which has, you know, pretty grim scenarios. And even that guy the next day after I spoke to him, wrote and said, wrote to me and said he couldn't sleep. And he was like buying water and food for his basement.

I was like, hey, calm down. You know, it's okay. But as you say, it can be a place which can get to you if you don't have a certain, you know, constitution. Let's talk a little bit more directly about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. First of all, I hear all the time from my readers, from people here, that NATO caused it, by expanding too aggressively, by swallowing up all these countries between Brussels and Moscow, that sort of the John Mearsheimer thesis.

And I always ask what, you know, what's your response to that? Because as the arsenal of democracies, NATO is in a kind of an ambiguous place. It's the, it's where the democracies get together to plan war. And now here we are having a war. and the boundary of NATO had been moving east, the boundary of Russia hadn't been moving west. Anyway, you've heard the arguments. What do you say to those? So I hear it too, obviously. And I guess my answer is, I don't want to make a long answer. I'd say two things. First of all, you know, when I was in school, I went to U.S.

and University of Toronto. And when I was there, I was taught in my political science classes that to understand Russia, Russia is an enigma wrapped in a puzzle, wrapped in a riddle. But my experience, and now is pretty long as a diplomat

and someone who actually spent a long time negotiating directly with the Russians, is the opposite. They say exactly what they mean. And they say it over and over again. and then we don't believe it, and then they do it, and then they say, but we told you. In this case, it has been a longstanding Russian grievance that they can't control, they want to control their near abroad.

They're a great power, and they should have control over their neighbors. And that's what they did over the last century and centuries, in fact. So my first answer is believe them when they say, when they call the Baltics the temporarily lost lands, when they say Ukraine is not a real country, that it is Russian territory, they have the right to dominate it. They are and have demonstrated to be an expansionistic empire, and they want their empire back. And they don't hide it. So you should just learn to listen to what they say. The second point I would make is look at 2014. Russia invaded Crimea and took it at a time when Ukraine was militarily neutral. This was a non-aligned country with no aspirations to join NATO. They were trying to move closer to the European Union, not a military bloc.

And Russia took the peace and then made it quite clear. clear that they were intending to go further. Third and final point I would make, to all your readers, just talk to anybody who lives or lived in one of the countries that has joined NATO. And it's a little bit where we started. NATO did not expand. NATO has been accepting countries that have desperately tried to get behind the wall of security that we provide. And they had to meet the standards to do it. because they were afraid that once Russia wasn't weak anymore following the collapse of the Soviet Union, that it would restart what it had done to them,

what it had done to other countries before, and that's exactly what happened. They hurried in and they did it consciously because they knew that if they were still outside the NATO wall of security, they were going to get what Ukraine got, what Moldova gets, what Georgia got. And I think the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. Russia is doing exactly what it always did.

It's using NATO expansion, a word it uses as an excuse, for justifying its desire to impose itself on its neighbors, like it always did, and like it continues to want to do. And the countries that made it in have security, and they are happy every day that they managed to do it before Russia got the strength to attack them again. Now let's talk about Canada in NATO. Canada's been through a bit of a journey since, let's say, 2008, which is when I think the target of 2% of GDP spending was originally agreed upon. And so that was the target.

during the Obama presidency, during the Trump won presidency, during the Biden presidency, and Canada was making very limited progress towards that goal. And then Trump came along, Trump too came along, very different Donald Trump, it seems, and said to hell with you all. And then suddenly there's a lot of motion, which has led the current Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rudin to suggest that Donald Trump is kind of the hero in this piece because he got everyone to take their commitment seriously. I wonder how you would tell that story of the last 15 years. And for a sort of a geographically distant partner like Canada.

Yeah, it's a really good question. First thing I'd say is, based on my experience at the Defense Department and then here, your characterization that we were making progress, is I think kind. I think Canada was rusting out. If you're at 1.2 percent, you're going backwards. You're not staying where you were. And, you know, this was a case we were making from here. Second thing I'd say is, yes, Trump has, you know, quite forcefully made the case. But I think it's the combination of Trump and the recognition by all NATO governments that we have a aggressive Russia that is willing to use military force up to an including nuclear threat

and a rapidly militarizing China as well as in the Canadian perspective a changing Arctic. You have to put all those things together. I'm not sure Trump alone shouting at everybody would have triggered this. But the security environment has changed exactly at the time as the Americans are, let's say, adapting their assurances to allies that they're going to carry all the water. They're not going to. And the world got worse. And that's why Canadians support this because they can see it. They know that we can't keep going the way we were, regardless of what Donald Trump says. Because if they're not willing to defend us, we're out in the woods and there's a lot of wolves now that weren't there before. And the Arctic is a particular Canadian security interest.

The Canadian ambassador here, Heidi Hulin, who I know you know, has been a leading agent here in NATO to shape how NATO looks at the Arctic and how Canada is seen in terms of continental defense and its commitment to Arctic security and how this fits into the overall NATO security. agenda, she's absolutely right because the Arctic is going to become central, even more central, to our security, and Canada is going to be central as a result of that. The Prime Minister talks about an arc of interest or activity for Canada that goes from the Arctic

over to the battle group in Latvia, essentially, and includes the very North Atlantic component of NATO's North Atlantic mission. And is the sea change from Trudeau to Kearney obvious in Brussels on a day-to-day basis? Or? I can't tell you what a difference it makes. Canada has contributed a lot to European security, including the battle group. And that was under the previous government. So I don't want to say that it hasn't been serious, but in terms of defense spending

and in terms of focusing on hard security and the Arctic and spending what needs to be spent, Canada is 10 times more credible than it was, and that's super important. I would add that, you know, I know there's like some less constructive agendas between Canada and the US right now,

trade being first among them, But if you step aside from trade, securing the Western Hemisphere and securing the Arctic are two issues where Canada and the U.S. have very common agendas. And I think see or should be seeing very much eye to eye on this. Then you have the Nordic countries, which also have a common interest in securing the Arctic. So in many ways, Canada is not the sort of isolated, discretionary, we can do it if we want or not if we want because we're safe and actually everything's fine. We have the Americans. We have a nice secure Arctic. Well, suddenly the Venn diagrams of hard security, hemispheric and Arctic cross in one place and that's Canada. So, you know,

we have a lot at stake here and will be much more central to the security of both Europe and North America. Part of the broader lesson of your current mandate is that the battle space is everywhere and the front line is everywhere. It's not 5,000 miles east of here. It's on my phone. It's in, well, upcoming election campaigns and other kinds of democratic rendezvous like referendums and stuff. And so you really are in charge of a sort of a growth industry in a bunch of different ways. Well, it's not a growth industry one would really want to be in charge of, frankly, because, you know, it's a little bit depressing. And it's a growth industry for many adversaries and strategic competitors.

And it's extremely creative. And the interesting thing about hybrid and the challenge for those of us who, and there's many of us who are working on this all the time, is it kind of aims at and effectively cuts through the seams between the way in which we operate. So I'll give you an example, which is the drones in Leipzig and the drones around much of our critical infrastructure. They're inside our borders. So if you look at the German announcement on attributing these attacks to Russia, who was there? The Interior Ministry and the Foreign Ministry. But you didn't see the Chief of Defense and you didn't see the military because it's not their mandate. It's inside.

But then the tools that we have to defend against drones, we can't use inside of a city. They're too powerful. The laws don't allow it. And we don't want to shoot things down over urban environments. The interior ministry doesn't necessarily talk to the defense ministry very much. They might talk to intelligence. Probably don't talk to the foreign ministry that much, especially in Canada. So we don't have the laws in place.

We don't have the bureaucracies in place to deal with this totally blurred battle space. But if you go online, you can look at this sort of hybrid command center that Russia has built in Moscow because they showed it off. And it's a place where they can pull the levers on. every instrument of state power to achieve a particular effect. So while they are united in the way that they operate, we are disaggregated both between countries and within countries between external and internal security. So, you know, we're working all that rewiring. And every time the Russians push and cross a line, it helps us with the rewiring. We can come

back and say, look, you guys need to talk to each other. We need the military and the civilians together. And that's happening now. I'll tell you what concerns me is that the Russians miscalculate. They miscalculated on Ukraine. They thought it was over in four days. What's been the result? They didn't think Sweden and Finland would join NATO.

They didn't think there would be sanctions. They can push too hard, cross a line they didn't know was there, and trigger a big reaction. So what we want to do is make it clear to the Russians that we will not be divided, that we will respond. We will respond forcefully, carefully, legally, but very strong. To dissuade them from escalating past a point where they will lose control of the situation. and they have demonstrated that they can and will lose control of the situation in ways which has cost them, as you know right now,

in terms of soldiers, a million and a half dead and injured soldiers. They never calculated for this. Their economy is being devastated, et cetera, et cetera. So, I mean, that's my concern and why we're very focused here on deterrence now, clear messaging now, to avoid, if possible, escalation towards worse. And I hope and think that we have the tools to do that. James, you've been very generous with your time. One last question. What are, what are the top items on your to-do list for NATO and for the Allies in the next two or three years? What's

the pressing business that needs doing? In my portfolio or more in general? Well, let's say, in yours, because it's a damned interesting portfolio. Yeah, it is kind of interesting. So I'll give you maybe one top line from each of the, the four or three or four areas. When it comes to cyber, my primary concern, and what I want allies to do is run advanced AI models on networks top to bottom to secure them against hacks. These tools are going to shred our cyber defenses, and that means banks, it means military command of control, it means your supermarket. at, so they have to deal with this as a matter of urgency. And we're running them on NATO network. So I think we're ahead of the game, but we can't do that for allies. We're trying to help a few of them. So that's the cyber priority one. When it comes to digital issues, data,

AI, for me, the real challenge is to ensure that we build AI defense. and AI offense together, by which I mean that we don't fall into the trap of Europeans, not trusting Americans, Americans not trusting Europeans, Canadians not trusting anybody, just to say that, and we end up with a sort of patchwork of clouds and different AI models, and we can't command together, take decisions together and fight together. Really, really important that we address this sovereign issue in a way that we can do all these things together and defend ourselves. And then hybrid, I think you hit the nail on the head. What we need to do is to, in my view, and what it would make me very gratified is if we manage to integrate the different silos

that have been built up over many years for very good reasons in a different world. and establish deterrence against any adversary in this space. It's super hard to do, but it can be done and it needs to be done. And that's priority one for me and all my team here. James Appathar, I thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me today. I really appreciate it. And I'm sure we'll run into each other again soon. Looking forward to it.

And really a great privilege to be on the show with you. So thanks so much for having me. Thank you to my presenting sponsor, Kamiko, a global leader and Canadian champion in nuclear energy. here at home and around the world. Camico is powering Canada forward. Thank you to my presenting sponsor the Transition Accelerator.

Visit transitionaccelerator.caiator. to learn more. And that's the Paul Welles show for this week. Remember to tell your friends about this podcast. Like and subscribe this show on your favorite podcast platform. You can watch these interviews on my YouTube channel and you can find all of my writing,

including new articles and a complete archive. at Paul Wells.substack.com. Thank you to my presenting sponsors, Camico and the Transition Accelerator, for making all of this possible. And thanks to you for listening. Have a good week.