America TREMBLES Before the Emerging Might of a “New Great Power Rival"

or something

I planned to say more about the dismal action at Davos, but let’s all spare one another that tedium. Mark Carney’s stunning and brave speech, which I discussed earlier this week, will stand in for all the rest of the noise. If you look for reactions to Carney’s babbling, you’ll see that he TURNED THE WORLD UPSIDE DOWN with a STUNNING SERIES OF BOLD DECLARATIONS, and decide for yourself how many exclamation points to chunk onto the end of this sentence. Sample headlines, and really take in the implied drama in all of this:

Everything’s different after Carney spoke, you see. There’s a world before and a world after. The old order is never coming back. Mark Carney killed it with his mouth. Everybody’s talking about the major departure, the new reality of global power that was just born on a stage in Switzerland.

To offer the dullest and clumsiest example of the stupid reaction, a person you’re tired of hearing me talk about said this in the opinion pages of the relentlessly dullminded New York Times:

Carney did not receive a rousing standing ovation because he called for submission. Instead, he marked out a path of allied integration and cooperation that could create, in essence, a new great power rival to the United States.

Submission, in fact, was never an option. Proud nations do not agree to become vassals. And so the choice isn’t between resistance and submission, but between forms of resistance — whether the “middle powers” will create national fortresses or enter into new alliances and agreements that don’t include the United States.

Carney, in essence, says yes to both. Canada, he said, is doubling its military spending and rebuilding its defense industrial base…If the middle powers answer Carney’s call, they could form an economic and defense alliance that rivals American power.

You got that? The prime minister of Canada announced the emerging presence of “a new great power rival to the United States,” a collective military and economic powerhouse of smaller nations that threatens to shrink America to number two or three in a world where it used to matter. Canada is doubling its military spending. Take that, Trump! The stupid orange devil must be HUMILIATED to see Carney being so POWERFUL!

But what David Fre— sorry, what the person whose name I’m not mentioning never gets into is the problem of what it means for Canada and its potential partners among the “middle powers” to double their defense spending. Starting with no baseline at all, unnamed idiot columnist joins Mark Carney in warning that doubled military spending in Canada is a huge threat to American power.

So let’s drag in that baseline.

Canada has about 150,000 miles of coastline:

Unless North Dakota invades, the problem of the defense of Canada against foreign aggression is a problem of oceans: Russia or China or those bastards in Peru are coming from the sea to make their attack. Canada’s defense demands a navy, and a serious one.

This week, precisely as Mark Carney spoke on stage at Davos about the rising military power that threatens to end the dominance of the American armed forces, a Canadian news organization reported at length on the condition of that nation’s submarine force. They have four, old diesel-electric submarines that Canada bought from the British nearly thirty years ago. One is in dry dock. One is in such poor condition that the Canadian navy now designates it as a training submarine only. The other two…sometimes get to sea, but probably not at the same time, and there are occasionally some problems with the whole submarine thing.

Go back up and look at the map of Canada. All of that is defended by a submarine, sometimes, at best.

Now double that: “in essence, a new great power rival to the United States.” Uh-huh.

Canada hopes to buy a dozen new submarines in the foreseeable future — but if you clicked on the link to the Canadian news story, you saw the other problem: “The Royal Canadian Navy is short roughly 2,000 trained regular-force sailors—or about a quarter of its 7,700-sailor benchmark— just to outfit and deploy its existing ships.”

The Canadian navy aspires to having 7,700 sailors, but is well short of that goal. The United States Navy has 400,000. But remember: Canada aspires to double its military power.

The Canadian Navy has no destroyers at all, by the way, but hopes to get some in the future, though the thing they’re planning to at some point put to sea as a destroyer is about the size of the kind of ship that nations typically call a frigate.

But remember, it’s not just Canada. Carney also hopes to form a military alliance of “middle powers,” so they would crush American military power under the combined weight of Canada plus Denmark plus Finland plus, I don’t know, Norway or something. Now you’re surging toward a dozen frigates, though you still don’t have any destroyers or submarines.

I drop in here, as a “by the way,” the fact that Canada has an extremely proud military heritage, and people I knew who trained alongside Canadian soldiers in the 1990s were always impressed by them. But a whole very proud country somehow just chose along the way to disarm itself, without ever quite saying it out loud.

In a glorious choice, the website of the Canadian Department of National Defense breaks down the country’s total military strength by province and territory:

The Canadian armed forces have seven personnel in Nunavut, but YOU WATCH YOUR ASS, AMERICA, because they’re planning to double that.

Speeches aren’t things, and Mark Carney hasn’t reset the global order. The news about this speech is meaningless noise.