alternatehistory.com

Based on the following Tellus comment:

Meh, I'm fairly bright I'll admit :p

And I didn't say we didn't need any military, a small amount of land and naval forces for local relief and such is indeed necessary, but you have to admit Canada's position is fairly hopeless on the military level.

There two kinds of possible threats: the USA and everyone else. If anyone else threatens us, America has to protect us, our security is a core interest to their homeland defense. That's rather obvious.

Then comes the real one: the USA is our ally but always places their interests before ours of course. In Maine, when drawing the western boudaries, the Alaskan/Yukon boundaries and now in the Arctic/Northwest passage issues they consistently screwed us territorially. In wars, they expect us to provide them with some degree of military assistance and legitimacy nonetheless by supporting their efforts everywhere, even when they are clearly in the wrong. And we generally go along because even if 'we're bigger and on top', we're their bitches, fundamentally.

This is the real nature of our relationship with the USA. We obviously cant fight them off conventionally or even use or good relationship to gain meaningful advantages (the softwood lumber crisis or the recent mess with passports are good examples of why fellating America on a regular basis doesn't mean she'll take you out to a good restaurant), so we tend to maintain a military and just go with whatever they ask.

Civil disobedience here would be to cut our military to such bare bones that we do not have the ability to project any power overseas anymore. It's not like there's anything meaningful to lose in the process. In fact, and I'm really pushing it here, was Canada to really want to play the military game and were we willing to grow balls, the only logical military expenditure in our situation would be to invest a small nuclear deterrent and short-range missiles. That's the only military expenditure that can change our strategic situation versus no military to speak of at all. I'm not saying we should, as Im not a fan of the whole concept, but if Canada was really worried about its national security and wanted to do something about it; we have one credible threat, and nothing but that can be a reasonable deterrent.

In the immortal words of Bachmann, we too can be "too nuclear to fail" :p . If not, well, fuck it, we're going to be the bitch, so let's not pay the dinner bill at least. I'll add that STEALTH fighters are obviously a buy designed to support US operations. Canadian interests that might need defense are in the arctic and require non-stealth, multi-motor aircraft with good bad weather tolerance... the exact opposite of the over-engineered pieces of platinum garbage they're pushing on us.

So, with as late a POD as possible, make it so Canada has an independent nuclear weapons capability.
Top