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Thailand's newly appointed Foreign Minister Maris Sangiampongsa reacts during a family photo session with new cabinet ministers at the Government House in Bangkok, Thailand, May 7, 2024.
US ally Thailand moves forward with BRICS membership
On Sunday, Thailand said Foreign Minister Maris Sangiampongsa had delivered an official letter to his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, outlining Bangkok’s intention to join the BRICS alliance, which has gained a reputation as an anti-Western forum in recent years. Thailand holds non-NATO major ally status with the United States, but Maris said it hopes joining the Chinese- and Russian-led group will help it “play a more active role in South-South cooperation.” Things may not come together by the next BRICS summit in October, but Bangkok’s bid is likely to work out.
Is Washington worried? Hardly. For all its ambitions of pushing the dollar out of its dominant trade position and aligning the Global South to mutual political goals, BRICS can’t match actions to rhetoric. The organization doesn’t even have a permanent secretariat to coordinate its activities, and its members often don’t see eye to eye.
Thailand isn’t the first US ally to join (Brazil was), and in January, BRICS expanded to include another major non-NATO ally, Egypt, as well as close US partners Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
So what’s the point? The impotence of BRICS makes joining a low-stakes gambit with some potential upside. It might help Thailand curry favor with China, its largest trade partner and most worrying military threat. But, if not, what has Bangkok really lost?A club for hemming China in
On Monday — the day that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters that Canada is interested in joining the AUKUS defense alliance — documents were released at a public inquiry that showed that Canada’s intelligence agency believes China “clandestinely and deceptively interfered in both the 2019 and 2021 general elections.”
Also on Monday, as Chinese ships carried out exercises in disputed waters in the South China Sea, the US, UK, and Australia announced that they were talking to Japan about inviting that country to participate in Pillar II of the security pact.
China’s growing military and political belligerence is rattling other countries, and they are responding by drawing together in a way that would have been out of the question a decade ago.
Neighbors under pressure
Pillar I of AUKUS, which was announced in 2021, is a collaboration between Australia, the Americans, and the Brits aimed at adding a powerful new capacity to Australia’s military: nuclear-powered (though conventionally armed) submarines. This is a huge spend for Australia — $368 billion over 30 years — that carries an inherent political risk. And to make the deal, Canberra had to blow up relations with France by abandoning a deal to buy French subs. The Aussies only did that after a year of tense political and economic confrontations with China that left decision-makers in that country gravely concerned about its future in a neighborhood dominated by Beijing. Australia’s back was against the wall.
Like Australia, Japan is being driven to closer cooperation with the United States by its concerns about an increasingly powerful and assertive China. Japan’s trade-focused economy depends on international shipping passing freely through the South China Sea, for instance, where China has been clashing with the Philippines.
So Tokyo has reason to be interested in Pillar II of the AUKUS arrangement, which focuses on defense technology sharing, including quantum computing, hypersonic missiles, artificial intelligence, and electronic warfare — all areas where China presents a technological challenge, and where Japan could offer expertise.
With China rapidly expanding its military, Japan has decided to break with its post-war pacifist tradition and dramatically increase defense spending.
Northern lightweights
Canada is also opening its checkbook, but at a much smaller scale, which would explain why the AUKUS partners are making a point of talking about doing business with Japan, rather than Canada.
Nobody is talking about adding other countries as full members, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Tuesday, but proceeding on a project-by-project basis.
Historically, Canada spends little on defense, falling well short of the 2% of GDP that NATO members have all agreed to spend. In an increasingly dangerous world, though, pressure is mounting for Canada to step up, and on Monday, Trudueau’s government did roll out a five-year plan to bring defense spending up to 1.76% of GDP by 2030, up from 1.38% last year.
Allies welcomed the announcement, but there was nothing significant enough to make Canada a much more desirable partner for AUKUS, says Eugene Lang, a former Liberal defense official turned Queens University professor. Officials are interested.
“I just don’t know that we're doing anything to get their attention,” he says. “What they're doing in AUKUS is investing in developing brand-new technologies. To my knowledge, Canada has not got any specific money set aside for any of that.”
University of Ottawa Professor Thomas Juneau, who has interviewed allied officials about Canada’s potential role in AUKUS, found that Canada is increasingly seen as a free rider in defense and intelligence circles. It’s not surprising that Japan was invited before Canada, he says.
“It's really normal for AUKUS to bring in Japan before Canada because Japan is not only a much bigger country than we are, but it's right next to China.”
Wolf warriors
On the other hand, because of its Five Eyes intelligence-sharing experience, Canada could more easily cooperate with AUKUS than Japan, says Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group.
And while it may not be spending enough money to be taken seriously, the Trudeau government has moved to be more circumspect in its relationship with China, limiting Chinese investment in critical minerals and being cautious about research projects.
“The scales have fallen from a lot of politicians’ eyes in the West,” Thompson says. “The question remains, how do you have constructive diplomatic and economic relations with Beijing, while at the same time competing with them geopolitically and seeking to build up and maintain deterrence?”
China will object to the new alliances being organized around it, but don’t expect Beijing to stop buying sabers and rattling them.
“China has a rising economy, so the idea that its rising economic power wouldn't come with rising geopolitical ambition is a fantasy, and we've kind of believed in that fantasy for a while, not just in Canada but in other Western countries,” says Juneau.
“But it was a fantasy all along.”
Trump hates NATO: Would he leave Canada out in the cold?
Almost lost in the flurry of outrageous things Donald Trump has said at campaign events recently were his comments on the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization at a rally in Las Vegas last Saturday.
The former president said he does not believe America’s NATO allies would be there to help defend the United States if it came under attack – as they are obliged to do under the alliance’s Article 5. The US is “paying for NATO, and we don’t get much out of it,” he said, glossing over the fact that the only time Article 5 has ever been invoked was after 9/11.
Comments like these have sparked speculation that Trump – should he win in November – might try to withdraw the US from NATO. This would serve as a seismic blow to global security, leaving new geopolitical fault lines, weakening democracies, and strengthening autocracies.
Trump’s first rodeo
Even if Trump is reelected, we have seen this movie before: In 2018, during his first term, he stormed into a NATO leaders meeting in Brussels like a tornado in a glass house, calling his allies “delinquents” for underspending on their defense.
At a time when few NATO partners were spending 2% of GDP on defense – the NATO guideline – Trump demanded 4% and implied he would bring US troops home if the allies didn’t comply. After a chaotic 24 hours and a series of hastily cobbled-together spending pledges, he left Brussels saying the US commitment to NATO “remains very strong,” claiming sole responsibility for allied spending pledges. It was a classic example of what The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg called the Trump Doctrine on foreign policy, where there are “No Friends, No Enemies” and “Permanent destabilization creates American advantage.”
If Trump again occupies the White House, his first NATO meeting could be a Brussels redux, but there are also signs that this time he means what he once reportedly told European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen: “NATO is dead, and we will leave ...”
What would NATO withdrawal mean?
The US departing from NATO would not necessarily kill the alliance, but Washington’s contribution is irreplaceable: NATO estimates suggest the US spent $743 billion on defense last year, compared to $356 billion for the rest of the alliance put together. That was the equivalent of 3.49% of America’s GDP, with only Poland spending more proportionally. Nineteen of 30 NATO member states spent less than 2%.
But the Europeans are already preparing for the prospect of a Trump victory. Defense expenditure rose 8.3% last year by members, excluding the US, and European politicians are calling for countries on the Continent to build their own nuclear umbrella. France and the United Kingdom have hundreds of warheads, but there has been a noticeable reluctance from other allies like Germany to hand over the responsibility for their defense to Paris or London.
The Europeans at least have political institutions that they can coalesce around.
Even if Trump doesn’t withdraw, the bloc’s deterrence is dependent on political unity – unity which has proven vital to Ukraine’s defense in its fight against Russia. After everything Trump has said publicly, who in Europe would trust that a Trump-led America would come to their defense? Would Vladimir Putin place any credence on Article 5 if Trump was in the White House?
Where would this leave Canada?
The NATO country that would be really left out in the cold by a period of Trump-inspired isolationism is Canada.
The Great White North has a history of stepping up to defend the rule of law and the international order. It did so recently when it signed on to support Operation Prosperity Guardian, the maritime task force aimed at disrupting Houthi attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea. But times have changed since the great days of Canadian peacekeeping in the 1960s and ‘70s: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was forced to concede that Canada could not take on an operational role in the Red Sea because it had no ships or planes in the region.
Support was limited to three Canadian analysts – and lots of tea and sympathy.
This is a recurring and embarrassing theme for the Canadian military. Last year, it politely declined to take part in NATO’s largest-ever air exercise because its jets and pilots were involved in “modernization activities.”
The Canadian Forces have just announced they will take part in a massive NATO exercise, Steadfast Defender, aimed at demonstrating to the Russians the alliance’s ability to conduct sustained multi-domain defense operations for months. But Canada’s commitment, which will likely stretch resources to breaking point, will only comprise 1,000 personnel, one frigate, a couple of helicopters, and a tank squadron.
Oh Canada … and the odd-day defense plan
At home, meanwhile, the warnings about the precarious nature of Canada’s military have been sounded from the very top. Vice-Admiral Angus Topshee, the commander of the Royal Canadian Navy, said the navy could fail to meet its readiness commitments in 2024 and beyond.
Departmental reports reveal a 16,000-position shortfall in personnel, and lack of equipment meant the percentage of the fleet that was serviceable for training and readiness requests was 51% in 2022/23. The equivalent numbers for the land and aerospace fleets were 56% and 43%.
In essence, the Canadian military could only defend Canada on the odd days of the week.
The malaise is well-documented. The land forces cannot defend themselves against tanks, drones, or aircraft, and there are not enough old Halifax class frigates to live up to commitments to NATO and the new Indo-Pacific strategy. Canada’s four Victoria class submarines are 40 years old and rarely at sea, while its CF18 jets are also four decades old and, despite upgrades, considered operationally obsolete.
The Canadian Forces have ordered 88 F-35s and 15 new frigates. But there are problems with both: The stealth jets took a decade to purchase, and the first plane won’t be delivered until 2026 at the earliest, while the ships are over budget and won’t start arriving until well into the next decade.
The US Navy paid around $1.66 billion for each of its Constellation-class guided missile frigates. Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Office has estimated each Canadian frigate will cost around $4.2 billion because of bells and whistles requested by the Canadian Forces (they are not the same ship, but critics have pointed to the cost overruns and asked why Canada didn’t simply try to purchase from the US.)
Defense shortfalls and a glimmer of hope
Canada’s capacity issues have not gone unnoticed in Washington. Leaked Pentagon documents said “widespread defense shortfalls have hindered Canada’s capabilities,” casting doubt on whether it could mount a major operation while maintaining a NATO battle group in Latvia and providing aid to Ukraine.
President Joe Biden is said to have been pleasantly surprised when he visited Ottawa last March and found that Canada was prepared to pay its way on modernizing the North American Aerospace Defence Command, aka NORAD.
Under the deal signed by Trudeau and Biden, Canada will contribute $29 billion over 20 years to pay for two of six Arctic radar installations and to fund infrastructure like hangars and runways to allow the F-35s to operate in the Arctic.
But it seems that on the defense file in Ottawa, every step forward is matched by two backward. The Pentagon intelligence leaked to the Washington Post said Trudeau told NATO officials Canada will never reach the 2% target. Since then, the Liberal government has indicated hundreds of millions of dollars in absolute cuts to defense spending.
Defense Minister Bill Blair has talked about the need to spend more to boost military readiness and capacity. But at the same time, the federal government is under pressure to spend billions of dollars on a national pharmacare program to ensure its allies in Canada’s third party, the New Democrats, continue to prop it up in the House of Commons.
Meanwhile, soaring interest rates mean Ottawa is now spending more servicing its debt than it is contributing towards health spending.
Pockets, politics, and persuasion
The key measure of any Canadian government is how it manages the Canada-U.S. relationship, regardless of whether it agrees with the White House. If Trump is elected president, and NATO allies are to have any prospect of persuading him not to blow up the alliance, they have to offer at least the veneer of self-sufficiency.
The impression Trump has at the moment is that Canada and many of its allies have short arms and long pockets, leaving him, like a sucker, to foot the bill.