WHY does Canada spend money on defence? To fight an imaginary enemy? Canada since WW2 did not need a defence budget. After WW2, the US became the world’s only superpower, making the international system a uni-polar structure. Soon after, the USSR acquired nuclear weapons and the Cold War was on.

But the nervousness during the life of the Cold did not reach Canada. There was no need for Canada to have a defence budget as part of the West arming itself to protect itself from the USSR. Canada has borders only with the US. For the USSR to have attacked Canada would have been the end of the world -the US would have started a third world war.

But the USSR did not have any interest at all in Canada and maybe the communist leaders in the USSR naively thought of Canada as being a part of the USA. Canada’s budget during the Cold War was a waste of money that could have been used to make Canada a better economy.
So why did Canada have a defence budget and still does? To understand this, one has to explore how Western Europe (WE) led by Churchill conned the US and has been doing that until Mr. Trump decided that he will bring an end to it. After WW2, WE faced a nightmare never seen before in European history.

WE lay in ruins, but the country that WE feared most because of the bitterness that accompanies historical rivalries was the USSR. Russia was never accepted as part of Christian Europe. This explains why Europe persuaded the US to ease sanctions on Germany after the First World War to rehabilitate Germany for it to take its place in Christian Europe.

From the 1920s onwards, all the sanctions against Germany imposed for causing the First World were lifted. By 1933, when Hitler rose to power, Germany had become, once again, a powerful European nation. WW2 did a cruel irony to WE. It devastated WE and led to the rise of the USSR as the most powerful European country.

Contrary to what Western and American professors have been teaching since 1945, the Cold War was more of an invention by Europe than the US. It was Churchill more than any other European leader who managed to convince the US that the USSR was a global threat.
What followed then was Europe’s acceptance that the US would lead the world and protect WE from the USSR. But the USSR was never interested in a war with WE. The USSR eventually collapsed in 1990 and for all its decades of existence, never had a military spat with any Western country. It was just

not interested in confrontation with any WE country. The Cold War and NATO were kept alive on the myth that the USSR, a godless country that hates capitalism, was a threat to the world.
But even when God and capitalism took over Russia after the fall of the USSR, the WE’s attitude to ostracising Russia did not stop. The story of Europe-US relation is one in which Europe kept the myth of innate Russian aggression going so the USA could see the USSR and Russia as an enemy of global freedom.

The history on international relations since WW2 is an ironic one. The innate aggression of the Russians did not play out. On the contrary, it was the USA that invaded more countries than the USSR since 1945. Donald Trump has risen to power as someone not familiar with the historical contours of US-Europe relations.

What Mr. Trump is doing is what we in Guyana and the rest of the Global South have been doing since the 1970s – accept that countries in the world have national interest to protect and in doing so, it is an accepted fact of the international system that nations must see other nations in terms of how they serve their national interest rather than through genetic lenses of ideology.
This was what the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was all about. The NAM nations made the conscious decision that development goals dictated that it pursued principled relations with all countries of the world. The West and Canada have been thrown in a vortex because they cannot understand Mr. Trump’s foreign policy.

The reason why they cannot understand it is because, since 1945 international relations have been built on a mythical foundation. Mr. Trump much to his credit understands that myth and he is simply saying the US will relate to other countries not by buying friendships or protecting friendships but by engaging with all countries that will serve the economy and social integrity of the US. Europe hates Trump for that. Trump is unmoved because he knows where the hate is coming from. It comes from a long period of Europe fooling generations of Americans.
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.