Editor’s Note: Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations at Macalester College in Minnesota, a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities, and a scholar of war, geopolitics, and grand strategy. Before entering academia, he worked with the Government of Canada, shaping national security policy and Canada’s role in the broader geopolitical landscape. His research interests span a broad range of topics, including the shifting geopolitical dynamics between the United States, China, and Russia; the role of NATO; ongoing U.S. debates on alliance burden-sharing, and Canada’s evolving role both globally, and within these debates.

By Christopher Preble, Senior Fellow and Director, Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program

This spring, the Trump administration suspended U.S. participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defence — an 86-year-old advisory body that Franklin Roosevelt and Mackenzie King created in August 1940 as the foundation of Canada-US continental defense.

Operationally, the decision to suspend the U.S. role changed almost nothing. NORAD continues to function. Canadian Forces personnel at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs continue their duties, and the bilateral relationship remains, on paper, among the densest in the world. What the suspension exposed was something the formal architecture had been quietly obscuring: The political relationship underneath has been running on assumptions for so long that neither government quite noticed when those assumptions stopped holding.

Canada and the United States did not arrive here in the same way. Canada spent three decades treating its NATO spending obligations as optional and its alliance relations with Washington as self-sustaining. The Trump administration then turned that accumulated vulnerability into leverage, meeting Canadian defense investments with tariffs, public talk of annexation, and pressure routed through alliance channels. One side let the relationship atrophy; the other discovered how much pressure could be applied once it had. The result is an alliance that still looks solid in its formal architecture and is visibly fraying underneath. How that happened, and what it means for the continent both countries still have to defend, is worth working through.

The Paper and the Reality

On paper, the broader Canada-US relationship is about as dense as an alliance gets. Five Eyes (the anglophone intelligence-sharing agreement that links the U.S., Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand) is only the most familiar piece of it. The Defence Production Sharing Agreement ties the two defense-industrial bases together. NORAD puts Canadian and American officers inside the same air-command system. The Arctic adds shared obligations of its own, and the trade relationship runs somewhere north of $760 billion a year. The world’s longest undefended border is part of the same picture, as are shared legal traditions, a mostly common threat history, and a geography that makes defending one country without the other essentially impossible. The existence of two formal security alliances matters when you set Ottawa beside Mexico City, which withdrew from the Rio Treaty in 2004 and has no formal security arrangement with Washington at all.

None of that, however, is the same thing as strategic alignment. NATO and NORAD can manage shared continental interests; they cannot supply the political trust those interests require. That is how a relationship this institutionalized became so politically brittle. The machinery kept running, and because it kept running, both governments treated the compact underneath it as if it required little care. But it did — and that is the problem. An inescapable relationship is still a political relationship, and in the Canada-US case, the habits needed to make it manageable have been allowed to decay.

Ottawa’s Long Free Ride, and What Came After

Canada’s defense spending record over the past three decades is not something its governments have wanted to examine too closely. By 2014, Ottawa was devoting roughly one percent of GDP to defense, half the NATO obligation it reaffirmed that same year at the Wales Summit. As recently as 2024, Justin Trudeau was dismissing the two-percent target as a “crass mathematical calculation” that missed the point of what Canada contributed. It was a defensible argument, made indefensible by the fact that Canada wasn’t contributing much of anything to compensate.

Mark Carney changed that fast. His government hit two percent in fiscal 2025-26 — the first time since the Cold War ended — with a spending surge his government called the largest since the Korean War, and committed to NATO’s new five-percent target by 2035. More than the numbers, he changed the language, telling Canadians the country could no longer assume the United States would defend it and had to invest in its own capacity to “control its own destiny.” That reflected something real about the moment.

Then Carney traveled to Beijing in January 2026, and this is where the trouble compounded. During his visit, Carney announced what his government called a “new strategic partnership” with Xi Jinping — the first such meeting between Canadian and Chinese heads of state in eight years. The two reached agreements on electric vehicles, canola, and energy. A few weeks later came Carney’s Davos remarks about middle powers cooperating in the face of hegemonic ones.

So, to recap: Canada did everything Washington had demanded for years on spending and then announced a partnership with America’s principal competitor. And, on top of that, Canada’s leader gave a speech Washington read as filing the United States under hegemonic threat alongside China. The suspension of the Permanent Joint Board on Defense followed. Whether or not the reading was fair, it is the one that mattered, and it drained what was left of Washington’s trust in the compact.

Here the limit of Canada’s skating room becomes the point. Carney can describe Canada as a middle power maneuvering between larger ones. But, in addition to drawing on a certain nostalgia for a bygone era when Canada claimed to be a “middle power” that routinely punched above its weight in global affairs, this vocabulary is borrowed from states whose geography lets them use it.

The UAE, for example, practices that kind of multi-alignment — leaning on Washington for security while deepening economic ties to Beijing — because no treaty binds Abu Dhabi to the United States. Canada does not realistically have that option. It can argue with Washington, but it cannot behave as though it stands outside the continental defense system it helps operate. That is what distinguishes Ottawa from Abu Dhabi and Mexico City, and what will ultimately make the middle-power rhetoric impossible for the Carney government and its successors to translate into meaningful defense policy.

Washington’s Contribution to the Problem

It would be convenient to leave it there, as a story about Canadian confusion. Anyone watching this relationship knows it isn’t the whole story. The Trump administration has tariffed Canadian goods, floated — repeatedly and in public — annexing Canada as the 51st state, and used the defense relationship as a lever in economic fights unrelated to defense. The board was suspended after Carney’s Beijing speech, mid-argument over Canadian commitments, and after Canada had hit the two-percent target Washington spent a decade demanding. Whatever one makes of Carney’s Beijing visit or Davos rhetoric, the Trump administration’s decision to suspend an 86-year-old defense body is not alliance management. It is pressure politics through an alliance channel.

One important fact gets lost in the day-to-day friction between the White House and the Prime Minster’s Office. Canada has not had a genuine strategic alternative to the United States since the Second World War, and geography alone makes that true. There is no escaping the American relationship, whatever a prime minister says in Davos. Washington knows it, and some U.S. officials seem to have concluded that Canadian dependence allows for unlimited pressure. That is shortsighted and, more to the point, wrong. A Canada pushed steadily toward Beijing is a far worse outcome for North American security than a Canada that occasionally says uncomfortable things.

What NORAD Reveals

Strip away the political noise and the institution that holds is NORAD. Canadian personnel at NORAD in Colorado are still at their posts, and the integrated air and aerospace command that has anchored continental security since 1958 is, as of this writing, intact. The defense experts are right that whatever happens politically, the two militaries have deep enough relationships to keep the essential machinery running.

But NORAD is being tested at the worst possible moment. The Arctic security environment is deteriorating — Russia has expanded its posture across the High North, China has declared itself a “near-Arctic state,” and the two have begun converging in ways that looked improbable a decade ago. What’s missing is political direction. NORAD modernization is funded — $38.6 billion over 20 years — but, four years in, the money is moving faster than the work. Arctic domain awareness and defense industrial cooperation are still underdeveloped, and nobody has settled on a workable rule for disagreeing about China without turning continental defense into a bargaining chip. Neither government is generating that will, and the institutions can carry the relationship for only so long without it.

The compact Ogdensburg created in 1940 rested on a recognition of mutual vulnerability — that in the shadow of a world war, neither country could defend the continent alone. The vulnerability is still there. What has lapsed is the habit of renewing the bargain it produced. Both governments spent decades betting the relationship would tend itself, and for a long stretch the bet paid off, which is exactly why the suspension is worth taking seriously now.

This leaves both capitals with things to stop and things to repair. Washington should stop treating continental defense as a collection point for unrelated economic grievances; coercion aimed at a partner with nowhere else to go buys compliance now and resentment later. Ottawa should stop reaching for middle-power language its obligations won’t support and decide whether the Beijing opening is worth what it costs in Washington.

Both should be repairing the short list of contested issues NORAD already points to — modernization, the Arctic, industrial cooperation, and a way to disagree about China without breaking things. Whether the dysfunction is a stress test the relationship passes, or evidence that the interests beneath it have drifted too far to hold, there is no clean answer yet. So far neither government has acted as though the question were urgent.