U.S. President Donald Trump, left, speaks with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, right, at a working lunch with leaders of G7 and the Middle East, in Evian-les-Bains, France, Tuesday, June 16, 2026. (Evelyn Hockstein/Pool Photo via AP) On May 28, Prime Minister Mark Carney stood before the Economic Club of New York and told the crowd that “Canada Strong will help make America great again.”
It was meant as an olive branch, dressed up in Trump’s own slogan — rhetorical jujitsu that flatters a counterpart while changing nothing real. Commentators on both sides of the border quickly dubbed it Canada’s “Maple MAGA” moment, and the line got the attention it was built for.
What got less attention is what Ottawa had announced the day before. On May 27, the Carney government named Sweden’s Saab the preferred supplier for Canada’s new Airborne Early Warning and Control aircraft, passing over the American alternative most analysts had assumed was the safer bet.
Airborne Early Warning and Control is not peripheral. Its value depends almost entirely on how well it talks to everything around it, and NORAD’s everything is overwhelmingly American. Choosing a system whose NORAD integration will now have to be proven rather than assumed, the day before flattering Washington in a speech about strategic partnership, is not subtlety. It is two strategies operating out of the same prime minister’s office.
This would have been a one-off embarrassment if it had happened in isolation. But it had not. Ten days earlier, on May 18, Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of Defense for policy, had announced the U.S. was “pausing” the Permanent Joint Board on Defense — the oldest continuous defense consultation mechanism between the U.S. and Canada, dating back to 1940 — to “reassess how this forum benefits shared North American defense.”
Colby was blunt about why: Canadian underinvestment, and a widening gap between what Ottawa says and what it does. The Pentagon was not reacting to the speech or the Saab decision. It had already concluded that Ottawa’s performance does not live up to its promises. Carney then spent the next 10 days giving that complaint a sharper edge.
Career officials in Washington do not look to prime ministerial speeches as policy — they look to procurement decisions. And what they have been reading out of Ottawa this year is a government that wants political credit for standing up to Trump and the economic benefits of telling him he is right, without letting either commitment cost it anything with the other intended audience.
I understand the political logic. Carney’s election last year was substantially a referendum on whether Canada would bend to Trump’s tariffs and his “51st state” routine. The answer Canadians gave was “No.” A prime minister who came to office promising elbows up cannot pivot to a charm offensive without managing optics carefully.
Diversifying defense suppliers away from sole-source dependence on Washington is not unreasonable on its own terms — no government should want its procurement entirely captive to one supplier’s political mood, especially not this one’s. But there is a difference between hedging and contradiction. The Saab decision sits closer to the second.
NORAD has functioned for nearly seven decades because both the U.S. and Canada treated cooperation on continental airspace as the default arrangement, not as something each had to keep re-earning depending on the politics of the week. That default lets two air forces share command authority and trust each other’s sensor data without renegotiating the relationship every budget cycle. It does not run well on a procurement timed to send a domestic signal one day and a diplomatic signal the next, especially when the two point in opposite directions.
Washington should not be smug about this. The Trump administration’s tariffs, its annexation talk, its habit of treating Canadian prime ministers as provincial governors, helped produce the domestic politics Carney is now navigating badly.
Colby’s joint defense pause was itself theater, a symbolic jab that costs the Pentagon little and tells Ottawa it is being watched. Two governments performing toughness for their own audiences while the actual defense relationship absorbs the damage is not new in either capital. It is close to the default setting.
What is different now is the stakes. Russian military activity and Chinese interest in the Arctic have already made the northern approaches harder to treat as a strategic backwater, NORAD modernization money is finally moving after years of delay and Washington’s Golden Dome ambitions add pressure for a cleaner binational sensor architecture, not a more politicized one. None of that works if Ottawa treats interoperability as a sideline to managing Trump’s feelings, or if Washington keeps using consultative bodies as leverage in a trade fight that has nothing to do with airspace defense.
Carney did not invent the dysfunction in this relationship. But he is demonstrating, with real procurement dollars, how expensive it gets when a government tries to manage Trump rhetorically instead of dealing with him structurally.
NORAD was never built on the assumption that Washington and Ottawa would like each other. It was built on the assumption that neither government would treat continental defense as a variable in some other argument. That assumption is the one being tested now. So far, nobody in either capital this year has shown much interest in reassuring anyone that it still holds.
Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., a senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy.
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