The author worked for nearly 20 years on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, notably as principal press secretary to Jack Layton, principal secretary to Thomas Mulcair, and then as national director of the NDP. In addition to acting as a political commentator and analyst, he is president of the Douglas-Coldwell Foundation and president of Traxxion Strategies.

The war in Ukraine is hitting the West hard. After two years of pandemic during which governments have been in continuous crisis management with more or less success, here we are facing another crisis, echo of a cold war from another era, almost forgotten.

If support for Ukraine is real among the population, as shown last week this Leger survey, the popular will to actively defend Ukraine is weak — and the political will to intervene directly even weaker. Ukraine is not a NATO country and the risks for world peace are too high.

Despite Putin’s rhetoric, a nuclear war between Russia and NATO remains unlikely. NATO leaders seek to avoid an escalation of the conflict. Beyond the admiration that one can have for the Ukrainian resistance, our leaders follow the doctrine of mutual assured destruction (DMA, or MAD in English). They don’t want to know if Putin is bluffing.

Thus, when Mélanie Joly declares that “Canada will do everything in its power to counter the aggressions of the Russian regime”, she does not really mean everything in its power. When NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh says he wants “Canada to do everything it can to help Ukraine,” he doesn’t really, really mean everything. When Canada’s Ambassador to the UN, Bob Rae, says “every possible assistance should be given to the people and government of Ukraine,” that’s not all possible assistance.

There is, in any case, no popular appetite for it, neither in Canada nor in the United States, as Léger shows. The West hopes that the Ukrainians will hold out long enough for the sanctions to take effect, that the Russian people will have had enough and demand change.

Canada will not deploy troops on Ukrainian soil. NATO will not set up a no-fly zone in Ukrainian skies. Despite calls for help from President Volodymyr Zelensky, the promised weapons are slow to arrive and the fighter jets will not materialize. We are standing with Ukraine, but not in Ukraine. In this Russian aggression, only Ukrainian blood will flow. This war NATO will wage for public opinion. Fighting disinformation is already not easy in America, so imagine in Russia…

In any case, even if Canada wanted to help more militarily, it would not have the means to match its ambitions. On the one hand, it shows a systemic inability to obtain quality military equipment while respecting its budgets and deadlines. Whether it is the construction of new frigates, the replacement of the CF-18s, the purchase of submarines, not to mention the renewal of the fleet of maritime helicopters — a process which began in 1983… and which is not completed, nearly 60 years after the first Sea King was commissioned in 1963! Moreover, among the weapons sent by Canada to Ukraine are 100 Carl Gustav M2 anti-tank rifles, a model designed in 1964.

On the other hand, Canada currently devotes only 1.39% of its GDP to defence, far from the minimum target of 2% set by NATO for all its members. A goal that had become a commitment of the Conservative government of Stephen Harper in 2014, after the annexation of Crimea by Russia. This objective was a hobbyhorse of Donald Trump in 2018, because he found that the other members did not contribute enough to collective defense. Even if the effort is greater today, only a third of the signatories of the North Atlantic Treaty invest 2% or more of their GDP in their armed forces.

Unsurprisingly, it is the countries closest to Russia that form the majority of this first third: the Baltic countries, Poland, Romania and Croatia.

Whether negotiations between Ukraine and Russia materialize or Russia forces Ukraine to surrender, NATO countries and their friends will have to maintain sanctions against Russia for a long time to come. It’s a matter of credibility in front of a serial abuser who ignored previous punitive measures.

Russia is therefore forcing the hand of the NATO countries, which have no choice but to prepare for war. A few hundred Canadian soldiers are now deployed in eastern NATO countries to defend the alliance, just in case. The planet is therefore entering a new cycle of rearmament and Canada will have to follow suit, not only to play its role within NATO, but also to protect its interests in the Arctic, where Canada shares a long border. , ill-defined, grounding and above all disputed, with Russia.

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Despite the distance, we watch what is happening in Eastern Europe with horror — not least because it is easy to identify with the people and their environment. Images from Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, Mariupol, Sumy or elsewhere show us snowy landscapes and modern cities. Their inhabitants wear tuques and scarves while waiting for the arrival of spring, like us here, but to the sound of sirens, which push civilians to hide in metro stations to protect themselves from bombardments. The refugees certainly use makeshift means, but also contemporary coaches and trains.

Among the other factors that make this war perhaps more real than others is the ability of the average person to follow it live on social media. No filter. No censorship. But no verification either: these apps are full of propaganda, lies and misinformation about the war, whether the source is Russian, Ukrainian or otherwise.

The nuclear threat is another striking reality. For those born after the fall of the Iron Curtain and who therefore did not experience the Cold War, nuclear anxiety is no longer a relic of the past. By putting Russia’s nuclear weapons on high alert, Vladimir Putin was expressing frustration at the slow progress of Russian conscript soldiers in Ukraine, coupled with anger at the unprecedented sanctions imposed by the free world. .

Russia’s nuclear arsenal remains the largest in the world. In 30 minutes or less, intercontinental ballistic missiles could reach North America. This threat of nuclear war is arguably the most real since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

At the time, John F. Kennedy had in Nikita Khrushchev an certainly tough interlocutor, but who made the humanist decision to back down and not go to the end of the nuclear logic, despite the personal political consequences that could (and would) stem from a Soviet retreat. Today, who can guarantee that Vladimir Putin will have enough humanity to know how to turn back? Right now, that’s the killer question, really.