‘Making Money’ host Charles Payne says Europe needs the help of the United States to stave off adversaries like China and Russia on ‘Jesse Watters Primetime.’

Our very nice neighbor and ally to our north, Canada, has 42 million people and a GDP of 2.4 trillion, but doesn’t even spend 2% of that GDP on defense. Its new prime minister, Mark Carney, promises that it will reach that minimum standard for NATO alliance members by 2030. The last consecutive years in which Canada contributed 2% of its GDP to the defense needs of the West occurred around 1989-1990, after which defense expenditures dropped significantly. 

Canada answered the bell after 9/11, and while it’s standing military is quite small — 68,000 – it sent troops to Afghanistan from the beginning of that long war and kept them there until 2014, sacrificing 158 of their soldiers on that faraway battlefield. 

Five hundred sixteen Canadians died during the Korean War, and while Canada did not send its troops to Vietnam, many Canadians volunteered for the U.S. military and as many as 140 died there.

AMERICA’S ALLIES ARE FINALLY PAYING THEIR FAIR SHARE FOR DEFENSE. NOW THEY MUST PAY THEIR BILLS

We remember the events depicted in "Argo." Many have cheered the musical "Come From Away." My wonderful daughter-in-law and her parents and siblings came to the U.S. from Canada, and while now proud Americans, they are also proud Canadians. Few are the Americans who don’t genuinely consider our cousins to the north very close friends, if not so strong in the national security department, and also very baffling in their politics.

In the era of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, when the West stood up together and defeated the Soviet Union, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was a friend indeed who, while he could not bring great force to bear on the communist powers, stood side-by-side with Reagan even as later Canadian Prime Ministers Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin and Stephen Harper stood shoulder to should with President George W. Bush and all America in the aftermath of the attack on our country. 

Canada has always been an ally of the strongest power in the West — first as part of the British Empire, then as part of the Commonwealth and as a part of NATO through the whole of the Cold War and since then as part of the "Five Eyes" of the intelligence consortium where trust and shared values were assumed. 

Those assumptions have now frayed.

NATO CHIEF PRAISES TRUMP AT DAVOS, SAYS HE FORCED EUROPE TO ‘STEP UP’ ON DEFENSE

The long and wearisome tenure of Justin Trudeau marked a turning of Canada away from the shared values of the long Anglo-American history, but as he was always a clownish figure, one that not many Americans really worried about as a true expression of the values of our friends to the north, the idea of Canada as hostile to the U.S. was unthinkable. When Mark Carney — an international banker first and for decades — took over from Trudeau, it was anyone’s guess how he would govern, but few expected the events of this January. 

Now we know. Carney went to Davos last week and delivered a 15-minute masterclass in the national security equivalent of fantasy baseball and an exercise in very real moral equivalence, one that would inevitably insult serious-minded Americans, as Canada’s head of government choose to define the world as divided into one class of two or three "hegemons," then another of "middle powers" and then everybody else. 

Carney then presumed to speak on behalf of the "middle powers" and did so in a way calculated to insult America by explicitly placing us in the "hegemon" category that includes China (and maybe Russia?), and calling out to the "middle powers" to band together to oppose the hegemons, even as........

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