Turns out, cheap talk has a price;
On Monday morning, the Pentagon’s senior defense strategist suspended the oldest bilateral defense institution in North American history and pointed the announcement at Mark Carney’s Davos speech — a four-month-old address the Canadian prime minister’s admirers had called Churchillian, and that Washington now treats as a case study in the gap between rhetoric and reality.
Elbridge Colby, Under Secretary of War for Policy and the principal architect of American defense strategy under the Trump administration, announced that the Department of War is pausing the Permanent Joint Board on Defense to “reassess how this forum benefits shared North American defense.” The board was established by Franklin Roosevelt and Mackenzie King at Ogdensburg, New York in 1940 and has operated continuously for 86 years.
“A strong Canada that prioritizes hard power over rhetoric benefits us all,” Colby wrote. “Unfortunately, Canada has failed to make credible progress on its defense commitments.” In a subsequent post, Colby attached a map of North America and wrote that “delivering on shared continental defense begins by recognizing our shared geography.” A third post revealed that Colby had recently hosted US Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra at the Pentagon, and that the two are “working closely” to ensure Canada reaches the Hague Summit’s 3.5% of gross domestic product defense spending target.
The implications for Canada are potentially generational.
In response to President Donald J. Trump’s directive for transparency on U.S. government information regarding Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), the Department of War (DOW), with support from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), is overseeing government wide efforts to expeditiously find, review, identify, declassify and publicly release unresolved UAP-related records and historical documents in the federal government’s possession. This is an unprecedented, historic undertaking that requires coordination between dozens of agencies and the review of tens of millions of records, many existing only on paper, spanning many decades. Given the scope of this task, the Department of War will be releasing new materials on a rolling basis as they are discovered and declassified, with tranches posted every few weeks.
Cole Allen, the gunman from last night’s WH Correspondents Dinner, maintained an active online presence, especially on the leftwing social media platform Bluesky where he went by the handle http://ColdForce.bsky.social with multiple references violence and guns.