Canada has set aside its former cherished international position as self-proclaimed peacekeeper, and now has an opportunity to graduate from the Harper government’s more commendable but still unsatisfactory status as a mouse that roars, to some level of international relevance.

Canada was a good ally in the World Wars and as a co-founder of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The notion of peacekeeping took hold in 1956, after the British and French had adopted the insane scheme of encouraging Israel to invade the Egyptian Sinai and proceed to the Suez Canal, which Egypt’s President Nasser had just seized from the Suez Canal Company, owned by Britain and France.

For the next 40 years, there was a fluctuating but imperishable attachment by Canadian governments of both parties to the concept of peacekeeping under U.N. auspices. Even as the United Nations became a steadily more disreputable sinkhole of corruption and hypocrisy where a vast coalition of poor and despotic countries squandered and embezzled the international organization’s budget, and peace-keeping itself degenerated into poor countries renting out their peacekeepers, paid for by the advanced countries of the UN, as mercenaries to factions in civil wars, Canada subscribed to the fraud that their country was a halcyon with a talent for calming troubled areas.

Canadian forces almost always performed well, but it was almost all a mirage — a convenient posture for the Trudeau and Chrétien governments, especially, to shrink the defense budget as a percentage of the whole budget and of GDP, while unctuously pledging the country’s allegiance to the highest purposes of international law. Even the fiasco of the international peace-keeping force in Bosnia, and the misdeeds of a number of Canadians in the peace-keeping debacle in Somalia, did not disillusion this country about peace-keeping. In general, and as both those episodes demonstrated, where there is peace, you don’t need peacekeepers, and where there is war, they are of no use.

Fortunately, Stephen Harper has had little time for this pretentious humbug centered on the United Nations. He renounced the longstanding Canadian ambivalent relativism between Israel and the Arab terrorists bent on the Jewish state’s complete destruction. The Prime Minister also has been commendably robust about sanctions on Iran, and in condemnation of the Russian role in Syria and its attempt to intimidate Ukraine.

Unfortunately, the other half of the promised Harper national security policy has not been delivered: The reversal of many years of neglect of the defense budget has continued and we now have an army of just three brigades, 15,000 men, and are approaching a three-ocean navy of just 15 ships, while the number of new warplanes to be acquired steadily shrinks as the unsuspected increase in their unit cost skyrockets.

Obviously, it is not within Canada’s means to acquire military forces sufficient to impose this country’s policy preferences in distant and complicated theatres. But instead of recognizing the incongruity of dire threats accompanied by a minimal military capability; or even recognizing that military spending is the most effective economic stimulus of any, as well as the best avenue of adult training and education; Harper and Foreign Minister John Baird continue to hurl moral and polemical thunderbolts as if they had some capacity to carry them out. They invite a riposte such as Bismarck’s comment that if the British army landed in Germany, he would have the local police arrest it. (Bismarck did not mock the mighty Royal Navy.)

In fairness, Canada is not alone in the pusillanimity of its defense policy. Germany, always the strongest power in Europe when it is united and not under occupation, which crushed France with 3,000 tanks 74 years ago, has no tanks to support Chancellor Merkel’s belated tough talk on Ukraine. Britain is weak, although it is building a large aircraft carrier; the French and the Italians are hopeless. The Poles are doing what they can, but Poland alone cannot impress Russia.

And the United States has simply abdicated and it is not clear that it retains any will to defend anything except the U.S. itself. (Contrast Obama’s infamous “reset” of policy toward Russia with Eisenhower’s handling of the Kremlin during the Suez and Hungarian crises: When the Russians threatened to attack Britain and France directly, he said that any such attack would be considered as equivalent to an attack on the U.S. itself, and would be responded to at once with maximum force. The Kremlin went quietly back to crushing Hungary under the hob-nailed jack-boot of the Red Army.)

Today, Canada could take a dramatic step to raise its strategic stature in the world, by either buying the Netherlands’ joint logistic support ship Karel Doorman, which Dutch fiscal restraints have made available, or either or both French Mistral helicopter carriers and amphibious assault ships, which were built for the Russians and partially fitted as ice-breakers, but which may be withheld because of Russian belligerency in Ukraine. These would be perfect ships for Canada’s needs and would enable this country to project both military force and humanitarian assistance.

If our political class had a complete transplant of the strategic lobes of its brains, we could probably pick up an Independence or even Nimitz class aircraft carrier from the United States, gratis. The U.S. has several of the former mothballed in its reserve fleet, and Obama, as part of his general retreat (apparently to the Mississippi), is threatening to retire a nuclear carrier prematurely. These would be a huge advance and commitment for Canada. In the early Cold War, the United States gave a number of ships, including aircraft carriers, to its allies.

Mr. Harper should finally look at delivering on his promise to strengthen Canada’s military. And Canada generally should stop this tedious bunk about punching above its weight, a self-serving reflex from days when all this country could do was tug at the trouser-leg of the Americans or British, and those countries had serious leaders and policies. Canada is a rich G-7 country unencumbered by excessive debt and it is punching below its weight. It is just as bad to talk a better game than we can play as it was to be a bit-player in the morally bankrupt charade conducted around the United Nations. We should stop free-loading and substituting purposeful words for appropriate action.

cbletters@gmail.com. From the National Post.