This is the best summary I could come up with:

There was an unscripted moment during a panel debate in Toronto last month that could go a long way toward explaining Canada's long-term reluctance to publicly and wholeheartedly embrace NATO's guideline for members' defence spending.

The suggestion that hard power is somehow an affront to the "international rules based order" — that jargony mouthful governments (especially Canada's) like to invoke — speaks volumes.

Joly's answer also indirectly peels back the curtain (somewhat) on what several sources within Global Affairs Canada say was at the root of the delayed delivery of the country's long-awaited Indo-Pacific strategy.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told a think-tank in Berlin in March of 2022 that he believed Moscow's war machine could be brought to its knees solely through the use of sanctions — as though soft power could somehow stop a Russian tank.

Appearing last spring on a panel at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, Defence Minister Bill Blair offered a broader glimpse of how widespread this skepticism about hard power is within the federal government.

She said that while diplomacy is the first line of defence for any civilized nation, successive federal governments over the past two decades have not invested in foreign affairs to any great degree.

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