Canada holds first defense talks with China in more than 8 years
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Forget that China, an authoritarian regime that is doing things like routinely stealing secrets from western countries [1] and is focused on destroying European economies ability to manufacture goods, it is a practically stupid thing to do because holding talks with China while the US, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and more as the article points out are actively training (obviously all mentioned parties and more conduct additional training annually) to potentially fight a war with China to defend another democracy looks incredibly bad.
Canada stands with China against the US, Australia, Korea, Japan, New Zealand [2], and the Philippines? Yikes!
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-07/chinese-c...
[2] https://www.wsj.com/world/oceania/new-zealand-military-china...
China isn’t capable of providing any security guarantees to Canada. What’s the point here besides pissing everyone off? It is a very poor diplomatic move in my view.
The U.S. has had military talks with China. They probably weren't very productive, because Hegseth, but are you going to go out and say the U.S. is now against the U.S. because the U.S.'s military has had talks with China's? Militaries talk to each other to avoid misunderstandings and unintended escalation. Sometimes it's even about coordinating things like disaster response.
Canada is not able to project military power and has no ability to fight a war against China so I’m skeptical that these conversations make a lot of sense, well, given the timing. And of course with many Canadiens seeming to think they are “going to turn to China” in light of American tariffs or something.
But the headline and meeting with Chinese military leaders while your allies are conducting defensive operations looks kind of bad. At least in my option.
> They probably weren't very productive, because Hegseth
Hegseth is a moron who shouldn’t have been hired and should be fired immediately, but if conversations weren’t productive maybe that’s China’s fault instead.
Ukraine was having security talks all around middle east, even made agreements and they also dont have ability or wish to attack Saudi.
> meeting with Chinese military leaders while your allies are conducting defensive operations
Which Canadian ally is doimg defensive operations? I mean EU against USA did around Greenland, but who else?
> egseth is a moron who shouldn’t have been hired and should be fired immediately, but if conversations weren’t productive maybe that’s China’s fault instead.
Why would it be Chinas fault? By all we have seen America is impossible to make agreements against and Hegseth is incompetent. Why blaming China here?
What security would they talk about? I suppose there are legitimate topics, though the timing makes it look quite bad, in my view.
> Ukraine was having security talks all around middle east, even made agreements and they also dont have ability or wish to attack Saudi.
China is a Pacific Ocean away from Canada. Iran is supplying drones to Russia (who invaded and is still bombing innocent Ukrainians) and Ukraine has technology to fight against those drones at an acceptable financial/technological cost and since gulf states were under attack from Iran it sort of makes sense they would come together against a common enemy.
I'm not following your comment about "they also dont have ability or wish to attack Saudi" - are you familiar with the nature of these talks or are you making something up?
> Which Canadian ally is doimg defensive operations? I mean EU against USA did around Greenland, but who else?
Did you read the article? Or is Canada not allied (formally or close enough) with France, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States?
> Why would it be Chinas fault? By all we have seen America is impossible to make agreements against and Hegseth is incompetent. Why blaming China here?
Why wouldn't it be? Regardless of Hegseth's competency there's no reason to believe that China was productive in their talks. Have they stopped trying to take over Taiwan? Do you support Taiwanese independence?
Also true of Bondi, Noem, Bergum, RFK Jr, Patel, Carr, that podcaster who was at the FBI for 5 minutes, ...
Almost seems like the guy who hired them has no idea what he's doing.
This is not Canada siding with China. It's a middle power engaging with China to find common ground before China decides that power vacuum is too juicy to resist. Canada has a border on the Pacific too, after all.