{"id":180740,"date":"2019-06-05T09:31:26","date_gmt":"2019-06-05T09:31:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/75-years-after-d-day-has-the-old-alliance-fallen-apart.html"},"modified":"2019-06-05T09:31:26","modified_gmt":"2019-06-05T09:31:26","slug":"75-years-after-d-day-has-the-old-alliance-fallen-apart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/political\/75-years-after-d-day-has-the-old-alliance-fallen-apart.html","title":{"rendered":"75 years after D-Day, has the old alliance fallen apart?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A disjointed and politically distracted collection of allied nations, including Canada, will gather in Britain Wednesday to kick off a series of commemorations to mark the 75th anniversary of the June 6, 1944 D-Day landings.<\/p>\n

The Queen and British Prime Minister Theresa May will host representatives from each nation that fought in Normandy for a ceremony in the Southsea Common area of Portsmouth, where the vast majority of British, Canadian and American troops departed for the invasion.<\/p>\n

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be there, as will U.S. President Donald Trump, whose state visit to Britain this week\u00a0triggered massive protests and Twitter-storms of public outrage.<\/p>\n

British media report that\u00a0some residents of Portsmouth, long known for their displays of\u00a0hospitality to returning veterans, plan to skip the ceremony \u2014 partly to show their disapproval of the U.S. president and partly because of\u00a0the extraordinary extent of security measures planned for the event,\u00a0which include the erection of\u00a0a high steel fence around the site.<\/p>\n

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A man holds a banner depicting President Donald Trump kissing Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage during a protest against the state visit of President Donald Trump, Tuesday, June 4, 2019. (Matt Dunham\/The Associated Press)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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With May about to step down as prime minister and Trudeau preoccupied with this fall’s federal election, the gathering presents an interesting contrast to the steely image of unity in adversity\u00a0that D-Day is supposed to represent.<\/p>\n

The invasion of Hitler’s ‘fortress Europe’ was not merely an extraordinary feat of arms, logistics and military planning. It was also a remarkable political achievement \u2014 one that has prompted historians and pundits over the decades to wonder whether it could ever be repeated.<\/p>\n

To be sure, the allies were a rancorous lot in 1944,\u00a0with Russian dictator\u00a0Joseph Stalin’s distrust of\u00a0the western democracies and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt’s disdain for France’s Charles DeGaulle.<\/p>\n

What united them were common enemies.<\/p>\n

Glimmers of unity<\/h2>\n

Marc Milner, director of the Gregg Centre for the Study of War at the University of New Brunswick, said we’ve seen flashes of that kind of unity during the interceding decades, notably in the first Gulf War against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.<\/p>\n

“So yes, I suspect we could do something similar to D-Day again,” said Milner, offering the caveat that nations would have to be properly\u00a0galvanized into action.<\/p>\n

What we likely won’t see again, he said,\u00a0is another\u00a0total industrial war.<\/p>\n

“The likelihood of an all-out and prolonged conventional war with mass mobilization of people and industry is, however, unlikely in the nuclear age,” Milner said.<\/p>\n

“In modern total war, our role is largely passive. We can stay at home and watch the missiles coming in on our TVs.”<\/p>\n

NATO as a political football<\/h2>\n

When the allies planned D-Day, they had to invent and negotiate many of the structures and procedures necessary to carry out the invasion.<\/p>\n

That kind of cooperation still exists today in the “well-developed military structure” that is NATO, said Walter Dorn, a professor of defence studies at the Royal Military College of Canada.<\/p>\n

It’s an institution that allies can plug into for major deployments and would make it easier today to politically organize a major multinational campaign.<\/p>\n

But since the end of the Cold War, NATO has expanded to include 29 members with disparate interests. Many NATO partners\u00a0squabble\u00a0over both the alliance’s\u00a0decision-making process and the cost of maintaining the military alliance.<\/p>\n

Trump has openly mused about pulling the U.S. out of NATO unless allies continue to increase their defence spending, demanding that more of them meet the two per cent of GDP\u00a0target that has become the alliance’s benchmark.<\/p>\n

Political paralysis<\/h2>\n

Dorn said political paralysis in domestic decision-making would make another D-Day difficult to stage these days.<\/p>\n

He pointed to the unfulfilled peacekeeping promises made to the United Nations by the current Liberal government.<\/p>\n

“The painfully slow progress of Canada to live up to its UN commitments in peacekeeping does make me wonder how fast the Canadian government could mobilize to meet other commitments, particularly ones involving high risk,” he said \u00a0<\/p>\n

“The Trudeau government has avoided risky commitments in peacekeeping and has left the heavy lifting to others.\u00a0So in the case of a major outbreak of conflict, one would have to wonder how quick and dependable Canada would be.”<\/p>\n

Still, Canada proved to be a stalwart ally in Afghanistan and has taken leadership positions in both NATO’s Iraq training mission and the Baltics, commanding a battle group there intended to deter Russian aggression.<\/p>\n

Although both missions are risky, they represent safe political choices at a time when western democracies are unwilling to tolerate the casualties associated with modern conflicts.<\/p>\n

And\u00a0that \u2014 perhaps more than political and trade differences \u2014 would make another D-Day an unlikely proposition.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Article source: https:\/\/www.cbc.ca\/news\/politics\/dday-normandy-portsmouth-trump-trudeau-nato-1.5162431?cmp=rss<\/a>\r\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A disjointed and politically distracted collection of allied nations, including Canada, will gather in Britain Wednesday to kick off a series of commemorations to mark the 75th anniversary of the June 6, 1944 D-Day landings. The Queen and British Prime Minister Theresa May will host representatives from each nation that fought in Normandy for a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[84],"class_list":["post-180740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political","tag-political"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180740\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.timesofnews.com\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}