Canada holds first defense talks with China in more than 8 years

Posted by ilamont 20 hours ago

Comments

Comment by beloch 20 hours ago

While the U.S. is doing... whatever it is they're doing right now, it's probably not a bad thing for the world's middle powers to build bridges with China and steer them away from doing stupid things. There are enough stupid things happening in the world right now.

Comment by vsgherzi 19 hours ago

I’m not exactly a fan of certain policies being pushed in the US but aligning with China is a bad idea. Chances are if you’re is disagreement with US policies you’re going to be in disagreement with China’s policies even more.

Comment by beloch 19 hours ago

The trouble is that the U.S. is threatening annexation and waging trade war on the West while pulling its military assets (e.g. All carriers) out of Asia with no diplomatic successes to keep the area stable. There's a power vacuum around Taiwan now. Middle powers have to step in, and this is an example of that.

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.

Comment by ericmay 19 hours ago

The Canadians who think this or more is a good idea have lost their minds.

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...

Comment by watwut 17 hours ago

Canada needs to stand against the country openly talking about annexarion.

Comment by ericmay 10 hours ago

And stand against Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, and others?

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.

Comment by beloch 5 hours ago

https://www.scmp.com/news/us/article/3336686/senior-us-and-c...

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.

Comment by ericmay 4 hours ago

Well no because that wouldn’t make sense. I didn’t accuse Canada of going against Canada’s interests simply by virtue of having talks though I think ultimately such talks are likely to.

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.

Comment by watwut 2 hours ago

Why would Canada need the ability to fight against China for security talks to make sense?

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?

Comment by ericmay 2 hours ago

> Why would Canada need the ability to fight against China for security talks to make sense?

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?

Comment by jakeinspace 9 hours ago

China hasn't invaded another country this century.