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Two weeks ago, Canada announced it would provide staff officers to work at the new force’s six command centres in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Bulgaria and Romania.

Operation Trident Juncture, which is to be held between late September and early November in Spain, Portugal and Italy, will involve more than 25,000 troops. Canada’s contribution of 1,650 troops will include air, sea and land elements as well as special forces, Kenney said.

According to figures published by NATO this week, Canada has only spent one per cent of gross domestic product on defence, half the alliance’s goal of two per cent by all 28 member states. Kenney deflected criticism on this topic, concentrating instead on praise from NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg and other NATO ministers.

“What I heard were warm words for Canada for its high operational tempo and that it is one of 18 NATO countries this year to be increasing its defence spending,” he said. Ottawa recently outlined plans to increase defence spending by three per cent a year from 2017.

Although there was no hard Russia-bashing at the ministers’ meeting, Moscow’s actions in Ukraine were a constant theme.

Even before it began, the U.S. announced it was pre-positioning 90 Abrams tanks, more than 100 armoured fighting vehicles and highly mobile artillery guns at bases in countries with the new command centres.

The U.S. move to base heavy weapons in eastern Europe and Canada’s contributions of troops, ships and warplanes to NATO missions in eastern Europe over the past year underscore how NATO has suddenly returned to its original Cold War mission. In the 1950s and 1980s, it kept a close watch on everything Moscow did militarily. Since then, the alliance has been repurposed to conduct combat operations further afield in Afghanistan and Libya.