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What Trudeau wants to emphasize in Brussels is that Canada is about to lead a NATO combat task force in Latvia. The prime minister will not want to call attention to the fact that Canada ended up there only after former foreign minister Stéphane Dion tried for months to have nothing to do with the project, lest it interfere with his dream to deploy peacekeepers to Africa.

When Canada finally put up its hand, it ended up in Latvia because Estonia and Lithuania, considered easier to defend, and with smaller Russian populations to serve as potential fifth columns, had already been spoken for by the Brits and the Germans.

He will likewise not want to draw attention to the fact that Canada is sending the fewest troops among task-force leaders in eastern Europe, and they will be the last to deploy. Not until next month will Canada begin rotating 450 troops through Latvia on six-month tours, at about the same time it will withdraw several hundred infantry trainers from another NATO mission in Poland (though it is keeping another 200 trainers in western Ukraine).

To put the numbers in perspective, even after the Canadian government finally gets around to figuring out what — if anything — it is going to do for the UN in Africa, Canada will have, at best, 1,300 combat troops deployed overseas. They are highly professional and strongly motivated, but that is still less than half the number of combat troops that Ottawa rotated through Kandahar between March 2006 and July 2011.

There is no escaping that at a time of heightened tensions in eastern Europe, an increasingly complex dynamic in the Middle East and terror attacks in Britain, France and Belgium, Canada goes to the NATO summit with a plan to spend less on defence and to do less for and with its closest security partners than it did a few years ago.

Twitter: @mfisheroverseas