Timing’s pretty good for this week’s return of a podcast episode you probably missed.

The timing is this week’s NATO summit, which featured commitments from all member states, including Canada, to spend even more on our assorted militaries than the even more we’ve already pledged to spend. It also featured the alliance’s secretary-general, Mark Rutte, texting his extravagant praise to Donald Trump, which the US president took all of one minute to share with the world:

This raises a question: what’s Canada buying with an incremental $50 to $150 billion a year, which incidentally is up to six times the incremental health-care spending the provinces sought in vain two years ago? Independence? The right to join a Donald Trump flattery club? Bit of both?

These are handy questions to keep in mind in a week when Canada’s prime minister shows up in Brussels praising the “triple alignment of values, of interest and of trust” that makes Canada the “most European of non-European countries.” Which values? Trust whom? And precisely how interesting do we want things to get?

These are, to some extent, Zen riddles. They don’t have definitive answers. That’s okay: they’ll still be there the next time you have spare bandwidth to think about them. Europeans’ proper distance from one another, and from trans-Atlantic allies of great and modest means, are eternal questions.

Few Europeans have spent longer considering these questions than Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European studies at Oxford, sometime journalist and chronicler of Europe’s growing pains since the 1970s. I spoke to him two years ago, when he had a new book out, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe. It’s a kind of reported memoir, the story of Ash’s own travels through Europe from the last days of the Cold War to the deepening disillusionment of the new century’s first decades. It’s intended as a spiritual sequel to Tony Judt’s great history/ essay, Postwar.

Ash’s book, as I wrote when I first ran this episode, is studded with excellent old Iron Curtain jokes (“‘Socialism,’ went the joke in Budapest, ‘is the longest and most painful road from capitalism to capitalism’”). It takes note of ironies of history. “One might even say that the West won the Cold War because it feared it was losing it,” he writes. “The contrast with the early 2000s is instructive. At the turn of the millennium, giddy with success and seeing no major systemic rival, the West became complacent and hubristic. Just look what happened next.”

And of course Ash’s book notes the big moments in Europe in his lifetime: 1945, 1968, 1989, 2016, 2022. “I felt a pang when the European flags came down on official buildings in Britain after Brexit,” he writes, “and we were faced instead with the spectacle of Churchill-parody Boris Johnson blustering away flanked only by two Union Jacks. Something larger was lost, as important as freedom of movement or membership of the single market: an aspiration to be at once our national selves and something more than just our national selves.”

Ash was one of the first prominent English-language writers whose idea of Europe was big enough to match the EU’s current borders. He fell in love with Central Europe early. He gets the whole space, in a way that too few mid-Atlantic Canadians do. He also has a marvellously plummy accent, and crackerjack anecdotes about what Blair, Bush, Thatcher and others were like behind closed doors.

“I’ve said often, only half in jest, that Canada would be a perfect member of the EU,” he says in the excerpt from our interview that leads this episode. My read of the relevant treaties is that it could never happen, but no matter: if any kind of closer relationship sounds only like flattery — instead of like a challenge as big as the potential benefit — then we haven’t been paying attention. And Europeans always notice when Canadians haven’t been paying attention.

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I am grateful to be the Max Bell Foundation Senior Fellow at McGill University, the principal patron of this podcast. Antica Productions turns these interviews into a podcast every week. Kevin Breit wrote and performed the theme music. Andy Milne plays it on piano at the end of each episode. Thanks to all of them and to you. Please tell your friends to subscribe to The Paul Wells Show on their favourite podcast app, or here on the newsletter.