A doctorate in nonsense

Vincent J. Curtis

18 July 22

RE: NATO’s new strategy is dangerous.  Op-ed by Tamara Lorencz. The Hamilton Spectator 18 July 22.

“NATO’s new strategic concept is…a plan to maintain the West’s power and wealth through armed force and the containment of other countries.”  This is what we get from a Ph.D. candidate at the Ballsillie School of International Affairs of Wilfred Laurier University? (I hasten to add, as a UWaterloo science grad!)

So banal, so predictable, so tedious, so moralistic!

I think it was David Hume who observed that you cannot draw a moral conclusion from a set of factual premises.  The Doctor of Philosophy candidate neglected to mention the moral premise behind the moralistic “maintain their power and wealth” crack.  Perhaps the post-modern premise that “if it’s western, it’s evil” is the unsaid premise, but a doctoral thesis dedication to rationality and logic would have necessitated its inclusion.  Except that logic and rationality are western intellectual concepts, and “it its western, its evil.”

Banal tediousness is found in “maintain their power and wealth.”  Is it not possible the NATO powers wish to maintain their independence and freedom through a military alliance? Is the post-modernist doctoral candidate so good at mind-reading that she dismissed this obvious purpose?  Is she not aware that NATO enabled member countries to scrimp on defence spending and enabled more social welfare spending?  Is not “force and containment” deterrence from external aggression, as was feared from the Soviet Union, and is now expressed by Russian in Ukraine?

This product of a Ph.D. candidate is what I’d expect in a Grade 12 social studies essay - from an unimaginative student thinking she’ll get better grades by affirming the prejudices of her teacher.

She concludes, “Canada should reject NATO’s new strategic concept and reconsider our continued membership in this military alliance.”  Do you know how often Canada has been advised to become a neutral country by Leftists?  Do you know how shattering it would be to Canada’s military policy if she pulled out of NATO?  To say nothing of Canada’s diplomatic position in the western world if that were to happen?  All this gets casually ignored, as if the proposal itself had no consequences.  No consideration of why Finland and Sweden, after seven decades and after the fall of the Soviet Union,  are joining NATO.  No consideration of the influence within NATO that Canada would lose if she left.

Like liberal-arts studies programs everywhere, the Ballsillie School is evidently turning out nothing but worthless, post-modernist junk.  Analyses like this are harmful in government advisory bodies because they have no contact with reality.  Business has no use for this junk.  Perhaps with her Ph.D. Dr. Lorencz can get a job managing a Timmies, or, with courses in finance, a job as a bank teller.

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