Rough video transcript
Canada just applied to join a military coalition built to respond to a crisis before that crisis turns into a full NATO war. Which sounds a little strange, because the Joint Expeditionary Force is overwhelmingly Northern European.
Britain. Norway. Sweden. Finland. Denmark. Iceland. The Netherlands. Estonia. Latvia. Lithuania.
And now Canada wants in.
The reason becomes much clearer if you stop looking at the normal map of Europe and turn your attention north.
Because from the Canadian Arctic, through Greenland and Iceland, across the Norwegian Sea and into the Baltic, NATO’s northern flank is increasingly becoming one connected military problem.
And Canada is already sitting at both ends of it.
Hey friends, Wes O’Donnell here. Defense journalist, Army and Air Force veteran. And I believe in donut diplomacy. I’m going to eat this whole box of Tim Horton donuts to show my support for Canada.
[Cut away to Wes eating Tim Horton’s.]
I know it’s a sacrifice. But we do what we have to do.
Canada formally applied in September to join the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force, or JEF, a ten-country military coalition focused on the North Atlantic, High North and Baltic Sea.
And as I’m recording this, Canada’s defense minister is in Iceland meeting with JEF counterparts while the coalition runs Exercise Lion Protector across the region. The UK says Canada’s membership application is specifically part of the agenda.
At first glance, this looks like another piece of Ottawa’s rapidly expanding defense relationship with Europe.
There’s a much more interesting military story underneath it.
Canada already commands thousands of NATO troops in Latvia.
Canada shares roughly 3,000 kilometers of maritime boundary with the Kingdom of Denmark through Greenland.
Canada has signed new defense agreements with Denmark and Iceland.
Canadian aircraft already participated in a JEF exercise across Estonia, Finland, Lithuania and Latvia last year.
And Canada has built a separate maritime security partnership with Norway, Denmark, Germany and now Iceland across the North Atlantic.
Put those pieces on a map and Canada’s JEF application begins to look much less like a diplomatic side project.
It looks like another piece of a northern defense network stretching from Canada’s Arctic all the way to Russia’s border.
So, what is JEF?
The Joint Expeditionary Force grew out of NATO’s 2014 Wales Summit, right after Russia seized Crimea. Britain acts as the framework nation. The original group included Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway and the UK. Finland and Sweden joined in 2017. Iceland became the tenth member in 2021.
Every current JEF member is also a NATO member.
That raises an obvious question…
Why create another military organization when NATO already exists?
Because NATO and JEF solve different organizational problems.
NATO has 32 members spread across a huge geographic area. Decisions can involve governments from Portugal to Türkiye to Canada. The alliance has enormous military resources, formal defense plans and Article 5 sitting behind the entire structure.
JEF is much smaller.
Its countries are geographically concentrated around Northern Europe, the Baltic and the High North. They share many of the same immediate security problems and train specifically to operate together in that region. And JEF has built something called Joint Expeditionary Force Response Options.
These are pre-developed packages for different kinds of crises.
They can begin with intelligence sharing and political signaling, then expand through maritime, air, land or cyber deployments depending on what is happening.
The important word there is pre-developed.
If a suspicious incident occurs, commanders aren’t necessarily beginning with a blank sheet of paper while eleven ministries debate what everyone might theoretically contribute.
The military options have already been discussed, planned and exercised.
That gives JEF a particularly interesting role during the ugly period between obvious peace and obvious war.
And modern Russia spends a great deal of time operating in exactly that space.
Here’s where JEF becomes much more interesting than its terrible bureaucratic name suggests.
Imagine a Russian tank formation crossing Latvia’s border.
That is straightforward.
Nobody needs a committee meeting to determine whether tanks invading Latvia constitute a security problem.
Hybrid warfare is harder.
An undersea communications cable suddenly breaks.
A commercial ship with obscure ownership drags an anchor across critical infrastructure.
GPS signals disappear.
A cyberattack hits a power grid.
An unidentified drone wanders toward a military installation.
A Russian intelligence vessel appears somewhere unusually inconvenient.
Each incident may be serious.
None necessarily gives NATO the clean, unmistakable armed attack its collective-defense machinery was originally designed around.
JEF has increasingly focused on that gap.
At its March summit, the ten participating governments explicitly said they wanted the coalition capable of reacting quickly to security threats that remain below NATO’s Article 5 threshold.
They specifically identified Russia’s shadow fleet and hybrid warfare as priorities.
And they’ve already built a fascinating system for doing it.
This might be my favorite part of the entire story.
In January 2025, after damage to the Estlink-2 power cable between Finland and Estonia, the Joint Expeditionary Force activated an operation called Nordic Warden.
It uses software to monitor ships operating around critical infrastructure.
Automatic Identification System broadcasts, shipping movements and other information feed into a risk-assessment system.
Ships identified as belonging to Russia’s shadow fleet can be entered into the system for closer monitoring.
The software then evaluates vessels approaching areas of interest.
If something looks suspicious, Nordic Warden can flag the vessel, monitor it in real time and distribute warnings to JEF countries and NATO.
So, while most people hear “expeditionary force” and imagine Royal Marines storming beaches somewhere, part of the JEF’s actual job now involves watching tankers creep around subsea cables with computers deciding which one deserves more attention.
Welcome to warfare in 2026.
The coalition has also activated military response options to protect critical undersea infrastructure before.
After damage to Baltic infrastructure in 2023, JEF deployed maritime and air capabilities across the region.
That was the first activation of one of its formal response options.
And this matters enormously for Canada.
Because Canada has exactly the kind of geography where the line between Arctic sovereignty, maritime surveillance, critical infrastructure and military defense gets very blurry very quickly.
Most political maps make Canada and Northern Europe look extremely far apart.
They’re not.
Look across the Arctic and North Atlantic instead.
Canada sits beside Greenland.
Greenland belongs to the Kingdom of Denmark.
Canada says it shares roughly 3,000 kilometers of maritime boundary with the Kingdom of Denmark.
East of Greenland sits Iceland.
Keep moving east and you reach the Faroe Islands, Britain and Norway.
North of there is the Arctic Ocean.
Keep following the northern coastline toward Russia and you eventually reach Finland.
Move south and east and you reach Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Those countries make up most of the JEF.
Russia occupies the other side of that geography.
Canada’s government has spent much of 2026 building bilateral agreements along almost exactly that route.
In February, Canada signed a defense cooperation agreement with Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands covering logistics, exercises, personnel, defense industry and military cooperation. In June, Canada signed another defense cooperation agreement with Iceland focused partly on Arctic security and joint training.
Canada already works with Denmark, Germany, Norway and Iceland through its Maritime Security Partnership, which aims to improve maritime awareness and information sharing across the North Atlantic. None of these agreements replaces NATO.
Taken together, though, they show how Canada’s northern defense relationships are becoming denser.
And then there is Latvia.
Canada joining JEF would sound considerably more dramatic if Canadian forces weren’t already deeply embedded in the exact region JEF exists to defend. Operation REASSURANCE is Canada’s largest overseas military mission. Canada leads NATO’s Multinational Brigade in Latvia. Ottawa says up to roughly 2,200 Canadian Armed Forces personnel are persistently deployed there, within a multinational brigade of around 3,000 Allied troops. Canada also has hundreds of military vehicles in Latvia, aviation elements and cyber personnel working with Latvian authorities.
And in July, Canada took another step upward.
Canada joined Denmark and Latvia as one of three framework nations for NATO’s Multinational Division North.
That division sits above the Canadian-led brigade in NATO’s command structure and helps coordinate the defense of the region.
That detail matters.
Canada isn’t arriving in Northern Europe asking where everyone keeps the coffee.
Canada already has a major command responsibility on NATO’s eastern flank.
It has maintained troops in Latvia since 2017.
It has invested more than $315 million Canadian in Latvian military infrastructure.
Its brigade now includes troops from fourteen NATO countries.
And Canadian forces have already trained directly inside the JEF system.
During Exercise TARASSIS in 2025, Royal Canadian Air Force personnel operated from Estonia while conducting missions involving Finland, Lithuania and Latvia.
Canada wasn’t a JEF member.
It was already learning how to fight with one.
This is the question I kept coming back to while researching this.
If Canada already belongs to NATO, commands forces in Latvia, works with Nordic allies and participates in JEF exercises, what does formal JEF membership actually add?
Speed is part of the answer.
Geographic specialization is another.
JEF’s response options are designed around a fairly narrow map and a fairly narrow group of likely problems.
A Baltic cable gets cut.
A Russian shadow-fleet tanker starts behaving suspiciously.
An unidentified military presence appears around important infrastructure.
A regional crisis suddenly requires additional aircraft, ships, cyber teams or troops.
JEF members have spent years rehearsing those specific contingencies.
Exercise Lion Protector 26 is happening right now.
One portion involved escorting a Danish ship carrying military equipment to Latvia.
Other phases include protection of critical infrastructure in Iceland, operations across the North Atlantic and the deployment of a JEF headquarters into the High North.
Royal Marines even exercised in the Faroe Islands this year for the first time since the Second World War.
That is almost a diagram of Canada’s emerging security geography.
Arctic.
North Atlantic.
Iceland.
Faroe Islands.
Baltic logistics.
Latvia.
Joining JEF would put Canada inside the planning structure connecting those pieces. And there’s another Canadian reason this matters. For most of the post-war era, you could roughly divide Canadian defense into two geographic problems. North America meant NORAD and the United States. Europe meant NATO.
That distinction is becoming much less tidy.
A Russian submarine leaving the Kola Peninsula enters waters relevant to Norway, Britain, Iceland, Canada and the United States.
Russian aircraft operating across the Arctic approaches can matter to NORAD and NATO simultaneously.
The same northern seas contain submarine routes, military bases, energy infrastructure, communications cables and the reinforcement routes NATO would need during a European war.
Canada’s Arctic is not sitting at the end of this system.
It sits along one side of it.
That is why JEF’s own leaders now describe the Baltic Sea, High North and North Atlantic as a single interconnected geostrategic region.
Their words, not mine.
And once you accept that premise, Canada’s application suddenly looks much less exotic.
Canada is an Arctic NATO country with military responsibilities in Latvia.
JEF is a coalition designed around Arctic, North Atlantic and Baltic security.
The overlap is enormous.
There’s another development worth watching here.
Britain is trying to turn the northern European navies around JEF into something much more integrated.
The Royal Navy has proposed what it calls a Northern Navies arrangement.
The concept involves navies that train together, plan together, share logistics, use common digital networks and potentially operate persistent crewed and uncrewed systems across the North Atlantic and High North.
The British First Sea Lord described the ambition as moving from periodic cooperation toward a persistent integrated maritime force.
Canada is not automatically part of that arrangement simply because it has applied to JEF.
That distinction matters.
Still, Canada’s membership bid places Ottawa directly beside the governments building it.
And Canada has its own reason to care about persistent northern surveillance.
The Canadian Armed Forces are expanding Arctic operations.
Ottawa is spending billions on new northern support hubs, sensors and NORAD modernization.
Canada is also negotiating for Saab GlobalEye airborne early-warning aircraft, which would dramatically improve its ability to build a persistent air and maritime picture across enormous northern distances. Canada’s European and Arctic defense investments are beginning to point toward the same requirement:
See farther.
Share the picture faster.
Move forces before a crisis becomes a war.
That is essentially the JEF operating philosophy.
I think this is the bigger change hiding inside Canada’s application.
For decades, people tended to talk about NATO as one giant alliance.
Thirty-two governments.
One treaty.
One Article 5 commitment.
That legal structure remains the foundation.
Operationally, something more distributed is developing underneath it.
Britain and the Nordics work through JEF.
Canada leads a multinational brigade in Latvia.
Canada, Denmark and Latvia now share responsibility for Multinational Division North.
Regional navies are integrating around the North Atlantic.
Nordic countries increasingly coordinate Arctic security.
Smaller groups can prepare responses to specific problems while staying connected to NATO’s larger command structure. That reduces one of the hardest problems in coalition warfare: the time required to organize everyone after the emergency has already started. JEF’s Response Options exist precisely to shorten that process. And the category change is especially important because the opening phase of a future confrontation with Russia may not resemble the opening of February 2022 in Ukraine.
There may be no enormous armored column waiting on a border.
The first crisis could involve a cable.
A tanker.
A cyberattack.
A drone.
An unexplained explosion.
A navigation outage.
A suspicious submarine movement.
The challenge is identifying when several ambiguous events have stopped being random incidents and become a coordinated military campaign.
A geographically focused coalition that already shares information, operational plans and response options becomes very useful in that environment.
For Canada, that means defending the Arctic and defending Europe increasingly involve many of the same allies watching many of the same Russian forces across the same northern battlespace.
There is one very important limit to this story.
Canada has applied to join JEF.
Canada has not yet joined.
The ten existing members still have to complete the membership process, and ministers in Iceland are currently discussing the Canadian application.
JEF also has no equivalent of NATO’s Article 5 mutual-defense guarantee.
It is a military cooperation framework, not a replacement alliance.
Its response options are useful because participating governments have planned them in advance, although governments still make political decisions about what forces they contribute during an actual crisis.
And membership doesn’t magically create Canadian military capacity.
A coalition can improve command relationships, intelligence sharing and interoperability.
It cannot conjure another frigate out of Halifax Harbor.
Canada is currently rebuilding large pieces of its military at the same time it is assuming more international responsibilities.
New submarines remain years away.
Canada’s prospective GlobalEye fleet is still in negotiation.
Many Canadian modernization projects remain somewhere between announcement, contract and fielded capability.
So the value of JEF membership will ultimately depend on what Canada can actually contribute.
That is the appropriate test.
Still, look at the map again.
Canada.
Greenland.
Iceland.
The Faroes.
Britain.
Norway.
Sweden.
Finland.
The Baltic states.
That chain runs almost continuously across NATO’s northern approaches.
Canada already has soldiers at the far eastern end in Latvia.
It is expanding its military presence at the western end in the Canadian Arctic.
The Joint Expeditionary Force operates across everything between them.
That is why I don’t think Canada’s application should be understood primarily as Ottawa moving deeper into European defense.
The geography is telling us something more important.
Arctic defense, North Atlantic security and Baltic deterrence are increasingly becoming parts of the same military problem.
Russia already treats the northern approaches as connected.
NATO’s northern countries are beginning to organize themselves the same way. And Canada appears ready to take a seat at that table.
That’s it for today, my friends. If this kind of military and geopolitical analysis is useful, please hit the thumbs up and subscribe. I cover Canada, NATO, Ukraine and the technologies changing modern warfare four times a week.
And as always, Glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes, Crimea is Ukraine.
