US ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, when he told CBC News that if the Canadian government doesn’t buy the full complement of US-made F-35 fighter jets for NORAD purposes, US fighter jets might have to operate more in Canadian airspace.

The US Department of War (formally the Department of Defense) recently announced a pause to the working of the Permanent Joint Board on Defense (PJBD), a high-level planning body that predates NORAD, signed in 1940 by then Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King and then US president Franklin D. Roosevelt. The PJBD was designed to be, as its official description has it, “a senior advisory body on continental security for Canada and the United States and forum for Canadian and American diplomatic and military leaders to handle politically sensitive matters.”

Its deliberations once shaped the creation of NORAD. When Elbridge Colby, a senior Pentagon official, announced the suspension on X on a Monday morning, he included a link to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech. The speech has irked the Trump administration, who see it (justly) as an attack on US policies. It has also opened a path for a charge that the Canadian government is too prone to empty rhetorical flourishes.

Closing shop on the PJBD does not spell the end of NORAD, but it’s a potent signal that the US could itself decide to walk away from the continental defence pact or apply inordinate pressure on Canada to conform to US defence demands and outlooks if it doesn’t like the shape of Canadian commitments.

The Trump administration is increasingly focused on a made-in-America hegemonic policy and a “Fortress America” approach.