maybe the 5% is warranted, because of the ongoing collapse of American hegemony?

that will depend on being able to collectively stand up to military aggression from our “allies”

I think that's a fair point, but that's a different discussion. If Carney argues that we need to triple our defense budget because we need to prepare for the USA as a threat, I'll pay close attention to his arguments. If that was the case, we'd not be considering buying equipment from the USA. But that's not what's happening. The situation is that Trump is demanding that Canada increase the spending to 5%, and there's definitely lobby from US defense contractors eyeing these expenses coming their way. So I think it's fair to criticize that jump in commitment as appeasing to Trump.

Would I do things differently if I were Carney? Maybe not. Maybe I'd think "yeah whatever let's commit to those 5% by 2035 because this orange sack will be dead by then, and let's take our contracts and award to nordic contractors" and do things exactly as Carney is doing. The fact that I find his position fair to criticize doesn't mean that I'm totally against it, it just means that there's a good discussion to have about it. And the whole point of my initial comment is that I don't think there's a good discussion to be had about our 2% commitment, that's a done deal and we should focus on how we're going to do it instead of whether we should be doing it.