Canada in the World: Canadian International Policy

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Video Interview 

Note: The opinions presented are not necessarily those of the Government of Canada.

Deterrence, Not Disarmament	5 min 02 sec	Windows Media l QuickTime
Threat of Isolationism	5 min 25 sec	Windows Media l QuickTime

Deterrence, Not Disarmament

It was when I came to British Columbia that I had the opportunity to teach Strategic Studies for the first time, and that really got me interested in the history of the arms race and the role that Canada has played in it. That also partly grew out of a book that I did on Canadian foreign policy—In the Interests of Peace: Canada and Vietnam,1954-1975. In my investigations and research on the Vietnam book, I discovered that in fact concerns about risks of nuclear escalation had appeared at various points along the way. Many of the main lines of policy formation inside the American decision-making elite were shaped very much by their thinking about the nuclear arms race, about the prospects and desirability of accepting parity with the former Soviet Union, questions about how to deal with China, whether to try to prevent China from ever acquiring a nuclear capability. Those questions were on the table, but not overtly, not publicly. Those kinds of issues and debates one really only finds out about through fairly careful historical investigation. So that’s really what tweaked my original interest in all of this and got me involved in thinking about nuclear weapons in a systematic way. As well, of course, being from an older generation, the more practical concern that really we were living in an incredibly unstable world.

The problem of nuclear weapons, of weapons of mass destruction, remains with us. And that’s why I have not left thinking about strategic studies—because these are issues that remain unresolved. The whole question of getting rid of weapons of mass destruction, I think, is pivotal. Most analysts, most commentators in international politics, I think, can be sorted out by their attitude about whether they think, yea or nay, that eliminating several categories of weapons is possible, is conceivable, in any circumstances. A good many realists do not believe it’s possible. By and large, they think that the rest of the 21st century is going to be all about learning to live with ever more destructive technologies that various governments develop. You can’t disinvent nuclear weapons; you can’t disinvent biotech industries that are going to lead to all sorts of weapons-related breakthroughs. The best you can do is manage it; and you can’t get rid of human conflict. It’s going to get bad; in many places it’s going to get worse, and great power conflicts are always going to be with us.

So one has to work within a deterrence paradigm rather than a disarmament paradigm; defence and deterrence or disarmament. On a lot of issues, short to medium term, I am more in the realist camp than in the idealist camp. One could say the people who believe in the possibility of disarmament or some kind of political transformation of the international system are in that second category. And generally, short to medium term, I am certainly more in the realist camp about what can be done. But in the longer term, I think the global community, to the extent that it can really become a global community and not just a word, has to move beyond these weapons technologies. They are simply too dangerous; they are not susceptible to permanent rational control and restraint. We came very, very close to disaster during the Cuban missile crisis; there could very well have been millions of people killed as a result of that uncontrolled major exchange between the Soviets and the Americans.

That hasn’t sunk in. A lot of people have seen The Fog of War, which is a very good film, and haven’t really assimilated what that film is all about—when you have somebody who was at the centre of American decision making through those crucial years, in the early 60s but right through the Vietnam War era, and then for the last 25 years has campaigned very, very hard against reliance on nuclear weapons. McNamara is one of the most interesting personalities in the whole history of the Cold War and afterwards. He is not a nuclear disarmer in the sense that he thinks that there’s any way to go to zero, but he does think that nuclear weapons have to be taken off the table by the major powers indefinitely. But until you can devise a completely airtight, highly reliable verification system, you can’t ever really go to zero; you’ll have to have a minimum deterrent. But a minimum deterrent by the major states would be infinitely safer than having thousands of nuclear weapons around, and having various governments putting their nuclear forces on hair-trigger alerts.

Threat of Isolationism

If you have climate change, major shifts, loss in food production potentially in Central Eurasia and parts of Africa, massive drought, and you add to that mix proliferating nuclear weapons and some governments trying to intimidate others to extract emergency aid to stop their starving millions, etc., this is a recipe for complete chaos. We have to go the other way, we have to exercise the kind of collective restraint in controlling these technologies, in forging a common approach to a fair, sensible environmental and economic division of assets, resources, jobs and pollution quotas so that we don’t poison ourselves. That would seem to me to be, prima facie, what we should be doing but we’re not. We are still working within, essentially, a 19th-century paradigm of balance of power and manoeuvring, and that way, I think, is catastrophic.

So, what can Canada do? Go back to doing the kind of regime building, and do it better, do it with greater credibility, by spending substantially more on defence, on foreign aid, on taking an active role in trying to reduce and end conflicts where they’re spreading, by showing the good will of the Northern developed countries towards the South—that we’re not going to try and write them off and follow lifeboat ethics, as I think a good many Americans seem to be inclined to do.

George Bush’s warning about isolationism I take to heart. I think isolation is a very practical option for the United States—so much so that I fear it. I think that the only thing worse than a preponderant, imperial America out there trying to transform the world into democracies everywhere with its Wilsonianism with teeth, the only thing I fear more is pulling back completely to North America and doing nothing—putting up walls and barriers and letting the poor rot, letting them kill each other off because it’s their problem, not ours, and we can look after ourselves just fine, thank you, in our hemispheric lifeboat. Canadians would be tempted by that approach, greatly, and that would be a huge mistake. That way is writing a very short chapter for the rest of the human future. It’s not a good way to go.

Doing what the Canadian government and the Canadian community has stood for over the last 50 years, in terms of building up the UN, building up international agencies, building up international institutions, collective security, and multilateral cooperation on the security side, as well as the foreign aid side, that is the way to go. For that reason, even though I think the war in Afghanistan is really dangerous and may blow up in our face and may poison a whole lot of Canadians in terms of our thinking about involvement abroad, it’s the only game we’ve got in town. You either support that, or you stay home and be isolationist. But we should be doing Afghanistan, and that other country we’ve forgotten about, Haiti. We should be doing the Great Lakes region in Africa. And we could do it! With 2 percent of GDP going to defence, we would have options for doing those kinds of things with other countries, with other middle powers.

And I think you would suddenly get a very different response in Washington when you talked security. They wouldn’t see us as the permanent kings of free-riderdom that we have become, and indeed the biggest hypocrites. Because a lot of what we’re doing, in fact... they just dismiss us as windbags, as windy moralizers. We aren’t serious about security because if we were, we would in fact have an appropriate insurance policy with 2.5 to 3 percent of GDP being spent on defence. A whole lot of conservative critics in the States, who are further right than the Bush administration, think this administration’s biggest mistake is that they are not spending nearly enough on defence. Even with supplemental appropriations, they have only taken U.S. spending from about 2.8 percent of GDP maybe up towards 4 percent. At a minimum, they think, get back to Cold War levels of 6 or 7 percent, and then you can be the world’s dominant power indefinitely.

They may be right, but I want us to build up so that we can be a major player, a serious player, somebody with credentials, vision, direction. Somebody committed to multilateral global disarmament, but in the short term, in the near term, to arms control that means something, so that we can free up the resources (aid goes up, not just defence goes up) to tackle the major environmental and demographic crises that we are going to be facing in the next 10 to 20 years. Afghanistan all by itself is not something you just want to look at on its merits and think this is a one-off deal. This is the first of a whole series of crises that are coming. Rwanda was the first of a continuing series—the major war in eastern Congo, which continues in parts of Rwanda, Uganda, that whole region. All of southern Africa is a potential powder keg. The AIDS crisis all across Africa is creating an unbelievably horrific humanitarian catastrophe. We should be playing a role there, front and centre.

Last Updated:2006-10-16

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