Leona Alleslev, MP and chair of the Canadian NATO Parliamentary
Association, and Elizabeth Kingston, Clerk of the House of
Commons Standing Committee on National Defence, suggested that,
with the committee looking at Canadian involvement in NATO in
the fall session, it would be useful to have some prescriptive
policy advice.cruited CGAI fellows – scholars, former
diplomats, military officers and senior officials – many of who
were at the symposium. These included Andrea Charron, Richard
Cohen, Rolf Holmboe, Andrew Rasiulis and myself – as well as
more distant fellows – CGAI Director of Programming, David
Bercuson, member of the CGAI Advisory Council, Ian Brodie, Yves
Brodeur, Julian Lindley-French and Lindsay Rodman. We also
included a pertinent essay by graduate scholar Ariel Shapiro.
Thus, this volume of essays took shape.
The Olsen book, which brought us together and started this
exercise, was an initiative of the Ministry of Defence to
strengthen American and British interest in the north, to
promote the geostrategic and security policy significance of the
Norwegian seas, and to discuss how best to secure open supply
lines and sea control within NATO’s area of responsibility. In
his concluding remarks, Col. Olsen summed up the book’s six key
recommendations:
- Renew NATO’s maritime strategy.
- Reintroduce extensive maritime exercises and sustained
presence.
- Reform NATO’s command structure.
- Invest in maritime capabilities and situational
awareness.
- Enhance maritime partnerships.
- Prepare for maritime hybrid warfare.
Our participants approached Canadian involvement in NATO from
various perspectives and each essay offers both analysis and
prescription. Their papers look at the challenges of overall
organization, those of budget, the vital importance played by
the USA and the need for the rest of the alliance to
burden-share. We address the challenges to NATO’s northern,
eastern and southern flanks, as well as the continuing
challenges in Afghanistan. And we re-examine the utility of
NATO.
David Bercuson is optimistic about NATO, but if NATO is a
“bridge among continents and nations”, then the United States is
its “central span”. Bercuson observes that because NATO was
ratified by the U.S. Senate, it would require Senate approval to
pull the U.S. out of it.
Bercuson writes that Donald Trump is wrong in many things,
but he is right to argue for more burden sharing by NATO
members. He encourages NATO allies to read up on U.S. history to
appreciate the strong isolationist strain within the U.S. body
politic warning that “another Donald Trump may well lie
somewhere else in America’s future.”
Dr. Julian Lindley-French looks at the Wales Summit (2014)
defence investment pledge whereby members all agreed to reach
the defence spending target of two per cent of GDP. While the
increase in allied spending is encouraging, he notes it has a
long way to go and that NATO pledges are thin reeds. They tend
to bend with the prevailing winds and fall back on the U.S. But
“the Bank of Mom and Dad” (as Lindley-French calls the U.S.) is
getting fed up with the perennial backsliding of the
“Euro-Juniors”, is not as flush as it once was and is now
confronting a resurgent China. There is also division within
Europe, with some wanting any new money for security spent on
domestic counter-terrorism and migrant control rather than on
“hard” NATO requirements.
If NATO is to be effective, argues Lindley-French, it “must
be able to both deter and defend at the high end of conflict,
i.e., prepare to fight and if need be win a war, while playing a
full role in protecting its home base from penetration and
attack by terrorists and globally capable criminals.”
Canada, says Lindley-French “lives in strategically relevant
neighbourhoods in which others have a profound interest, and
some of these ‘others’ are not always friendly.” This has
particular relevance for the Royal Canadian Navy and the RCAF in
their protection of North Atlantic sea lanes, the Arctic and new
challenges from the Pacific side. Lindley-French says Canada can
do its bit and truly invest in hard defence as well as sustain
its soft power skills in stabilization and reconstruction. Or it
can follow the usual European approach of pretence and empty
rhetoric.
Yves Brodeur reflects on his NATO experience as an official
of the NATO Secretariat, as the senior official for Canada’s
Afghan participation and, most recently, as Canada’s ambassador
to NATO. For Brodeur “if the end of the Cold War and the demise
of the Warsaw Pact threw NATO in soul-searching mode, September
11 catapulted the Alliance in a new dimension, much more complex
and challenging than what it was created, prepared and trained
for” and now “the aggressive actions of Russia, annexing Crimea,
destabilizing Ukraine and threatening the eastern flank of NATO
seriously tested the resolve and solidarity of the Alliance.”
Today, writes Brodeur, the challenges are compounded: “an
aggressive Russia, an assertive China, a chaotic Middle East, a
North Africa in disarray, an indecisive and divided EU, intense
migratory pressures, expanding terrorism, growing
authoritarianism including in some NATO nations, the unforeseen
strategic consequences of climate change, and an isolationist
America led by an unpredictable president.”
Brodeur offers a range of prescriptive improvements:
streamlining NATO decision-making with improved managerial
capability; avoiding narrow politicization; improving strategic
oversight versus regionalization and Eurocentrism; clear
commitments to Article 5; as well as gender diversity. Brodeur
concludes that both Canada and NATO need to “take a hard look at
(themselves) through the prism of a changing and more complex
security environment than existed in 1947.”
Ian Brodie writes that the end of the Cold War brought many
dividends: democracy and free market economics have become the
norm in many former Soviet satellites and millions have been
lifted out of grinding poverty. But, he writes, “it is now
obvious that NATO has a continuing mission … deterring Russian
adventurism today is almost as important as deterring Soviet
adventurism was a generation ago.”
The nature of the challenge has changed, says Brodie, and
defending western democracies against new modes of aggression
requires new strategies and doctrines. The West’s economic model
was vastly superior to that of the Soviet bloc but the
assumption that the global economy “dissolves authoritarian
politics” was overly optimistic.
Illiberal regimes, writes Brodie, use their access to the
global economy to subvert the democracies. They exploit
weaknesses in international trade agreements to expand their
state-connected economic enterprises overseas. He notes that
Russian gas exports to Europe are now “part and parcel” of the
economic integration shaping NATO countries’ domestic policies.
Brodie concludes with a warning: “New global political economy
has made it harder to muster the political will to implement and
enforce them.”
In my essay, I argue that the most useful role that Canada
can play in sustaining the international order is to keep Donald
Trump’s America engaged in NATO. We need to tell Americans that
they are our most important ally, and that we do not take them
for granted. First, they need to know that we will shoulder our
share of the security burden. Second, commitment means taking a
greater share of the political burden. Third, commitment means
demonstrating a greater interest in U.S. security concerns
including those out of theatre. A vital piece is explaining to
our public why NATO, collective security and the rule-based
international order matter.
So does geography.
Looking North, Andrea Charron says that the recent Defence
Policy Review is potentially a shift away from Canada’s former
position of eschewing NATO exercises in the Arctic. Charron
thinks, given tensions, we should be wary about NATO exercises
when we can accomplish the same goal – readiness without the
NATO mantle. Charron notes that five of the eight Arctic states1
are NATO members and so exercises in the European Arctic
involving NATO states are not new. The eight Arctic states
(including Russia) have formed an Arctic Coast Guard Forum and
recently completed their first live exercise in Reykjavik,
Iceland.
Charron encourages a reinvigoration of the Arctic Chiefs of
Defence meetings starting with military support for
search-and-rescue. She also argues that all Arctic nations can
benefit from better information sharing to have a more complete
understanding of the climate, the geography and the vessels of
interest in the Arctic Ocean.
Andrew Rasiulis looks at Canada’s contribution to NATO’s
eastern flank defences. He points to Canadian leadership of the
battalion-sized battle group in Latvia, (Operation REASSURANCE)
as part of NATO’s enhanced forward presence to deter Russian use
of force against NATO territory (Article 5 commitment). Canada
is making available a six-pack of CF-18 fighter jets and its
NATO out-of-area training and capacity-building mission in
Ukraine. These initiatives have “placed Canada’s commitment
squarely on the politico-military map.”
Rasiulis reviews Canada’s participation in NATO since its
origins, noting in particular its push for Article 2 (economic
partnership) during the negotiations leading to the Treaty of
Washington (1949) and then the development of a Canadian
expeditionary capacity for Europe and Korea. He notes that when
former prime minister Pierre Trudeau wanted to increase European
trade as a counterweight to the U.S. while musing about drawing
down Canada’s NATO contribution, then-chancellor Helmut Schmidt
observed “no tanks, no trade”. In looking at today’s
reinvolvement, Rasiulis argues “efforts in Latvia and Ukraine
should be matched by active diplomacy to achieve an eventual
understanding with Russia and return to future co-operation,
rather than confrontation.”
Richard Cohen points to the alarming increase in Russian
military activities on NATO’s northern and eastern flanks,
saying the way to demonstrate Canada’s commitment to this
collective security challenge is through meeting the two per
cent GDP target for defence spending.
Cohen writes that most Western armed forces have remained
focused on counter-insurgency and asymmetric warfare of the kind
NATO faced in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the Russians have rebuilt
their forces for high intensity combat, as they demonstrated in
Eastern Ukraine. Canada’s recently announced defence policy,
says Cohen, provides for relatively tiny contingency forces
modelled on Afghanistan’s operational requirements, but
inadequate for a heavy combat scenario in Europe.
Cohen says “we have entered a new kind of Cold War, this time
with an array of dangerous adversaries, from an aggressive,
resurgent Russia and a rising, assertive China to relatively
weak but dangerous rogue states like Iran and North Korea.” All
of this makes the case for a greater Canadian contribution to
collective defence.
Rolf Holmboe looks at NATO’s southern flank arguing that NATO
must engage to contain Russian and Iranian anti-access and area
denial (A2/AD) and to block Russian attempts to establish an
“axis of autocracies” in the region. NATO needs to enhance
Defence Capacity Building (DCB) and expanded military
cooperation, including enhanced air and maritime assets within
the Middle East and North Africa.
Migration pressures, says Holmboe, are another pressure point
and NATO needs to put more into crisis management readiness -
intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) assets to
counter human smuggling networks and establish a dialogue with
its southern flank neighbours around migration control, maritime
security and counter-terrorism.
A “hands-off” approach won't work, concludes Holmboe. NATO,
in tandem with the EU must address the challenges of its
southern flank if it is to contain Russia, curb terrorism and
address migratory pressures.
Lindsay Rodman looks at Afghanistan and the NATO role there,
observing that with Trump’s decision to maintain the U.S.
presence in Afghanistan, there is a role for Canada. But Canada
needs to ask some tough questions:
- First, seeking clarity and forcing a good articulation
of U.S. and NATO objectives in the region.
- Second, both the United States and NATO must think
carefully about how to approach Pakistan.
- Third, there can be no success in Afghanistan without a
political solution and a sustainable path to Afghan
self-sufficiency.
- Fourth, NATO partners may seek some clarity and
assurances about the use of private contractors in
Afghanistan.
- Fifth, NATO should offer up a deal to rename and rebrand
the mission. Even the name “Operation RESOLUTE SUPPORT”
implies lack of ownership and the never-ending commitment
that has plagued this conflict from the outset.
Ariel Shapiro has written a longer piece entitled NATO If
Necessary, But Not Necessarily NATO: Critically Evaluating
Canada’s Membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Shapiro argues that the costs of NATO membership are “higher
than often realized” while the benefits “are not as significant
as the common wisdom accepts.” He also maintains that NATO
membership is “potentially hurting Canada’s Arctic claims and
interests, and dragging Canada into a conflict it does not
need.”
While not passing judgment on Canada’s NATO membership,
Shapiro concludes: “Treating our membership in a military
alliance as an end with intrinsic worth, a grand symbol of
Canadian identity, as opposed to a means to further Canada’s
values and interests, is a mistake … There is a threshold beyond
which NATO is too costly, too risky and not beneficial enough to
justify continued Canadian membership. It is incumbent upon us
to continuously ask ourselves whether or not we have reached
that threshold.” Shapiro’s arguments encourage debate and
discussion. They are a reminder of the importance of public
argument and the need for public affairs on critical security
issues.
Canada played a critical role in NATO’s creation. In his
memoirs, Lester B. Pearson entitled the chapter on Canada’s
critical role in NATO’s creation “Atlantic Vision”. He and his
colleagues – Hume Wrong, Norman Robertson and Escott Reid – put
effort into NATO’s creation because it served Canadian interests
and values. Article 2, encouraging economic collaboration among
its members, was very much a Canadian initiative. With the
implementation of the Canada-European Union Comprehensive
Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), we continue to realize the
promise of the Atlantic community.
Preserving the peace and deterring aggression during the Cold
War, NATO managed the reunification of Germany and the
integration into NATO of the eastern European nations and those
of the former Yugoslavia. The original 12 have expanded to 29,
with continuing active engagement both within and out of
theatre.
The Trudeau government’s recent Defence Policy Review,
‘Strong, Secure, Engaged’, declares that the NATO alliance has
been a central pillar of Euro-Atlantic defence and a cornerstone
of Canadian defence and security policy ever since. NATO
provides significant benefits to Canada’s security and its
global interests and NATO membership also carries important
obligations.
We hope that these essays will stimulate discussion and
provoke debate about Canada’s involvement in NATO and how best
we can carry out our obligations within this fundamentally
important alliance.
Colin Robertson September 2017
End Note 1 Finland, Russia and Sweden are
not NATO members.
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