Paul Chapin retired last year as Vice President of the Lester B. Pearson Peacekeeping Centre following a career as a foreign service officer. His last appointment in DFAIT was as Director General, International Security Bureau, and he previously served as Canadian Representation on the NATO Political Committee. He currently serves on the Board of the Conference of Defence Association International.

Canada’s National Strategic Relations: NATO and NORAD

It is a privilege to be speaking with you today. My function is to talk about Canada’s interests in NATO from a strategic perspective and the options that Canada has in dealing with NATO. Canada historically can count for its security on two vast oceans, the arctic, and a benign nation but with the development of technology we have had to rely on three pillars for security: active defences to the extent that they made sense and various governments felt they could afford; alliance with the U.S.; and, membership in the broader defence community of NATO. The first two pillars were natural steps for Canada to take, as it had to look at how it would defend itself and work out allies. The third one, the notion of joining an alliance in peace time was very foreign to Canada with the obligation of sending troops, and it was as alien to the U.S. The only thing to justify this would be the perilous condition of Europe and the Soviet Threat should the Soviet Union take control of the countries fought so hard to liberate.

Conditions today are very different. There is no need to have an organization that involves defence of Europe with the U.S. and Canada as they are more than capable of defending themselves. That doesn’t mean that Canada has to go back  to the first two pillars, instead Canada has a continuing interest in being part of a common defence organization that provides for the defence of all democratic states. NATO can be adapted to be that organization because its main purpose has always been far beyond the defence of Europe and its mandate is broad enough to provide for a new mission. It is important for Canada to help NATO adapt, but if the organization cannot do so, it doesn’t make sense for Canada to commit itself to an organization with a Eurocentric mandate. It is in Canada’s interests to take a leadership role in helping NATO adapt to the new circumstances but if NATO proves that it can’t or is unwilling to do so then Canada needs to spend some time thinking about a new defence architecture.

It is hard to look to the policy of the future without knowing the past circumstances. Canadian public policy has been driven by four things historically: security, prosperity, independence and national unity. Security has been around for awhile but we have taken to the notion that we have a peaceful history. The idea of manifest destiny in the U.S. was never just a pipe dream of a few isolated fanatics and the U.S. articles of confederation still have a piece written in asking for Canada to join, and distinguished fathers of confederation are still promoting the idea of integration.

If you flash forward a few generations you get a situation where Canada and the U.S. are quite comfortable in their defence relationship and this comes to the fore in the advance of Nazi Germany and the idea that Britain may not be able to defend Canada and Canada may not be able to defend itself which concerned the U.S. The mutual security pledge that Roosevelt and King exchanged in 1938 has a kernel of truth in the continuing mutual assistance treaty. After WWII we set up specific institutions. We have been cooperating with the U.S. for a long time and Canada has been a marshal state in some respects throughout its history, but the political overlay is that we are very peaceful people. My point is that we have been pursuing, one way or another, a Canada First Defence policy for a very long time and it is important to conclude the following:  we just can’t do nothing to defend ourselves as we have the materials and the financial resources to do a very good job. We can be respectable in the efforts we make in that regard. We are quite capable of dealing equal to equal without loosing our soul or identity and these two pillars must not be forgotten when thinking about whether we should be members of NATO.

NATO was always Canada’s second best solution with promotion of international peace and security. The best case scenario was always the U.N. but the basis of the U.N. saw Canada unhappy with what the U.N. charter said and they knew that the U.N. wasn’t working out the way it was perceived and that it was the Soviet threat that caused this. The Soviet threat was not inconsequential and from the time that the U.N. was created and the time that NATO was created the Soviet Union annexed parts of four countries, took control of seven continuous states, and it was blockading Berlin. You don’t have to talk about ideological misunderstandings. This was a real issue and their urgency and pragmatism in dealing with this was remarkable and it took the U.N. months and years to figure out how it was going to work. There was something sensible in NATO. NATO fundamentally was not a defence organization for Europe. NATO was created before it had any military forces and the charter is basically a political alliance with the assumption that should this unity be threatened there would be a military response. It was basically a political gamble with the idea that if you stick together that will have a powerful deterrent effect, and if someone goes after one of your members they will be taking on a community not an individual. 

There is a wide spread assumption that NATO was developed to deal with the Soviet threat, NATO had more in mind than active military defence, and an attack on Europe from the USSR. It was a political union backed up by military force. NATO finally began to realize that it needed forces in Europe with the outbreak of the Korean War. There is no mention of the USSR or Russia or any other threat in the charter. It was created to be a community to defend against a threat. People stick together against a common enemy.

NATO today needs to change the debate regarding whether or not NATO is doing the right thing today with regards to Iraq, Afghanistan etc. and start talking about the menaces that we confront and how we can combat them. These menaces can come from anywhere and it is NATO’s job to deal with them effectively. So what are the options?

Canadian interests have shifted over the last 60 years, initially they were very Eurocentric, as were most peoples, in an effort to deter the USSR. The second was to make the deterrent credible by deploying Canadian forces in Europe during peacetime. Third, it was to help deal with the huge problem of thermo-nuclear war. Canada was armed with tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. The mutually assured destruction philosophy held by both sides gave one less reason to retaliate. Canada was also involved in peacekeeping and it was created to help prevent conflicts from developing into all out war. This stuff cannot be allowed to get out of control. Finally, we wanted to find a way to maximize Canadian interests. At the end of the Cold War our interests changed a little bit, initially it was to develop a stable environment in Europe and after 60 years of Cold War it ended not with a bang but with a whimper and it is quite astounding that no one died in a war to settle things. It was statesmanship of the first order that was just as good as the statesmanship after the first world war, we were also trying to do something about failed states that had become homes for the terrorist threat. Most specifically we wanted to prevent the repetition of 9/11 and this led us to Afghanistan.

The future is that Canada needs to be looking at its interests three ways. It has to ensure that policies of democratic states are grounded in reality. The problems of the 20^th century were largely the fault of intellectual leadership as man kind needed to figure out a great deal of new information and w will need that leadership today. We have four options for future Canadian policy:

1. Little or nothing: Remain a member of NATO but only if the risk isn’t too high. We stay in as it helps continue our national influence, but not get too involved.

2. NATO needs help and it has transformed itself in some ways but it needs to continue to change and improve and Canada could help lead this. It does matter to Canada whether NATO survives.

3. Push harder. It is not clear that governments are ready for this. There is a new strategic contract that is being worked on and this year long process will produce some new thinking and some radical changes are required. Small fixes won’t do it if you have to change your decision and organization structure to develop resilience and manage your operations. There is also the matter of the financial situation as in order to be a member of the United Nations you have to pay a membership fee and if the organization has special costs you are then dinged, this does not exist within NATO. If Canada goes to war in Afghanistan then Canada pay for it, also the burden sharing issue. Obligations of alliance force the question, is it okay just to show up? If someone decides to do something you could actually veto it as it operates under national consensus. I’m pretty sure that they don’t allow you to publicly undermine another allies foreign and defence policy and this was a huge failure for NATO. Canada didn’t cross a line but Germany may have and France certainly did. In democracy governments come and go.

4. If NATO is not up to the job we have to think seriously about a new arrangement as we have friends and allies elsewhere, and we have to be concerned with the alliances ability to absorb others.

There is a large focus on asymmetric threats and failed states and there is a chance we may miss a bigger threat because of our focus on this. When dealing with American weakness / increased multi-polarity of the world how do we move forward?

In terms of threats, threat analysis is done on a continual basis and right now the threats that NATO sees will be used as the basis for the mandate but discussions of threats and capabilities are done very openly and hopefully, in this case we will come to a consensus on the basis of what the threat is. The level and degree of threats can be clearly lined up and evaluated.

NATO needs to look at democratic values and work toward the protection of them so when there is a threat an ally cannot say that there is nothing in the mandate. We cannot simply look at the conventional defence of a territory. There was an assumption in the early 90’s that there would be a happy relationship with Russia and views were received but not debates. The domestic policies of the Putin administration caused the relationship to cool as reports of political parties being driven out, newspapers being closed down, and the rule of law becoming the culture of the government began to emerge. I don’t think that this is a hopeless case, but it will take some time for NATO to come up with a new position and it will take some time to develop a different story to determine how they will be treated by the rest of us.

There is a close and progressive relationship between NATO and Russia and they are intermittently involved in the partnership council and, depending on who was there, they were participatory. There was also a fair amount of progress and a pretty good relationship between NATO and Russia, and Russia was involved in the theatre missile defence with one exercise sponsored in Moscow. Russia also contributed to NATO operations in two ways, transit through Russian airspace into Afghanistan and contributed a vessel to Operation Action Endevour. There has been a commitment on the part of NATO to rejuvenate that relationship and there have been discussions and intentions at many levels to rekindle the relationships between NATO and Russia. Russia has similar threats to deal with.