Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Foreign Affairs
Issue 40 - Evidence
OTTAWA, Wednesday, June 2, 1999
The Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs met this day at 3:31 p.m. to examine the ramifications to Canada of the changed mandate of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Canada's role in NATO since the demise of the Warsaw Pact, the end of the Cold War and the recent addition to membership in NATO of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic; and of peacekeeping, with particular reference to Canada's ability to participate in it under the auspices of any international body of which Canada is a member.
Senator John B. Stewart (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: I now call the meeting to order. With us this afternoon is Professor Bercuson, who has a long CV. Professor Bercuson has been deeply involved in the study of strategic matters and has published extensively on those matters. In 1991, he was the co-author of a book entitled, War and Peacekeeping: The Canadians from the Boer War to the Gulf War. That title is attractive to me because I have been asking about the situation in which peacekeeping efforts have been successful as against those that have not been successful, and what the explanation of the difference has been.
Please proceed, Professor Bercuson.
Professor David J. Bercuson, Director, Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, University of Calgary: Senators, I appreciate the opportunity to share some thoughts with you this afternoon regarding Canada's role in NATO, and Canadian participation in NATO peace enforcement operations. According to the information given me, you are specifically interested in views regarding four major aspects of the Canada-NATO relationship and I will, therefore, focus my remarks on those topics. I will, of course, be happy to answer any questions you may have arising out of these remarks, or any other topic within my area of expertise.
The first area that I shall focus on is the changed mandate of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
NATO is today, in some ways, a very different organization than that which grew out of the original 1948 tri-partite negotiations between Canada, the United States and the U.K. The organization came into being largely as a result of the growing conviction by Western leaders that the United Nations was not capable of fulfilling its original mandate of providing collective security against international aggression. That conviction followed the onset of the Cold War and was strengthened by crises over the future of Germany, the disposition of Trieste, the Czech coup of February 1948, the Berlin Blockade, and other East-West confrontations. NATO was intended as a defensive alliance, to be sure, but one that could provide collective security to its members through a true political unity of purpose, as much as through any deployment of arms and armies.
NATO was created for linked military and political reasons. It was intended to establish a unified military command that would join American military power, including the all-important American nuclear umbrella, to European security needs. This aim served two purposes. It established the principle that Soviet aggression against NATO members would never be "local" in scope, or treated as an isolated occasion, and it gave the Western European countries the military muscle to resist Soviet pressure to align themselves politically with the USSR even if they were not, in fact, occupied by Soviet forces. This last concern was rooted in the experience of Finland which, although democratic and "western" was, for all intents and purposes, within the Soviet orbit because of a powerful Soviet military presence on its borders.
Times have obviously changed, but the core raison d'être of NATO remains that its member nations now rely on it not simply for "point" defence, as it were, but to maintain a larger peace and stability in areas where such a condition is vital to the west's interests and cannot be achieved by other means. Put simply in relation to the Balkans, as a prime example, the United Nations has consistently failed since the start of this decade to maintain order and stability in a region of the world strategically important to the west that has been the cockpit of conflict for many hundreds of years. The UN has failed to do so for the same reasons that it has failed in other intranational conflicts such as the ones in Somalia or Rwanda, because it has neither the mandate nor the means to act effectively. Thus NATO's original mission as the defender of Western Europe during the Cold War has obviously changed, but its mission to act in an international vacuum to achieve Western military and political objectives is unchanged.
The second area of focus is Canada's role in NATO since the demise of the Warsaw Pact.
The end of the Cold War gave the Government of Canada the opportunity that some Canadian policymakers had desired since the mid-1960s -- to eliminate Canada's standing military presence in Europe. The closure of Canada's land and air bases in Germany was largely symbolic, however, since the scaled-down presence of Canadian forces had reduced Canada's standing military role in Europe to virtual insignificance long before. Indeed, by almost any measure of military significance, Canada's military role in NATO was only militarily important to the alliance for about a decade and a half, from roughly 1952 to 1968, when Canada placed relatively large, well-armed, well-equipped ground and air forces at the disposal of the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR).
For a short period after 1963, Canada even played a role in NATO plans to meet a potential Soviet attack with tactical nuclear weapons when its air forces were equipped with tactical nuclear weapons to be used against rear area Warsaw Pact troop concentrations, transportation choke points, and command and control facilities.
Since about 1968, Canada's role in NATO has been largely symbolic; Canada's presence, then and now, gave NATO the appearance of balance to both the Europeans, in having a second North American nation, and to the Americans, in that they were not the only North American nation committed to the defence of Europe. As ludicrous as these two notions may appear today, they must be viewed in the context of the immediate post-war period when Canada loomed much larger on the world stage as a result of both its military and non-military contributions to the Allied victory in WWII. Canada, in other words, really mattered to the Americans and the Europeans in a political sense.
Third, the recent additions to NATO.
Given that one cornerstone of Canadian foreign policy since the end of the Second World War has been to attempt, as much as possible, to offset the influence of the United States by forging alliances, agreements and understandings with nations other than the U.S., Canadian support for NATO expansion was predictable. Presumably, that support was based on the reasoning that the more NATO allies Canada might count on to keep U.S. leadership of NATO in check, the better. If so, it was wrong. As the current campaign in the Balkans shows, U.S. leadership of NATO remains unassailable.
Furthermore, the larger NATO grows, the more disparate will its political leadership be. The greater the disparity of the NA Council, the more difficult it will be for NATO to take focused and concerted action. It was certainly true in the early days of the current bombing campaign that NATO target lists were selected "by committee," thus undermining the effectiveness of the air offensive. We are thus left with the unhappy result that Canada is now committed to the defence of the borders of the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary in return for very little gain by way of greater constraints on U.S. policymakers.
Canadians must face the fact that growing economic, social, and cultural integration with the United States, combined with the overwhelming U.S. dominance of modern military technology and the U.S. willingness to continue to maintain large armed forces to defend and advance U.S. interests, make greater Canada-U.S. defence integration virtually inevitable. The question facing Canadians today is not whether to follow the U.S. as opposed to building alliances and agreements with others, but how to find the means to live with the realities forced upon us by American power and continental integration while retaining a modicum of independence in our foreign and defence policies.
The fourth area to which I will address myself is: Peacekeeping, specifically Canada's ability to participate in it under the auspices of any international body of which Canada is a member.
There are two aspects to this issue: First, to what extent can Canada's military undertake so-called "peacekeeping" missions under UN or other international auspices? And second, under what circumstances should it do so?
At present, Canada has only a very limited capability to send forces to participate in offshore military operations. The Chief of the Defence Staff put it much better than I could in his annual report to Parliament last week. That limited capability is partly due to the factors of limited resources discussed by General Baril and partly due to the tremendous changes in the nature of "peacekeeping" that have occurred in the last 10 years.
The end of the Cold War has made the old-style, classic Pearsonian, peacekeeping virtually obsolete. In places such as the Golan Heights and the Sinai, it is still a valuable function. But the major international crises that arise today grow out of situations such as the Indo-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir, the failure of the Former Yugoslavia, and so on. If intervention is to be made in crises such as these, the interventions require large, heavily armed forces with robust rules of engagement. Canada was once able to play a useful role in international affairs by deploying a few dozen combat engineers here, a few dozen signals troops there, or a lightly armed infantry battalion to a place such as Cyprus. That will suffice today in only a handful of not-very-serious disputes. What is required now is expensive, and Canada, for the most part, does not have the goods.
As far as circumstances go, the experience of the Canadian Forces in UNPROFOR ought to be the guide to deciding under what circumstances and whose auspices Canadian troops should be sent in harm's way. Quite simply, that experience showed that the UN is not now capable of directing, conducting, organizing, commanding a peace enforcement operation. Yes, Canada's soldiers performed many useful humanitarian functions in Croatia and Bosnia, no doubt saved many civilian lives by helping to feed, clothe and house refugees, de-mine the countryside, keep transportation routes open and so on. Those Canadians who were killed there did not die in vain. However, at the same time, Canadians were forced to helplessly stand by, countless times, while innocents were slaughtered. Too few Canadians realize that, but for the grace of God and extraordinarily lucky timing, it could have been Canadian troops -- not Dutch -- forced to turn the people of Srebrenica over to their murderers.
The Chairman: Professor Stairs is next. He has written on the diplomacy of constraint, Canada, the Korean War and the United States. He has written extensively on Canadian external affairs and defence, including a paper on contemporary security issues that was published as an appendix to the report of the Special Joint Committee of the Senate and House of Commons reviewing Canadian foreign policy.
Professor Denis Stairs, Department of Political Science, Dalhousie University: I want to begin by thanking the members of the committee for inviting me to take part in your proceedings here today.
I have long been an admirer of the committee's work. As an academic with teaching responsibilities in the field of foreign policy, I have made frequent and extensive use of your reports, not only in the classroom, but also in my own ruminations, such as they are.
Regarding the subject before you at the moment, I am not going to speak for very long. However, perhaps I can offer a few brief comments on each of three basic issues. Most of what I say will be blindingly obvious, and certainly very familiar to the members of this committee. If it was not familiar to you before Professor Bercuson spoke, it certainly will be familiar to you now. While we agree on many of these questions, we did not collude in advance of the presentation.
The three issues I have in mind are the following: First, what is the changing role of NATO? In effect, can we figure out what is really going on here? Second, to the extent that we can figure it out, what are the implications, if any, for Canada? Or is it too early to tell? Third, what has been happening to the concept and the practice of international peacekeeping, and what are the implications of that?
First, the Changing Role of NATO.
It seems to me that the answer to the question of how NATO's new role will ultimately turn out is not yet clear, and it will probably remain unclear for some time.
What is clear is that it is not what it used to be. NATO began as a collective defence organization. Its fundamental purpose, as we all know, was to promote the security of the signatory countries of the North Atlantic area by committing them to defend one another against external attack, and to provide a mechanism for ensuring that the deployment of their military capabilities to that end would be effectively coordinated.
At the very beginning, and it could be argued that this also held for most of the subsequent Cold War period, the primary function of the North Atlantic Treaty was to ensure that American nuclear weapons would be brought to bear in a reliable and, therefore, credible fashion on the defence of Western Europe.
Other things were going on too, of course. The Canadians, in particular, wanted to use the alliance as a vehicle for promoting the economic as well as the military cooperation of the allies. They saw it also as an instrument for strengthening and reinforcing the liberal political culture, which they regarded as essential to the preservation of the Western tradition.
Even here, the assumption was that these objectives related in the first instance to NATO's own members, and to them alone.
The purpose of the alliance, in short, was to protect its own against "the other," where "its own" consisted of the signatories to the Washington Treaty, and "the other" was the Soviet Union and its cohorts.
The achievement of this fundamental objective ultimately depended on the willingness of the United States to countervail the USSR's military capabilities by bringing Western Europe under the protection of the American nuclear umbrella.
The details -- including the strategic planning, and the specific composition and deployments of military equipment and personnel -- might change with alterations in military technology and with various evolutions in the military capacities of the Soviet Union itself; but the underlying dynamic was almost constant for a period of about 40 years.
Once the Cold War ended, of course, this rationale ceased to exist and some floundering about automatically ensued.
As time went on, however, it became increasingly evident that NATO's premises were shifting from those of a "collective defence" organization -- an organization established to protect its own members against specific perils that were thought to be posed by known adversaries -- to those of a "regional collective security" organization -- a kind of mini-United Nations with a focus on the European theatre.
This process was accentuated by the drive to enlargement -- a development that made the Russians nervous but which they were now powerless to oppose except by rhetorical means.
In concrete terms, it was now less clear who the "enemy" really was, and it was even conceivable that some of the nastiest challenges might not come from outside the alliance but from inside it. Alternatively, they might not have to do with the direct security needs of the alliance's own members at all. This reality became especially evident in the Balkans, of course, over Bosnia.
However, even in Bosnia, it could be argued, in essence, that the NATO role was simply to provide, at the UN's request or under UN auspices, a capacity for coordinated military deployment in the European theatre that the UN itself was not in a position to mount.
In effect, in the initial manifestation, NATO's members were saying, "Do not attack us; we carry guns." In this second manifestation, however, they were saying, "Have guns, will travel" -- the assumption being that the travelling would occur only in a good cause; that is, a cause endorsed by the UN Security Council.
In current circumstances, however, the alliance -- to judge, at least, by its new strategic concept, and by some of the rhetoric issuing from President Clinton, Prime Minister Blair, Robin Cook, and others -- seems to be entering a third phase, one in which its members are saying to almost anyone, almost anywhere, "Behave yourself; we carry guns, and we will use them if you do not behave yourself." Here the implication is that the goodness of the cause need not be authenticated by a UN decision at all but only by the political will and preferences of the NATO members themselves.
Here is where I find it difficult, of course, to know what will happen next, and whether the new aspiration will stick. If the Kosovo operation turns sour, it is quite possible that the alliance will feel that its new aspirations are impracticable, in which case they may whither on the vine. On the other hand, if the operation succeeds, as some think it is about to do, and if there are no grossly inconvenient consequences, the new aspirations may be reinforced.
If the latter happens, NATO will have established itself as a modern version of the "concert system" that appeared for a time in Europe at the end of the Napoleonic wars. In effect, it will have taken unto itself the responsibility for promoting the kind of political order -- both international and domestic -- that it prefers, not only in the European region, but more generally in the Mediterranean, and on some accounts, in parts of the Middle East and even in Central Asia.
This is likely to cause resentment, not only in the Russian Federation, but also in the Islamic world, Asia, more generally, and elsewhere, too.
In thinking about this, it is worth noting that even so hard-headed an analyst as Samuel Huntington in the United States has recently expressed concerns about the possibility that the United States is "becoming the rogue superpower" and that much of the world is beginning to think of it as "the single greatest external threat to their societies."
Perhaps none of this is very surprising, given the enormous gap between the military capabilities of the United States on the one hand and everyone else on the other.
After all, as the Americans -- with some occasional help from the British -- have demonstrated in recent months in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Sudan, to say nothing of Yugoslavia, they are now in the position of being able to destroy, at will, any physical target, at any location around the globe, with virtually no risk to any of their own personnel.
To my knowledge, no power in the history of international politics has previously enjoyed such a capability. The temptation to make use of it -- particularly when this can be done with the support of one's closest allies and when there is cause to fear that unfriendly powers may be developing unpleasant mass destruction capabilities of their own -- is probably overwhelming.
I repeat: I do not know where this is all leading. Certainly, there are political constraints at work, both internally and internationally, that in the end may compel a retreat. However, in the meantime, NATO seems to be feeling its oats, and this is certainly having an effect on its agenda.
The second issue I will address is: What are the implications for Canada? I wish I could answer that question. However, about all I can do is to reflect on a few possibilities.
The first of these -- and about this I am reasonably confident -- is that Canada's influence in NATO is almost certainly becoming negligible. I am not sure that it was ever very great. However, I think we simply must recognize that our military contributions to NATO activities -- the Bosnian contingent notwithstanding -- have now reached the point at which they can hardly be expected to significantly reinforce our diplomacy, not, at least, in ways that matter.
This is not to say that they lack practical or political utility from the cosmetic point of view -- certainly our presence, however small, can help to legitimize politically NATO operations -- and I do not doubt for a minute that our forces are performing invaluable functions, in professional style, "on the ground."
However, the reality in these matters is that the prerequisite for exercising influence is the paying of dues, and we do not pay very many. It is not surprising, therefore, that we are not a member of the contact group in Bosnia or that our defence minister is sometimes embarrassed by appearing to sometimes be left out of the loop.
This problem may be compounded, moreover, by the enlargement of NATO's membership. In some circumstances, it can be argued that an increase in the number of smaller players in an international institution has the effect of increasing Canada's diplomatic room for manoeuvre, making it possible, for example, to develop political coalitions within the alliance with a view to amplifying our capacity to affect policy decisions. However, in this case, it seems to me unlikely that what is of interest to Canada will routinely be of similar interest to the new members of the alliance. That being so, the utility of such manoeuvring may not be very great, not, at least, from Ottawa's point of view.
Canada's problem here is a function also of two other factors: The first is the survival of the United States, for the time being, at least, as the world's only superpower. In effect, they need us less, so they will be inclined to pay us less attention. The second is the increasing evidence that the "twin-pillar" or "dumbbell" model of the alliance, with the European members constituting one pillar and the North American members the other, is winning out over the more "collective" model inherent in the original concept of an "Atlantic community."
In effect, the Europeans are institutionalizing their own internal connections, just as Canada and the United States have done with theirs under NAFTA, NORAD and the like.
In that context, Canada is losing much of the independent "presence" and visibility that it once seemed to enjoy. The Europeans naturally regard us increasingly as "incidental" -- a natural appendage for diplomatic and security purposes of the United States.
There are exceptions, of course. We have taken sundry initiatives on security issues recently in close cooperation with the Norwegians, the Dutch, and so on -- landmines, small arms, child soldiers. However, in general, it is fair to say that we are not "there" -- not at least in a way that attracts the serious, as opposed to the courteous, attention of the major powers.
This reality, when taken in conjunction with NATO's expanding aspirations, may help to put us in a "Catch-22" position. On the one hand, NATO's role could be expanding in directions that are much more complex. On the other, we will have very little capacity to be a major factor in determining its decisions.
Thus, we may be drawn more and more into ventures of which we do not entirely approve -- particularly since our continental interests in relation to the United States may make us very reluctant to challenge the Americans on matters that they regard as important to their security policies and interests.
Historically, we tended to regard NATO in part as a vehicle for multilateralizing our relationship with the United States. That helped to make our membership in the alliance seem like a major diplomatic asset. It is not entirely clear to me, however, that this will continue to be the case in the future. The asset may turn into a liability.
I hasten to say that I am not here advocating that we get out of NATO. I am only trying to suggest that the politics of our involvement seem to be changing quite dramatically, and perhaps not in our favour.
The third area to which I shall address some remarks is this: What is happening to the concept of "peacekeeping"?
The evolution of peacekeeping enterprises from first generation to second generation versions is very well known. So also is the encouragement that was given to this evolutionary process by Boutros Boutros-Ghali's document "An Agenda for Peace" and its successor.
Essentially, peacekeeping has come increasingly to mean "peace enforcement within states" as opposed to "'peacekeeping' between states," and because of this it has also become an increasingly partisan, as opposed to neutral, activity.
In addition, we have incorporated into our understanding of the peace encouragement process an awareness of a whole series of extraneous factors -- or "variables," as the social scientists like to say -- that seem to be pertinent to the promotion of a "will to order," among them, a democratic politics, the reliable administration of the rule of law and with it the successful maintenance of a regime of human rights, a reasonably high rate of literacy, a significant measure of economic prosperity distributed in at least a moderately equitable fashion, and so on.
Some of this strikes me as a trifle simple-minded, and not all of it, it seems to me, is sustained by such evidence as we have at our disposal. But, taking the argument at face value, it appears to me that there are two clear implications that result: The first is that this kind of "peacekeeping" can be pretty rough stuff. That is, it often entails the deployment and the use of considerable military force. This is the price of trying to compel others to be good, to behave like us.
It follows that if Canada is serious about continuing to take part in these enterprises, it will simply have to do something to strengthen its armed forces establishment.
It is clearly irresponsible for a country with Canada's resources -- we are, after all, a G-7 power -- to place military units -- volunteers though they be -- in dangerous circumstances abroad with inadequate equipment, and in contexts in which provision cannot be made for reasonable patterns of rotation, and so on.
It is certainly an option for us to define our way out of the problem by making it clear that we are prepared to take part in some kinds of peacekeeping missions, the ones that do not require firing any weapons, but not in others -- although we may find it politically undignified and diplomatically inconvenient to do so.
However, if we are not prepared, in this way, to cut our coat according to the cloth we now have, then we should certainly acquire some new material -- and quickly, too. For both political and diplomatic reasons, for example, I can imagine our wanting to help out eventually with ground forces in Kosovo, irrespective of the conditions on the ground. Indeed, the government has indicated that its inclination is to do just that. However, we need then to be sure that our forces can be genuinely useful and in a position to look after themselves in a hostile environment.
The second implication has to do with multi-factor analysis of the peace-encouragement or peace-building process challenge that I mentioned a moment ago.
I have some reservations about a few of the propositions that are implied by the argument, propositions that seem to me to be oversimplified. However, if we accept them at face value, it should be clearly understood that they imply an extraordinary commitment to social-engineering initiatives in a wide variety of locations for a very long period of time in a way that may turn out, in the end, to be unreliable anyway.
I do not want to make the best the enemy of the good, and I am not trying to argue that helping other folk run their electoral balloting or training some of their police officers in Regina are useless enterprises.
I realize that our intention is not to accomplish objectives of this kind entirely by ourselves, but to work towards them in cooperation with others of like mind. However, I want to assert, all the same, that democratizing a foreign country -- particularly a country in which there has been no previous history of democratic political practice -- is an extraordinarily difficult enterprise and that there is very little evidence of our really knowing how to do it at all. The same goes for transforming a destitute economy.
We need, therefore, to think very soberly about these challenges and not to allow our aspirations to get too far ahead of what is technically possible on the one hand and politically feasible on the other.
The Chairman: Professor Bercuson, on page 3 of your presentation, you talk about the record of the UN in the area of peacekeeping. You say:
...in relation to the Balkans, as a prime example, the United Nations has consistently failed since the start of this decade to maintain order and stability in that region of the world...
Then you say:
The UN has failed to do so for the same reasons it has failed in other intranational conflicts such as the ones in Somalia and Rwanda, because it has neither the mandate nor the means to act effectively.
NATO is filling a gap, in a sense.
Would I be exaggerating very much if I said that the time had come when we might as well admit that the UN insofar as certain peacekeeping functions are concerned has been a failure?
Mr. Bercuson: I believe that to be true. The end of the Cold War has brought the United Nations its greatest test in this regard. I do not consider the Gulf War to have been a success from the United Nations point of view. I do not take that as evidence in favour of the United Nations. The UN set up as an organization of nations to solve international issues -- issues between nations -- does not have the structure or the mandate. It certainly does not have the military capability, and that includes not only the military hardware but more important the command structure to deal with these sorts of issues.
I would use the Balkans, the former Yugoslavia, as the best example. In that case, the total number of UNPROFOR troops, which at certain times probably numbered 20,00 to 25,000 -- in other words, not much different than today with the stabilization force that you have in Bosnia -- were not able to do anything to stop the wanton slaughter of populations, by all sides, of all sides, the siege of Sarajevo, and on and on and on.
I ask myself: Where was the UN's effectiveness there? Effective in bringing in food? Yes. Effective in these other ways that I mentioned, yes, but it could not deal with the root cause of the conflict.
The Chairman: What you are saying, then, is that within the NATO area -- and that is not strictly confined of course to the NATO members -- given the fact that we cannot rely on the UN, NATO is at the moment at least virtually indispensable.
There are those who advocate its abolition.
Mr. Bercuson: I am not one of them. It is indispensable in the sense that the western countries, Canada being part of them -- those nations that believe very strongly in the free flow of people and ideas and the importance of democracy for the development of humankind -- need to have an organization such as NATO, in a very general sense. More specifically, in a strategic and operational sense, those nations need some instrument to deal with the falling apart of international order as a result of either international disputes or intranational disputes, such as the one we are seeing in the Balkans. The UN cannot act; NATO must act.
The Chairman: Professor Stairs, I am trying to decipher the message of your presentation.
It seems to me that you are saying <#0107> and correct me if I am wrong that NATO may be all right if limited to the North Atlantic area; that we should not want NATO to undertake to police the world, particularly in view of the defects in the decision-making process in Washington and the pressures of various kinds of domestic American interests on that process.
At the end of your presentation, on pages 10 and 11, you seem to be saying that there is a real danger that, if we go beyond the NATO area, we will become highly hubristic. For example, that we will speak and democracy will be established; that we will speak and human rights will be established and we will reform their economies.
This is pretentious nonsense. Is that what you are saying?
Mr. Stairs: In response to your first question, I have some serious reservations about NATO embarking on out-of-area operations without very careful thought. It seems to me that, given the agglomeration of military power that it represents, this is bound to be regarded in other parts of the world as a threatening enterprise, particularly since it seems highly likely the political foundations for such enterprises are likely to be very western. Other parts of the world have different sets of priorities. Hence, it would not be surprising if there were very serious adverse reactions. It is not impossible that even some of the poorest countries could react with very unpleasant consequences for us.
There are after all weapons of mass destruction that do not require sophisticated technology to deliver. One of the reasons the Americans are dotting the world with missiles from time to time is to try to prevent that from happening. It is a losing battle. They will not be able to prevent it from happening.
There are long-term political consequences that may flow from NATO simply presuming that it embodies virtue in the modern globe and that it has a responsibility to promote virtue by military means, if necessary, anywhere.
In the case of the Balkans there is an ambiguity, because in one sense it is out of area and in another sense it is not. Clearly, there were both strategic and political interests for the parties there. It is unlikely that Western European populations could have stood by indefinitely without anything being done about this.
I do not have reservations. The noises that I hear from some quarters, including President Clinton, for example, that we might make use of NATO in places like Central Asia is, frankly, unwise.
Therefore, the short answer to your first question is, yes, that is what I meant.
Second, I do not want to make the best the enemy of the good. We seem to have put on our agenda a series of aspirations about which I am not sure that we know technically how to fulfil. I do not know how you democratize hate. Perhaps I should give you an example -- and this may be totally unfair to the players involved but it has Canadian content.
I once heard a presentation by an RCMP officer who had gone to Haiti to help train their police forces and to expose them to rule of law, for example, how to properly arrest someone. He was surprised when he got there, to discover that what they really wanted was computers. They were a little puzzled because they looked around the room and there were no electric outlets in the walls. To have computers you must have electricity. They soon got them electricity and then they got them computers.
The RCMP officer was delighted because, within three months, the Haitian police officers were using the computers. They took to them like ducks to water. They were using the computers to prepare operational plans and organizational charts. This was an enormous accomplishment.
However, if you inquire as to how they are coming along with changing the political culture, introducing an understanding of the rule of law, changing the attitudes on the streets so that officers have a reasonable chance of making a peaceful arrest as opposed to being shot at first and hence deciding to shoot back themselves, the story is different. What we are talking about here is the need to fundamentally transform a society. My argument is that we certainly do not know how to do this in the short run. I suspect that it is a large task, which will involve not only enriching their political understanding, but also enriching their economy and engaging in a wide array of public administration interventions and so on.
If you replicate that aspiration in all the parts of the world in which aspirations of that sort have been expressed, you are looking at an agenda that I do not think the whole of the western world is prepared to pursue. We will not raise the money to do it, aside from anything else. However, if we tried to do it, we would be engaging in a 19th century imperial exercise that would come back very quickly to bite us.
The short answer is that it is not that I do not think we should do anything. There are many things we can do to ease human suffering around the world. However, when we say that the preconditions of peace are all these other things, then we are in for a long wait. The people who make that argument most enthusiastically are often people who are very distrustful of the armed forces. My own view is that it will be a very long wait and we had better have some power to drive.
Senator Bolduc: In an 1993 article, you wrote that the central imperative of Canadian foreign policy should be the maintenance of a political, amicable and, hence, economically effective working relationship with the United States.
You seem to favour, for many reasons that you elaborate in your article, general disengagement from Europe in consideration of Canada's geographic priority, that is, North America. On the other hand, you did not say that you would get out of NATO.
Mr. Stairs: I certainly do not mean to suggest that we should disengage from multilateral organizations around the world. We are the great joiners. We sit at all the tables. By and large, that is in our interest. That is not what I am advocating.
That particular remark about the only imperative in Canadian foreign policy being the maintenance of an amicable relation with the United States seems to me an empirical fact. Most of what we do elsewhere in the world is not absolutely essential to our vital national interests. We can do it, or not do it. We do not have to be peacekeepers. We can say no anytime. There will be a price for doing that, and there may be some indirect consequences that would mildly effect our interest adversely at the other end.
However, one thing Canada must do, which is of vital national interest -- Canadians would not allow you to do otherwise -- is to maintain an amicable relationship with the United States. That is where the real hard interests lie. That is an imperative. The rest are not imperatives.
Having said that, that circumstance may be a ground for our actually taking quite positive initiatives in these other areas. We are lucky. We are one of the few states in the international community that can go out there to do good because we do not have countervailing pressures that prevent us from doing good. We might as well be constructive. We have those opportunities, in ways that, for example, Israel might not have. Israel has a hefty agenda without thinking about doing good in other parts of the world. Canada can do that, but it is a luxury.
The reason I am inclined to emphasize it in my writing from time to time is that there is a slight tendency in Canada to assume that we are doing these things abroad because we are holier than everybody else. I do not think we are holier than anyone else. We are the same as everybody else. We are a lot luckier than everybody else. We only have one set of imperatives. It has to do with dealing with the United States, and most of the time that is painless.
Senator Bolduc: There has been a tradition, under Pearson and others, since the end of the war, that because Canada is a trading country and as such we need a good international image, we do the things we do on the international stage. However, we do it in a modest way, as you said; for example, our armed forces are not large. I suspect that that is the reason we do these things.
Mr. Stairs: Yes.
Senator Forrestall: I would be interested in making sure that I know where both you gentlemen are, having been exposed to where you were over the last 10 or 15 years. While you have been tempted to redefine certain elements of this very fascinating study, you have really strayed too far.
For example, the 1994 defence white paper through to the 1997 work that was done. I am leading to this question: Should we have troops? What would have been the difference had we proceeded with the recommendations of the 1994 defence white paper?
Interestingly enough, last evening Major-General Lewis MacKenzie was a witness before this committee. He spoke very strongly of the need for Canada to find the wherewithal to mount a brigade. That would enable us to use a little bit of elbow at the NATO table, at least to the extent that we continue to be invited to meetings that deal with the well-being of Canadian armed force personnel, particularly if, in our case, they are a recce group and are going to be melded with the British. They will still be out in front of British, who are out in front of everybody else. It would be nice to be invited to the table where your future is being discussed, and we are not.
Had we proceeded with the white paper recommendations in 1994, what might you have said differently? In other words, is it too late to put the troops on the ground, to regain a place? We are not invited to participate in the discussions at the table, and that is very painful. Would it have made a significant difference in what you are saying now?
You are absolutely right. We have not the wherewithal to make a contribution that is meaningful, and to pretend that we do is a little sad. It makes me sad as a Canadian.
Mr. Bercuson: This country trades troops for influence, and has been doing so since the Boer War. As I constantly tell my classes in Canadian military history, Hitler was not about to get into a rowboat and come over here and do us any great harm. Our involvement in that war and in any other war in which we have been involved has been a matter of our determining where our interests lie, making contributions, in return for the enhancement, the enlargement, and the strengthening of our national interest. That is no less true today than it was then.
I have no doubt that would have more influence at the table today if we had more assets to bring to the table. However, it is not simply a matter of how many assets you can bring to the table today; it is an issue of the quality of those assets.
The revolution of military affairs is a revolution in the ability of armed force to command, control, communicate and bring intelligence to bear on the battle field. It is a digital revolution. It is a revolution in speed and a revolution in the application of battlefield information to the solving of battlefield problems. It is expensive. It is difficult to achieve without a highly educated military, a highly educated officer corps, in particular. Although our armed forces are making efforts in that regard, given the resources available to them, they are not keeping up.
There is only one major player in the world today, and that is the U.S. The armed forces of this country have as their aim interoperability with the United States. That is as it should be. We are not, for the most part, interoperable.
You could send many troops, if you had them, overseas to Bosnia or whatever, but what sort of contribution would they be making? Would they be contributing quality or quantity? Today, what is required is quality. For the most part, we do not have it because we cannot afford it.
Senator Forrestall: Are you suggesting that perhaps we should not bother to do it?
Mr. Bercuson: If you look at the current contribution, where we are sending a reconnaissance squadron, we happen to be in a fortunate position that one particular squadron in one particular regiment in one particular brigade group -- which happens to be a very well trained brigade group -- has been training on this new piece of kit for some time now. They know how to use it, and it is a very good piece of kit.
However, if you were to look at the rest of the army's capability in this regard, you would not see anything of the equal of that for the most part. Some of the units are getting some of the new kit, but it is taking time to integrate. You must train on it and learn how to use it.
In essence, we are contributing because we bought the equipment. We have trained the troops and they will perform an important role. However, to send general purpose troops to an area where general purpose troops are not required, what would be the purpose of doing that?
Senator Forrestall: It would be counterproductive if we sent them over. General MacKenzie said last night that it is important how long the men who are using the rifle have known one another.
Mr. Bercuson: We could go on and on here. We have tasked our soldiers to death. The matter in which this particular deployment was carried out did not give people enough time to get their family affairs in order, those who were heading overseas and so on, and this is the result of having too small a force.
Senator Grafstein: I do have the advantage of having read both these gentlemen in their written form.
I want to bring your attention to a raging debate, which both of you have touched on, that is occurring in the United States. It is the debate about NATO and about American foreign policy that those of us who were in Quebec City at the Canada-U.S. interparliamentary exchange were able to witness. We were watching the Americans debate in camera the issues of NATO and the issue as it relates to Kosovo and the issues of foreign policy.
It struck me that the debate was clarified by Henry Kissinger not too recently, where he said that now that NATO is in Kosovo it must win to maintain a stable force in the world beyond. That is his concept of realpolitik. On the other hand, Mr. Kissinger said that the United States is torn between realists and moralists, between those who are concerned with their real interests and their sentiment and that, in effect, the Kosovo issue is more of sentiment than it is of real interests, and that therefore, having got there the way they did, they had no choice, in effect, but to resolve the issue and defeat Mr. Milosevic.
Apply that principle to Canada. We have been fellow travellers here. We have played at the military game; we are members of NATO. Yesterday we were told that we were the fourth largest contributor to the air bombings; nevertheless, you say we are not a major player. We are a major player in this effort.
Where should we end up? We have danced at both weddings. We believe we are moralists through CIDA and NGOs. We have been staunch members of NATO, yet at the same time we have emasculated our contribution to NATO. That has been a national acceptance. There is a consensus in Canada, all governments, all parties in Canada have agreed that we should emasculate our military contribution to NATO, which we have done.
What school should we be attending? Should we attend the realist school and be very realistic about our means, withdraw essentially and still play the softer game of participating but really not contributing? Redefine for us our national interest as it relates to NATO.
Mr. Stairs: You are asking one of the most difficult and perpetual questions of international politics. This is an issue that is on the agenda just now, but it has been debated by philosophers and academics and politicians and diplomats for hundreds and hundreds of years.
This is a particularly difficult one. If you look at how people are responding to it in Canada, the people you would expect to be in one position are in fact in another. The NGO community, for example, tends often to be the belligerent ones. The hard-nosed realists, the traditional analysts of foreign policy and defence policy, tend often to have the most reservations, although there are people who cross the lines. That is simply a reflection of a very difficult, not to say existential problem.
What are Canada's immediate interests? Fundamentally, they are in supporting with moderate means our allies in this enterprise. That is a national interest. If we let the Americans and the British and others down, we will, in the long haul, probably pay for that. It may also be in the government's interest politically, for the moral reasons that will drive a lot of public input into this sort of debate.
I have two problems with the moral approach to the foreign policy. One problem is that it can lead to a lot of killing. One of the concerns that I would have with NATO having its appetite wetted for this type of operation is that it could lead, in the end, to some pretty nasty behaviour. The Crusades, in the Middle Ages, were fought for a moral cause and led to very bestial activity. I am not entirely sure that, in the end, it is the moral thing to do, if you start from a purely moral premise. That is an academic observation.
For me, where, as the military say, "the rubber hits the road" is when you ask the question: Are we prepared to place any Canadian uniformed citizen in harm's way in the certain knowledge that some will die in support of this campaign? I have a problem with that. I know that we have an army of volunteers, but I find it a little difficult, unless you can show me some substantial national interest, to think of myself in the cabinet room making a decision to send Canadians abroad in the certain knowledge that some of them will die if they go in on the ground in the prosecution of this cause in the Balkans.
My position on this is very unpopular and not widely shared. Like everyone else, I am horrified by what Milosevic's regime is doing. On the other hand, this is a recurrent problem in the Balkans. It is not entirely clear to me that Canadians should lay down their lives to stop them from perpetuating this yet again, unless you can show me some other substantial interest.
I know am waffling, but I am waffling because it is a difficult existential question. It is the ultimate political question. Thank God it is the cabinet that must make the final decision and not academics. That is where I start to hesitate.
On the surface I am drawn; we must stop this monster. However, if you tell me that it is a monster only within Yugoslavia and if we talk about the history of Yugoslavia -- that this has been occurring for a very long time; we were drawn into it in the First World War -- I have a little bit of difficulty with killing Canadians to clean that up. It bothers me in particular when the most enthusiastic desire to kill is expressed by organizations whose people may not do any dying.
I find this to be a very difficult issue -- as do you -- and that is the best I can give you by way of an answer.
Mr. Bercuson: First of all, let me comment on that one statistic that you were given about us making the fourth largest contribution. I have heard all kinds of numbers from people over at DND about the size of our contribution. What we must remember is that this is essentially an American air operation. They have the aircraft, they have the technology. The British are participating. From thereon in, everybody is token.
We have precision guided munitions capabilities on these CF-18s and the Dutch do not on their aircraft -- which is a fact -- and it is Dutch aircraft that escort Canadian bombers to their targets, are the Dutch one of the larger contributors or are they not?" They are not doing too much bombing. The fact is that our contribution in a 600-plus force over, our 18 aircraft -- which means six on the flight line at any given time -- is minimal.
The second point is that <#0107> and I will not weasel out of this by saying that I am a historian and not a political scientist. I do not world look at the world in these categories of morality and realism. History shows consistently that those tyrants who begin by killing their own people usually end up killing someone else. You cannot make a distinction between morality and national interest. Did we fight Hitler because it was a moral cause or because it was a matter of national interest? I do not know where you draw the line in that particular campaign.
Senator Grafstein: Kissinger would say, in response to that, that he would be prepared to risk his national interest on a balance of power structure as opposed to a humanitarian set of principles; that, in effect, what you are referring to is a balance of power structure, about which current thinking has said to move away from.
Mr. Bercuson: We have moved away from it.
Senator Grafstein: That would be the short answer. Having said that, maybe you can conclude, because I want to talk about something else.
Mr. Bercuson: I want to answer your third question about where our national interest lies. To me, the national interest is very clear. We cannot go it alone, so our national interest lies in staying with the team. It would be nice if the team stays together. NATO, 10 years from now, will not look anything like it does today. I see the United States moving farther down the road of unilateralism and farther away from multilateralism as multilateralism constrains the Americans more in the achievement of their own national objectives.
I also happen to believe that, when push comes to shove, the national objectives of this country more or less mirror those of the Americans. The farther we get from our shores, the closer the interests of the United States and Canada converge, when it comes to questions of the future of Southeast Asia and the future of China and so forth. We may argue a lot with the Americans about salmon, and shingles, and magazines, and that is fine. However, when it comes to the free flow of ideas, free trade in Asia, democracy, our ideas and the Americans are virtually the same.
Senator Grafstein: If in fact that is the case -- and this committee is looking at the future role of NATO and Canada's participation in it -- if in fact we are concerned with the United States being an errant, unilateral player, should not we adopt Jonathan Swift's version of the Lilliputians? In other words, should our interest be multilateral? I though that this one of our architectonic principles was to contain the United States through as many multilateral strings as we can so that it does not excessively use its power in a way that is not consistent, according to some of us, with international norms.
Mr. Bercuson: This is something that Professor Stairs and I may disagree with. I do not think that policy has ever worked. He has studied the Korean War from a diplomatic perspective. I have studied the Korean War from a military perspective. I do not think we have ever constrained the Americans. We have wasted a lot of effort trying to do that.
Our best efforts are trying to work with the Americans from the perspective of helpful partner, making those contributions we can in those niche areas where we can make them in order to buy some influence in Washington. It hurts Canadian pride to think that that may be our future. I cannot see any alternative to that.
Also, to try to create alliances with the Hungarians and the Polish and so on when, as Professor Stairs say -- and I entirely agree with him -- first, last and always, we really only do have one interest when it comes to outside our borders, and that is the United States of America and good relations with them, is just foolishness.
Senator Grafstein: You then would discard the whole notion of Europe, the European players.
Mr. Bercuson: I do not discard the notion. I know where Europe ought to be. In Canada's list of priorities of whose interests we need to serve, in serving our own interest we need to serve American interests before we serve European interests.
Senator Stollery: I have noticed that for the last few years our population is growing at a much greater rate than is the American one. At what point will that be noticed?
Mr. Bercuson: It is being noticed by the Americans in a way that we do not find particularly comfortable. As the Americans look at the growth of our population, the growth of our gross domestic product, the growth of our ability to shoulder more of a burden internationally in military operations and see that we are not doing it, they are becoming more and more impatient with us. This impatience is being seen in a variety of ways that I am sure you are aware of.
Senator Stollery: I thought of it in a narrower way, that is -- without being melodramatic -- that your war-like potential goes up directly proportionate to your population. At what point does that arithmetic come into the equation?
Canada is a more powerful military country today than it has ever been in its history because it has 31 million people. If we put our minds to it, we should be able to be more powerful than we are. I am not suggesting for a moment that we would take on the United States or that there is any interest in us taking on the United States, however, in that context, traditionally that is how it has been seen.
Mr. Bercuson: With great respect, I must disagree with you. You are bringing a 19th century steam-engine-factory notion to the concept of military power. If you look around the world, what you will see are shrinking but more powerful militaries because of changes in military technology.
Probably the best example I could bring would be the changes that are being carried out today in China by the People's Liberation Army, its air force and navy, which is downsizing considerably from what it was several years ago but is replacing quantity with quality. We have seen some of the results of that in the last two weeks regarding the espionage scandal.
Numbers simply do not cut it. It is what you have, how advanced it is, and your ability to use it knowledgeably.
Senator Stollery: I was really thinking of the low-tech campaigns, which have been the kind of campaigns we have seen -- apart from Iraq -- in the last 10 conflicts. Vietnam was low-tech. Somalia was low-tech. Kosovo is low-tech. On the ground, they are trying to make it high-tech, and everyone is questioning whether that is working.
The Chairman: In Professor Stairs' answer to Senator Grafstein's very difficult question, he indicated that he was happy not to be in the cabinet room participating in making a decision. It occurred to me that perhaps one reason he would rather not be involved is that, although there would be moral appeal for Canada to participate in situations such as Yugoslavia, Kosovo, he doubts whether, in the end, after a major operation, we would indeed fail to clean up the situation. We might be able to impose a temporary peace, or we might be able to propose a long-term peace provided we are willing to put soldiers in for several generations, or even two or three centuries, in the type of situation that prevails in that part of the Balkans.
That raises the question of the desirability of an enlargement, an extension of NATO. We may be putting ourselves into a situation that will entail a series of Yugoslavia-type problems
Mr. Stairs: In essence, you have extrapolated my argument, such as it is, very well. At some stage, if we get some agreement from Milosevic, I can imagine that NATO troops will move into Kosovo and stay put, that there will be some restoration of Albanian Kosovars to their homes and some reconstruction of those homes and other facilities by western powers and so forth. However, the troops will have to stay there for a very long time and they must do it in a way that will persuade all the players that they are prepared to stay there for a very long time.
In terms of a time commitment, if you were to ask me what can we do to engender the conditions that would eventually allow us to leave without fear that tribal massacres would again break out, I would say probably for at least two generations and maybe three.
If you were to ask me which department of government I would want to control after the interior ministry, it would be the department of education. The problems here are largely problems of political socialization. They are very deeply rooted. Those socialization processes have occurred for a very long periods. Until you can get at the process that controls the way young people start to think as they grow up, you will not change the reality.
If one really takes seriously the question that you have put to me seriously, then we must be there for a very long time, and we must be there very intrusively, just as we are now in Bosnia. Bosnia has become now a multinational protectorate. Nobody trusts the Bosnians to run anything. We will be in the same boat here. I do not think this is a short-term enterprise at all.
When we went into Haiti there were discussions in the U.S. that this would be a three-month operation. This is absurd. We went into Somalia, encountered a little bit of hostility and we went running. None of these issues is simple. None of them can be dealt with in months or a couple of years, if you are serious about discovering the underlying causes, which is what I hear in the rhetoric of many western powers at the moment.
Senator Di Nino: I would like to shift the focus away from the situation in Kosovo. A lot of emotion is involved in that topic, and it clouds the picture on the kinds of things that we are trying to arrive at.
Professor Bercuson made a comment that will be the focus of my two or three questions.
If I understood you correctly, you said that within 10 years NATO would likely be the U.S. and anybody that wants to go along with that. Am I representing your thoughts correctly here?
Mr. Bercuson: Yes, with regard to NATO as a military organization. NATO as a political organization will remain the same probably. Their current military structure will not remain.
Senator Di Nino: Can NATO have a future without a military component?
Mr. Bercuson: That is a good question. With the onset of the OSCE and other discussions occurring in Europe with European security organizations, it may well be. I see European powers increasingly identifying European interests from their own perspectives and the United States identifying interests from its own perspective, and not as great a confluence as we have seen over the last four or five decades, especially during the Cold War.
The recent American experience in Iraq, for example, where they tried to reconstruct a multilateral coalition to act against President Hussein, has considerably soured the United States on multilateralism. One can argue -- as Americans do among themselves -- about whether multilateralism is a good or bad policy, but clearly, given what is occurring right now, the Americans abandoned multilateralism. They have NATO to go with them. However, what choice does NATO have except to go along with the Americans, who provide much of the punch for NATO?
Will that happen down the road? The Greeks apparently do not want to be in on this operation, the Italians are lukewarm about it. Who knows how the other new central European members feel about this operation? It may hold together now because they are in it, but what about the next time?
When I look down the road, I see a United States that is more likely to act on its own militarily with whomever goes along with it. The British will always go along with them, for very good reasons. The question is: Who will we go along with?
Senator Di Nino: What will the Germans and the French do then? Do you foresee a European association, both political and military?
Mr. Bercuson: Yes, I do. The French and the Germans are already drawing closer together militarily. They are doing that with the construction of mixed brigades, in terms of ground forces, naval operations, and so on, and this is likely to continue. Anybody who reads tea leaves knows that, when German reconstruction of East Germany is finished, Germany as an industrial powerhouse will be a significant military factor in Eastern and Central Europe.
Senator Di Nino: We have also been told that the contributions, particularly to the military side of NATO from Europe, are not up to the standards they should be. They are not making the contributions that one could would expect them to make. Is that a fact at this stage?
Mr. Bercuson: How do you measure that? There was a time NATO went around and told nations what sort of contributions they should be making. That does not happen very much anymore. Everyone has fallen "below standard" -- whatever that standard is. Everyone has taken a peace dividend to a certain degree.
I do not think it is an issue of all the European countries. I do not think it matters to anybody what the Belgians and the Dutch -- with great respect to those countries -- and Luxembourg spend on security in Europe. European security will depend on the French and the Germans, with respect to the continent, and the British to a certain extent, and not much on anybody else.
Senator Di Nino: If certain European members of NATO are not making a contribution equivalent to the standards that they should be making, and they are relying more on the U.S. -- militarily I am talking about now -- is this part of the evolution towards the 10-year scenario that you are painting?
Mr. Bercuson: Yes, to the extent that Americans will increasingly require -- and they certainly do now -- a quid pro quo of one sort or another. For example, if you want to join, what is your technological capability? How much are you prepared to assume? If you are not, as they have shown in other instances, they are not prepared to play.
Senator Di Nino: What do you think is the impact of what is happening with NATO today under UN? Second, do you see the world evolving into geographic military powers?
Mr. Stairs: With respect to the UN, I suppose the answer is that it may be weakening. The United Nations is us. The UN does not exist apart from the politics of its members. It is the complexity and pluralism of the politics that makes it difficult for the organization to act.
What we are seeing in the Balkans at the moment is NATO acting because it has a narrow range of members. Therefore, apart from having instruments at its disposal, it also has narrower politics. It is easier for it to make a decision. In a sense, it is weakening the UN, but the UN is weakened by something more fundamental than the current NATO example.
That does suggest another observation about an earlier question. The danger of enlarging NATO's membership too greatly and diversifying the politics of its composition is that you will gradually weaken it by the same sort of process that the UN has been weakened, except of course that the great powers within it may continue to dominate no matter what the smaller powers say. That is a kind of danger.
As it ceases to be a collective defence and becomes more like collective security it may also show some of the weaknesses of collective security organizations.
Senator Di Nino: Second, do you foresee geographical military powers <#0107> for example, the Europeans, the North Americans?
Mr. Stairs: If the Americans become fed up with the burden-sharing problem, which applies to us as well as to the Europeans, and fed up with the European connection generally, it could be problematic. In some U.S. quarters, people are beginning to ask why the Europeans cannot look after this; that it is in their backyard and they have now recovered and that, indeed, they are our competitors economically in the world at large.
If that sort of attitude grows, then there will emerge in the world what Winston Churchill thought would be a good idea at the end of the Second World War, namely, regional spheres of influence. That could happen.
The countervailing debate in the U.S. takes a larger international view and sees America's interests as being advanced more effectively by engaging very actively in organizations that it knows in the final analysis it can dominate. From that perspective, America's global interests are served by its continuing involvement in Europe. We could argue the Europeans are banking on that American interest if they do not pay as much of the bill as some may think.
It is difficult to know how that debate will turn out in the end, but I suspect the Americans will not lose interest in Europe in the foreseeable future. It is not an immediate concern.
Senator Losier-Cool: My question is a supplementary to Senator Forrestall's.
[Translation]
Mr. Chairman, I am comfortable asking this professor Bercuson my question in French. Senator Forrestal spoke of a significant CF contribution to NATO. On page 5 and at the top of page 6 you refer to the limits of the Canadian Forces. You think that the Canadian Department of Defence should change its initial priorities in order to make a significant contribution to NATO?
In the second part of my question, when you speak of the development of peace, I would like to have your opinion on what you describe at the top of page 6 as "The old classic Pearsonian peackeeping." How is that related, or is it completely different?
[English]
Mr. Bercuson: I do not believe that there is more that the Department of National Defence can do today to ring more effectiveness out of the dollars that it is receiving from the government. I have been in a fortunate position as a policy advisor to Minister Young, and now on the monitoring committee to monitor change in the armed forces and DND to study what DND has been doing over the last four or five years.
Anyone who believes that somehow you can get more bang for the buck, more cutting-edge, is not basing that on facts. DND, through a variety of measures that it has taken -- outsourcing, private contracting and so on -- is probably receiving as good a value out of a dollar as you can possibly get. It does not have the money to continue.
Anyone who goes over and talks to the people in that building beside the canal will be told that, sooner or later, the government of this country must face a decision as to whether it will pump another $1.5 billion a year into the National Defence budget or whether it will downsize the force from the roughly 60,000 it is now.
If you downsize the force, you can say goodbye to revolution and military affairs, goodbye to combat effectiveness, goodbye to officer education, and goodbye having a first-rate combat-capable force. It cannot be done.
Today, both the commissioned and non-commissioned members do not have the time to carry out their jobs, to educate themselves, to go to staff college, to take their training, and to pursue the advance degrees that this government says they need to have in order to run a modern armed forces. That is with 60,000. If you drop to 40,000, forget it.
As to the second question, the best illustration that I can give is our experience in Croatia and Bosnia. When UNPROFOR was created, it was created along classic Pearsonian lines. It was created as a force to stand between two parties who apparently wanted to make an agreement but could not bring themselves to trust each other. Hence, in a classic sort of way, as was the case in Cypress or in Sinai, in Croatia, UNPROFOR 1 was supposed to stand between the Croatians and the Serbs. It deteriorated into a full-scale civil war that lasted for several years -- as we all know.
Our forces were there with inappropriate rules of engagement. They were not rules of engagement that allowed our forces to defend themselves properly. They had inappropriate equipment. They did not have the capability of defending themselves. In many instances, they were brought under direct fire by troops, both the Croatians and the Serbs.
One of the mystery battles was a 36-hour intensive combat operation, the battle of a Medak pocket, which was fought by the second battalion of the Princess Patricia's Canadian light infantry against an attack by Croatian forces to take over an area that had been designated as a non-partisan area. Canadians are not aware of that fact.
The point is that Pearsonian peacekeeping still exists in certain parts of the world. However, what was required in former Yugoslavia, in Bosnia, in Croatia were heavily armed forces that were capable not only of defending themselves but of carrying out a mandate of stopping the slaughter.
The CO of the second PPCLI, in his post-combat report to DND, bemoaned the fact that his troops knew that ethnic cleansing was occurring in his area of operations but they did not have the mandate from the UN to stop it. He believed that, had they stopped it, that might have set the tone for the rest of the war in Bosnia and Croatia, but it did not.
Senator Losier-Cool: If memory serves me, I think we heard that at another meeting.
The Chairman: We had Colonel Galvin in.
Senator Roche: Professor Bercuson, as you know, the committee is struggling with the relationship between NATO and the United Nations. From your presentation, I take it that it is your view that, because of the weakness of the United Nations, NATO per force must play a more decisive role. We are seeing that now in Kosovo.
Looking down the line, the Secretary-General of the United Nations stated the other day, rather emphatically, that it was necessary to restore the pre-eminent authority of the United Nations Security Council in the determination of the use of force.
How does that square with your view that NATO must become more powerful in the determination of maintaining peace, defined as intrastate, for which you think that the United Nations is not well enough equipped? How do you square your perception that NATO must become stronger, more determinative, in a dangerous world with the Secretary-General's call for the restoration of the pre-eminence of the UN Security Council?
Mr. Bercuson: If the UN and its Security Council can reform themselves, or itself -- this is a question we grappled with back in the 1940s. We grappled with it in the 1950s in terms of how we would get around the question of the Soviet veto, for example. We are grappling with it today. It is not a Soviet veto, but for all intents and purpose today Russia is beginning to act like Czarist Russia and in many ways like the Soviet Union did.
You are probably aware of the fact that, for many years, analysts of the Soviet Union were not sure whether the sources of Soviet conduct were communist or whether they were traditional Russian imperialist. That is a whole other issue.
If the United Nations could reform itself in a such a way that it could demonstrate that it was capable of exercising effective military command, that it was capable of intervening in intrastate conflicts such as this one as others that occurred in Africa, why not follow UN leadership? It is always better to do it that way if you can.
However, the position that I have taken publicly on this war in Kosovo is that, in the absence of any ability of the UN to act, someone must.
Senator Roche: With respect to the future, I am interpreting that you think that the authority of the United Nations should be re-established and that this committee, in looking at this situation, perhaps ought to make that point. Would this not be more in Canada's interests, in dealing with our always tenuous relationship with the United States, that indeed a restoration of a true multilateral authority in a better working security council is much more in Canada's interests than subsuming ourselves into a United States-driven NATO?
Mr. Bercuson: The difference between you and I probably is that I am trying to look at what I see is hard realities. You talk about the pre-eminent authority of the United Nations. I am not an international law expert. From where I sit, international law over the last 99 years has largely been determined by those nations that have had the force to determine it. We are very fortunate today in that the world's only superpower is also a functioning liberal democracy that answers to certain imperatives of its own, if not other international forces, imperatives that do have to do with certain sets of morality, human liberty, and so on. Perfection the U.S. is not, but what state can claim that?
Pre-eminent authority of the United Nations under all circumstances, unconditionally, I would never agree to that.
Senator Roche: We cannot, at this moment, extend this dialogue. However, I would point out that the United Nations charter is fairly clear on this and NATO's own charter and the reaffirmation by NATO and the new strategic concept does make the point that NATO operations ought always to be with the consent of the UN Security Council.
Mr. Bercuson: I do not believe the UN Security Council would have ever given consent to this current operation. Someone needs to stop that man from killing lots of people.
Senator Roche: I would certainly agree that Milosevic and company had to be stopped, but I feel that the chairman will not allow me to go down that avenue of expounding the argument as to how he should have been stopped. You will notice that my questions were directed into the future.
Professor Stairs, with respect to the Washington communiqué NATO issued in conjunction with the strategic concept in which they committed themselves to a review of their nuclear weapons policies, how do you see that review working? What is your view of NATO's reassertion in the strategic concept that nuclear weapons are essential in the light of the advisory opinion of the international court of justice, in the light of the requirements of Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty?
What is your view concerning how NATO ought to realistically and responsibly in the world today review its policies on nuclear weapons?
Mr. Stairs: I do not know how it can do it because I do not think it will give them up. In other words -- we have had this discussion before -- I am absolutely convinced, and they have as much as indicated so, that they will not give them up. They actually feel that there is a need for Britain and France to have them as well as the United States.
The review may have to do with a review of issues such as no first use, but my guess is that that will not go anywhere because there is no indication that the Americans in particular will accept that proposition, even if all the other NATO allies were agreed on it. I do not think that they will be.
They may have discussions, they may talk about technical questions, perceptions. There may be issues about the deployment of anti-ballistic missile systems in various theatres, and things of that kind, but I would be surprised if they had the kind of review that would lead in the sort of direction that you might hope for.
Senator Roche: It is not what I hope for, it is a question of the international law, the requirements of Article VI of the Non- Proliferation Treaty. If you were drafting the report of this committee, in coming to this section, never mind what you think will happen, what would be your view of what this committee might well say with respect to NATO's continued retention of nuclear weapons in light of the requirements of the Non- Proliferation Treaty and the advisory opinion of the international court of justice?
Mr. Stairs: We may again be starting on a different premise. You are beginning with the premise that NATO should in fact submit to serious sources of international law that you feel are pertinent. That may or may not be in legal terms.
Senator Roche: Are you suggesting that NATO could legitimately operate without reference to international law?
Mr. Stairs: I think it is doing so.
Senator Roche: Do you take that view with equanimity?
Mr. Stairs: Obviously, I would prefer to have an international politics that was subject to the rule of law in general. My response is that we are not there yet. I do not think that is the way the world works. I certainly would support a gradual evolution towards the creation of a system of rule of law that everyone can regard as reasonably reliable. The difficulty is that in matters of this kind no system of the rule of law that I can see is reasonably reliable.
The reality is that there are Milosevics in the world. The reality is that many of them have enormous capability. The reality is that they will not pay any attention to the rule of law. As long as that Hobbesian jungle exists -- and there is no reasonable assurance that it has been tamed -- then frankly I cannot put my faith in commitment to legal documents of that sort. We are in the jungle; we are not out of it. We may be evolving towards that, and certainly the aspirations of the Government of Canada as I understand them is to promote new norms in international politics in a whole variety of areas that will gradually erode the temptation to violate law for purely state-interest purposes. That is an admirable objective. However, we will be a long time in getting there. In the meantime, we must keep some powder dry and some of it may have to be nuclear power.
Senator Andreychuk: We have been zeroing in on Milosevic as a problem in the area where Kosovo is grabbing our attention, but if there is to be a peacekeeping mission of any kind in there, however described, under what mandate, part of the problem is the KLA. We failed in the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia because we did not understand the realities of mixing various aggressors. How would a peacekeeping venture work, NATO having been so closely involved with anti-Milosevic, which would almost put you into a pro-KLA position and probably has been on the ground?
If you do not see us exerting collectively, multilaterally, some influence on the United States, it has never been my thought that we could dissuade the United States from their initial objectives but we could certainly find more appropriate means of accomplishing it. We have been persuasive in doing that in some cases.
Would we do it by lifting up our efforts into a context with Congress, the Presidency, and ignore the multilateral issues, or are we saying we have no influence at all?
Mr. Bercuson: We need to show Congress and the American taxpayer that we are serious about making a contribution that is in proportion to our size, wealth, and abilities, to our technological capabilities, to our educational levels, and so on, when it comes to maintaining international peace and security, especially the kind that serves western interests, the free flow of people and ideas. Until we do that, we will not be taken seriously.
As far as your first question is concerned, you point to one of the major outgrowths of the fact that the West has bungled this problem so badly since 1991. I can see a direct historical parallel to the use of national liberation forces in Southeast Asia against the Japanese in World War II. When the war was over, we basically said to those national liberation forces, "Thanks folks. We have appreciated your help. The Japanese are now defeated. Go home, go back to the jungle." They did not, and we know what the consequences were.
In order to arrive at a settled agreement, a political agreement with regard to Kosovo on NATO's own terms, NATO will have to turn around and kick the KLA in the teeth. Will it be able to do that? That is other another question.
Senator Stollery: I certainly agree with you on the KLA.
I read last night in the context of this very realistic discussion -- sometimes it sounds very neat, and as we know nothing in human relations is neat. In reviewing the United Nations resolutions dating back to the Korean War, I was surprised to read about the way in which these resolutions have been stretched, that once the UN receives a resolution from the Security Council, because they have had resolution, the Security Council has not always vetoed resolutions. I am talking about the last 50 years.
I remember the Pearson-Dean Acheson connection. They were close friends, and we did have a lot of influence in those days because of that friendship.
The Security Council passes a resolution and then that resolution can be distorted in order to authorize the use of force with a resolution to legitimize the use of force. I am surprised that it has gone on ever since the Korean War. I know the problems. When the British left Palestine in 1948, there was a unanimous resolution of the Security Council, if I am not mistaken. The Russians agreed with the establishment of the State of Israel.
I would like to hear more about that. This must be a subject that you study, the fact that they receive a resolution that is then used to legitimize actions which, as an ordinary citizen, I would have said were not legitimized by that resolution -- which seems to have had a very weakening effect on the United Nations.
Mr. Stairs: One of the reasons for that is that the UN can issue the resolution, but it is not a command-and-control system. It did originally have a military committee. The idea was that the Chiefs of Staff of the great powers would act as a military committee and become a kind of joint chiefs of staff who would then operate in the same way as a domestic joint chiefs of staff, but that never worked.
Effectively what happens is that it delegates these processes, usually historically in large operations through the United States and their allies. When circumstances change in the field, they have a certain freedom of manoeuvre, which they are inclined to stretch if they think it appropriate to do so.
In the case of Korea, they did come back and ask for instructions from the General Assembly that would allow them to cross into North Korea and so forth.
It is largely because the UN passes a resolution and then somebody else does the implementing. It is a bit like government bureaucrats.
The Chairman: Professor Stairs, would you be willing to take the question under consideration and give a considered reply on paper? That might solve the problem.
Mr. Stairs: Yes, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman: Thank you very much.
Professors, you have given us a good afternoon. We have had good afternoons in this committee, this being one of the best. Thank you very much for helping us in this way.
The committee continued in camera.