7 Nov 12
With the re-election of Barack Obama as
President of the United States, certain things will ensue.
The first is that Obama Administration will
do its best to ignore the war of Islamic extremism against the west. The scandal arising from the al Qaeda attack
on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, in which the American Ambassador Chris
Stevens was killed, is that the President left four Americans to die at the
hands of terrorists because for him to have taken military action would have
inconvenienced his re-election campaign.
The second is that American economic power
and her military power will decline noticeably.
The American budget deficit is wildly out of control, and the political
will to do something about it was decisively defeated in the November
elections. American borrowing madness
cannot continue indefinitely, and no combination of tax increases and spending
cuts elsewhere is going to spare the U.S. defense budget.
The power vacuum in the world thus created,
combined with unchecked hostility towards western culture, will leave the
western world less safe. The question
arises: what can Canada do to avoid being attacked and be able to deter
misguided attacks against us?
The curious fact about Canadian military
interventions abroad is that we have always done so not because we were
threatened ourselves but to uphold an alliance.
In 1884, we sent voyageurs to Egypt to help a British expedition relieve
General Charles Gordon, who was under siege in Khartoum. Gordon was trying to hold out against the
Dervishes, a 19th century group of Islamic extremists. Britain protected us against an American
invasion, and with this we demonstrated the value of having Canada in the
British Empire.
In World War I and II, Canada sent her
armed forces to Europe not because she was herself threatened by Germany, but
to protect what Canadians felt was near and dear to them.
Canada sent troops into harm’s way in Korea
to demonstrate support both for the United Nations and also the United States,
and then to Afghanistan to show solidarity with the United States, which had
been attacked on 9/11.
Canada’s recent effort in Libya was made
not because of the threat Gaddafi represented to us, but to help hold the NATO
alliance together.
A survey of military threats to Canada and
estimating the value of the NATO alliance to our security make one wonder
whether Canada should change its foreign policy from one of robust engagement
to one of cold, calculated isolationism.
The plain fact is that Canada is more likely to become involved in
foreign wars because of our alliances than because of anything Canada herself
represents to others.
A Canadian withdrawal from NATO and the
decline of American military power mean that we would have to rely on our own
strong right arm should the defense of our national interests require it. Disengaging also from much of Asia, Africa, and the of Muslim world would reduce
risks of attack and lessen the need for a robust military capability.
The
nature of the military capability we keep would need to change in accordance
with a foreign policy of selective isolationism. Our standing military forces are designed as
a microcosm of the expeditionary force that we would send to Europe in the
event of World War III. Its capacity to
project power unaided is miniscule.
Fortunately, the nature of future conflict with rogue nations and
transnational terrorist organizations do not require the raising and sending of
a land army overseas to deal a decisive blow against the enemy.
The United States tried that in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and the limits of the decisiveness of that method are now better
understood than they were a decade ago.
If we dispense with the idea of decisiveness against terrorism, then we
come to the realization that being able to strike powerful retaliatory blows
from the sea and air is the kind of deterrence we can afford in a standing
force.
Since Canada makes no pretense of being
able to decisively defeat anyone, nothing is to be gained by picking on
Canada. And it would be awfully
embarrassing for a strutting terror-master to have to explain to his supporters
how he came to be staggering and bleeding from a bolt out of the blue delivered
by a middle power like Canada.
A blue water navy is the arm that is able
to strike these kinds of blows.
-
XXX-
No comments:
Post a Comment