Vincent J. Curtis
30 May 2017
The election of the Trudeau government in 2015 brought with
it hopes in some for a return to international peacekeeping as a prestigious feature
of Canadian foreign policy. Attention was
focussed on a mission in Africa, and the West African nation of Mali in
particular. None of the peacekeeping
opportunities were, on second look, particularly appealing. Despite pressure from the UN, the Trudeau
government has not committed itself to any large-scale peacekeeping
intervention in Mali, or anywhere else in Africa.
With good reason. In
the first place, it is not in Canada’s national interest to have Canadian
soldiers keeping peace among the warring tribes of Africa. Whereas it is in Canada’s national interests
to keeping the peace among the warring tribes - of Europe.
To say nothing of national interest, the obvious racialism
involved in having Canadian soldiers patrolling the African bush to keep the
tribesmen from killing each other presents no winning visuals and a real danger
of a loss of prestige as a result of some incident.
Even at two percent of GDP spent on defense, Canada lacks
the military strength to supply a peacekeeping mission in Africa and a mission
of deterrence in Europe. In Afghanistan,
we were stretched to maintain a full-strength battalion and a brigade
headquarters in Kandahar indefinitely; subtract an additional battalion from
the reserves for a mission elsewhere, and something would have had to give in
short order.
Maintaining the peace in Europe is by far Canada’s higher
priority, and we have to husband what military strength we have in order to
keep that peace.
One of the threats to the peace of Europe comes from the
Putin regime of Russia. Russia is an
interesting socio-political case. For
seventy years, as the heart and soul of the Soviet Union, Russia represented
the sacred flame of communism and official atheism to the world. When the fraud of communism could no longer
be maintained, the Soviet empire collapsed, leaving Russia shorn even of her
Czarist imperial lands. There must be a
huge emptiness in the psychological core of the Russian people right now.
The country went into serious demographic decline. The population of ethnic Russians
shrank. Of a total population of now
less than 150 million, only 120 million are ethnic Russians. The average lifespan of a Russian is falling,
and alcoholism and corruption are said to be rampant. Russia’s GDP is smaller than Canada’s. She relies heavily on exports of oil and gas
for foreign exchange, and with depressed prices for both those commodities, her
capacity to import foreign goods is not what it was a decade ago, when oil and
gas prices were more than double what they are now.
President Vladimir Putin faces a huge challenge in getting a
demoralized Russian people turned around, and he turned instinctively to the
prestige game. He believes that the fall
of the Soviet Union was a great geo-political disaster. The role he is playing to the Russian people
is that of the Strong Czar, which is distinct from the Good Czar. Putin is exercising Russia’s military
strength to regain lands which once comprised the Czarist empire: in Georgia,
Crimea, and in eastern Ukraine. He is
menacing the Baltic States. In addition,
he is propping up the Assad regime in Syria, and is supplying Iran with missile
defenses. Russian air forces are testing
the NORAD defenses again, and are buzzing NATO warships in the Baltic and the
Black Seas.
Putin is doing the things that dictators typically do in
order to distract attention from internal domestic problems: create
international problems that justify internal oppression and distract attention
from the internal issues. The good Czar
would undertake the thankless and personally dangerous task of a spiritual
revival in Russia; the strong Czar creates and carefully manages external
problems.
Publisher Scott Taylor has observed that Russia is in no
position to attack and conquer Europe.
Russia has recently cut military expenditures even as NATO countries are
being encouraged to increase theirs. By
comparison, Germany has a population of 82 million and a GDP nearly triple that
of Russia. True, Russia still has a
large nuclear force that could reduce Western Europe to a nuclear waste-land;
but what is the point of trying to rule a nuclear waste-land?
The threat that Russia represents under the Putin regime is
the nibbling at the edges of NATO, and a consequent loss of prestige of that
organization that would follow should he succeed. The seizure and forced incorporation of all the
Ukraine would create diplomatic tidal waves that NATO could do nothing
about. Such a move, if successful, could
cement Putin’s standing in Russian history while diminishing NATO’s prestige at
the same time. An attempt at seizing one
of the Baltic States, on the other hand, would create a far more ticklish
problem for both Putin and NATO. If,
say, NATO member Latvia were seized in a lightning invasion, NATO would be
faced with a fait accompli and NATO
countries would have to ask themselves how much they were prepared to risk for
the sake of a country of less than two million people and of territory not
vital to the security of the rest of NATO.
That is why deterrence in Europe is central to Canadian
foreign policy. We don’t want to have to
answer that question in respect of the Baltic States, and would greatly prefer
a stabilization of the Ukraine/Crimea problem.
Only military deterrence can inhibit a seizure of Latvia, and military
measures that can make a seizure less than lightning fast contribute to the
stability of Europe. Putin is not going
to risk all his prestige on a less than sure thing.
A force of 450 troops in the Baltic States is a start. Providing those troops with real defensive
power with plentiful machine guns and anti-tank weapons will be the next step. Diplomatically, Canada can encourage a
spiritual revival of the Russian people through engagement with the Russian
Orthodox Church and encouragement of the spread of the western enlightenment
through cultural exchanges, rendering the prestige game moot. We can’t do this if we are busy putting out
brush fires in Africa.
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A version of this appears in the July, 2017 edition of Esprit de Corps magazine.
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