by Gwynne Dyer
However, the American guarantee to Europe did not really depend on the presence of a mere third of a million U.S. troops on the continent; they were there mainly to reassure Western Europeans that the United States really could not avoid fighting in their defence if the Soviet Union ever attacked. The real military guarantee was the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command, which would destroy the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons. When Lester Pearson had asked U.S. secretary of state Dean Acheson during the Korean War what would happen if the “Communists” launched a major offensive in Europe, he replied: “The free countries [in Europe] would have to do what they could to defend themselves from Russia while American air power was brought to bear on Russian cities and industries.”
As time wore on and the Soviet Union gradually acquired the ability to strike the United States with nuclear weapons too, that simple, ironclad U.S. guarantee became suspect: would the Americans really attack the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons and expose their own homeland to Soviet retaliation in order to “save” Europe in a crisis? To reassure the Europeans that yes, indeed, they would do that implausible thing, the Americans consistently tried to stay far ahead of the Soviet Union in the number and variety of their nuclear weapons.
But nuclear weapons cannot be counted like spears. Once the Soviet Union had acquired the ability to deliver a couple of hundred large nuclear warheads on American cities (which it had by 1965, in the form of unstoppable Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles), then the number of nuclear weapons the United States possessed became quite irrelevant. It could have them by the million and it still wouldn’t be able to save the American population, no matter how thoroughly it could annihilate the Soviet Union. At that point, the American nuclear guarantee that lay at the heart of NATO strategy became logically inconsistent and, in the strictly technical sense of the word, incredible. In a rational world, this development should have led to the withdrawal of the U.S. nuclear guarantee from Western Europe, since it could only be fulfilled at the cost of seeing American society utterly destroyed. Alternatively, it could have been replaced by an enormous buildup of U.S. and allied conventional military forces in Europe, which would have freed NATO from its need to rely on nuclear weapons at every level.
But neither of those things occurred. The alliance continued to rely on a fundamentally incredible nuclear threat to compensate for its deliberate and self-imposed weakness in conventional forces, maintaining only enough American troops in Europe to ensure that the United States would be irrevocably involved in any war there. Indeed, the fact that NATO blithely carried on for a quarter-century with a strategy that no longer made military sense, and that the Soviet Union was never tempted for a moment to call the bluff, demonstrated the fundamental and quite awesome stability of the post-1945 settlement in Europe. The partition of Europe between the superpowers was never seriously challenged by either side, and there was probably never a single day between 1945 and 1991 when either side seriously contemplated initiating a war there.
Indeed, the superpowers showed a good deal of tacit complicity, in Europe as elsewhere, in pursuing policies designed to reinforce the deeply entrenched bipolar character of international politics that gave each of them such a dominant position in their respective blocs. And although it was nonsense to claim, as people often did, that NATO (or the Warsaw Pact, for that matter) “kept the peace” in Europe for forty years, it was certainly true that neither superpower had the slightest incentive to break it, for they were the greatest beneficiaries of the status quo.
At one level, therefore, the NATO and Warsaw Pact alliances were simply the means by which the superpowers preserved and perpetuated the very agreeable division of power in the world that had come about as a consequence of the Second World War. But at another level, these familiar old alliances were not at all harmless. Although the confrontation between them was heavily ritualized, large numbers of people on both sides took their own propaganda seriously, and the fifty thousand nuclear weapons were quite real. Moreover, the fact that the industrialized world had been corralled into hostile military blocs provided the military-industrial complex on each side with an inexhaustible supply of “threat” images. And if the long period of relative stability in great-power politics had ever broken down, the alliances ensured that the ensuing crises would be faced by an extremely over-armed and hair-trigger world.
Canada would have been involved from the start, for the main purpose of stationing Canadian forces in Europe was exactly the same as it was in the American case: to guarantee to the Europeans that Canada would be in the next world war from the opening shot. Our country had no direct role in the central relationship of nuclear dependency between the United States and Western Europe, but we were certainly complicit in it, and the presence of Canadian troops in Europe, by making the presence of American troops there seem less of an anomaly than it really was, helped to blur the otherwise stark outline of that central relationship.
The alliance that the West created in the late 1940s and the early 1950s was indeed a “dreadful mistake,” but it never actually tumbled into a nuclear war, and the fact that the Soviet Union never attacked Western Europe was frequently offered as proof that NATO was necessary. It was an inherently unanswerable argument, but reminiscent of the story about a man who was sitting in a train, tearing up little bits of paper and throwing them out of the window. Somebody asked him: “What are you doing that for?”
“To keep the elephants away,” he replied, tearing off another piece of paper.
“But that’s crazy, there are no elephants around here.”
“Of course not,” he explained patiently. “I’m keeping them away.”
For the Canadian forces—and especially for the army, given the unlikelihood that anyone would ever invade Canada’s own territory—NATO was a godsend. Being part of the alliance gave meaning and interest to our soldiers’ careers: their spiritual home was Europe, where they could be competitive and well-respected professionals playing in the military big league. They got to play there for two whole generations, and most of them never questioned the politics or the strategy of it. And, of course, they would have died bravely and uncomplainingly if that was the ultimate price of being able to practise the profession they loved in the service of the country they loved.
I don’t think anyone has illusions that we’re going to live all the way through the next war. Everyone’s going to try their best and do it as long as possible; however, in any war someone’s got to die, and that’s just what we’re here for, I would imagine.… I don’t think we’re going to have a war in the next few years. But if we did, and I’ve been getting paid for the last ten or fifteen years now without a war, then it’s my duty to go and fight the good fight.
Major Jim Calvin, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, West Germany, 1986
The great expansion of the Canadian forces in the 1950s, which carried them from 35,000 men in 1948 to 120,000 in 1960, virtually smothered the old militia spirit, for the new armed forces were entirely professional. They were, of course, motivated by patriotism as well as by the attraction of practising their profession at the highest level, but they were never asked to choose between the two: after 1950, the defence of Canada was fully equated with membership in the alliances that gave our forces access to the military big league. They would no more have volunteered the argument that Canada’s defence could be separated from the NATO alliance than they would have suggested before 1939 that it was separable from the British imperial context. Asking our soldiers if NATO was a good thing was like asking the barber if you need a haircut.
There is no deliberate deception or conscious self-interest in it, but no other section of Canadian society subscribed with such near-unanimity as our armed forces to the view that having heavily armed alliances is the best and indeed the only way to prevent the “other side” (defined by the alliance system) from starting a war. Like many theological propositions, this was neither provable nor disprovable by logic,
nor was it desirable to settle the argument by experiment. But by the mid-fifties, as the panic engendered by the Korean War wore off, for people like Lester Pearson the alliance case was starting to lose its glitter.
Late in 1955 Pearson was the first Western foreign minister to visit Moscow since the Cold War had begun. On the last day of his visit he was flown down to the Crimea to meet Nikita Khrushchev, the man who was already clearly emerging as “first among equals” in the post-Stalin collective leadership. Khrushchev, whom Pearson described in his report to Ottawa as being “as blunt and volatile as only a Ukrainian peasant turned into one of the most powerful figures in the world can be,” came straight to the point: why didn’t Canada leave NATO, which was “an aggressive alliance and a direct threat to Russia and to peace”? The usual futile argument ensued, but after things had mellowed a bit Khrushchev returned to the subject in a subtler way, referring to the repeated Soviet efforts to embarrass the West by pretending to take the NATO treaty literally. If it was really a regional collective security organization authorized under Article 51 of the UN Charter, Moscow kept asking, then could the Soviet Union please join too?
I was about to explain why NATO should be [regarded as a purely defensive organization] when Khrushchev broke in with the remark, “You should let us into NATO—we have been knocking at the door two years.” I replied that if the world situation were such as to permit entry of the U.S.S.R. into NATO it would also presumably permit proper functioning of the United Nations in the security field.… I also pointed out that if the Soviets were in NATO they would have to accept an integrated defence system and unified command. If they were prepared to accept that why not make the United Nations security system work?
“Mike”: Memoirs, vol. 2
And besides, Pearson added, the Soviet Union might be worse off without NATO, since it would then face “the United States ‘going it alone’ and Germany freewheeling in the centre of Europe, without the cautious and restraining influence of countries like the United Kingdom, Belgium, France and Canada.” It is not recorded whether Khrushchev expressed his gratitude for Canada’s restraining influence.
Like most of the generation who had helped to create the NATO alliance, Pearson had a sense of parental pride that would never allow him to renounce it entirely, however disillusioned he might become with its practical shortcomings. But although most Canadians still considered NATO to be necessary, it was quite clear to them by the mid-fifties that the alliance was not in any practical sense a part of the UN process. In fact, it was mostly a rival to it, and many Canadians still believed in the United Nations too. Moreover, many Canadians were feeling stifled within the alliance, where Canadian compliance was increasingly taken for granted, and—although this was mostly just the result of the relative decline in Canada’s power as the rest of the world recovered economically from the war—it chafed at the national pride. So peacekeeping, the great Canadian invention of 1956, was a cause for much national self-congratulation.
It is one of those cases where the Canadians felt good, because here we were, the very virtuous people who had no colonial past and a good reputation throughout the world. We were the mediators, we were the peacekeepers, that was our self-image at the time.
Dale Thomson, secretary to Prime Minister St. Laurent, 1953–58
Peacekeeping was a last-ditch invention by the disillusioned idealists of the 1940s when their dream of a world made safe by collective security had collapsed under the weight of postwar rivalry and suspicion. It was a pale facsimile of what the United Nations was supposed to do by way of keeping the peace, done on a voluntary rather than an obligatory basis, with forces that could only cajole, not compel. It operated only in places where peacekeeping forces had been invited by the local government, and never on the territory of a great power. But peacekeeping was the only vestige of the original vision of a more orderly world that became a kind of reality—and it came into existence during the week that saw the most concentrated outburst of international stupidity and bloody-mindedness since the 1945 war.
In the same crowded week in late 1956, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to crush a revolt against Communist rule, and Britain and France invaded Egypt (in collusion with Israel) in order to force it to submit to European interests. Both were attempts to reimpose imperial discipline on restive subject peoples, the only significant distinction being that Hungary was in thrall to one of the new informal empires cloaked by ideology and military alliances, while Egypt had only recently emerged from one of the old colonial empires that were based on naked power.
But that was a very important distinction in practice, for the new-style empires had a basis in the realities of power, and a credibility in terms of the prevailing psychology of the time, which allowed them to rebuff any outside interference from the United Nations or anywhere else. The crumbling European colonial empires, on the other hand, lacked both power and credibility. The United Nations was no more able to prevent the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolt in 1956 than it could have stopped the U.S.-backed “rebel army” in CIA pay that had invaded Guatemala and overthrown the elected left-wing government of that country two years before. But Egypt was different.
The “Suez crisis” was a quarrel between Britain and France on one side and Egypt on the other over the control and profits of the Suez Canal. Britain reflexively saw the canal as a “lifeline of empire” even though its remaining imperial interests “east of Suez” were already in the process of liquidation; the Suez Canal Company, which owned and operated the canal, was a private French company with many influential shareholders. Moreover, both European powers were then critically dependent on oil imports from the Gulf. A group of nationalist, pan-Arab officers led by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser had seized power in Egypt in 1952, and both the British and their French allies were concerned that Nasser might close the canal to them in a crisis.
Meanwhile Israel was angry at Nasser for allowing Palestinian guerrillas to operate out of the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula, and U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles was corralling various countries of the region, including Iraq, Iran and Pakistan, into the Baghdad Pact, yet another alliance to “contain” the Soviet Union. (Pearson described it as his “passion for surrounding the Communist bloc with a ring of mini-NATOs.”) What triggered the Suez crisis, in fact, was American displeasure with Nasser’s attitude toward the Soviet Union:
Dulles had begun to think of Egypt as a threat to his policy of containment of Soviet Russia, rather than as a people struggling to be free from British imperialism. The matter came to a head over the issue of help to build the Aswan high dam.
“Mike”: Memoirs, vol. 2
Washington, afraid that the Egyptians would seek aid from the Soviet Union for their ambitious plan to dam the Nile at Aswan, offered to help finance the project. Nasser accepted the offer but remained friendly with Moscow, recognized Red China and kept up a stream of propaganda insisting that the Arabs ought to be creating an alliance against Israel, not the Russians—so Dulles suddenly announced in July of 1956 that the United States would withdraw its support of the dam. The Soviet Union, seizing the opportunity that the West had created, said it would give “favourable and friendly consideration” to any economic aid that Egypt might ask for. The Aswan High Dam was eventually built with Soviet aid (and Egypt did not catch Marxism or join the Warsaw Pact as a result), but President Nasser was furious: “Let [the Americans] choke with rage,” he said, and nationalized the Suez Canal. He promised to compensate the shareholders, but his aim was to finance the dam with the tolls from the canal, which meant that they would probably have a long wait for their money.
Britain, under the Conservative government of Sir Anthony Eden, was incensed. “We believe that we should seize this opportunity of putting the Canal under proper international control,” said Eden—and in a cretinous outburst of late-imperial machismo, Britain began conspiring secretly with France and Israel for a surprise attack on Egypt. Lester Pearson,
anxious to stop Britain from doing something criminally foolish, tried to have the Suez crisis discussed at NATO meetings without much success, and he also tried directly to talk the British down off their high horse. It seemed as if they were listening, but while London was sending reassuring telegrams to Ottawa and the other Dominion capitals, the secret talks with the French and the Israelis about a surprise attack on Egypt were continuing at a “safe house” outside Paris.
Israel’s tanks invaded the Sinai Peninsula on October 29, while its air force destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground. As prearranged with the Israelis, the British and the French issued an ultimatum the next day calling for a ceasefire: both sides, they demanded, should withdraw ten miles from the canal. If the ultimatum was not accepted within twelve hours, Anglo-French forces would land in Egypt, ostensibly to keep the canal traffic moving. Since the canal was 193 kilometres from the Israeli frontier, this would effectively leave the entire Sinai Peninsula under Israeli occupation (which was to be Israel’s reward for giving Britain and France a pretext to invade Egypt).
Not surprisingly, the Egyptian government rejected the ultimatum. (The Israelis accepted it, of course, on condition that the Egyptians also accept.) On October 31 the British and the French began to bomb selected targets along the canal, and Canada received a secret message from Anthony Eden asking for Canada’s diplomatic support. Prime Minister St. Laurent’s reaction was sheer outrage. “I had never before seen him in such a state of controlled anger,” Pearson wrote afterward. “I had never seen him in a state of any kind of anger. He threw me the telegram and said ‘What do you think of this?” ’