by Gwynne Dyer
CHAPTER 11
GOING WITH THE FLOW
PRIME MINSTER LESTER PEARSON’S ARRIVAL AT THE HEAD OF a minority Liberal government in April 1963 put an end to the confrontation with the United States over nuclear weapons that had blighted the relationship between the two countries under John Diefenbaker. Pearson accepted all sorts of nuclear weapons for Canada’s air force and army under the agreement that Diefenbaker had signed in ignorance, all under “dual-key” arrangements that allowed Ottawa to maintain the fiction that they weren’t really Canadian nuclear weapons since an American officer also had to turn a key to arm them.
The warheads will remain in United States custody, and for this purpose small units of United States custodial personnel will be stationed at the Canadian storage sites, at bases which will of course remain under Canadian command and control.… The arrangement does not add to the numbers of governments having nuclear weapons at their independent disposal.
Prime Minister’s Office, press release, August 16, 1963
I think [there was] sort of a feeling that this was a super-power business, and that we had no business being involved in it. Some of us felt, “well, that’s fine as long as we’re not hypocritical about it.” I mean after all, it was our uranium that armed the western world to a very large extent. We were very pleased to have those dollars in our country, especially in Mr. Pearson’s riding [Algoma East]. And so, you can make a case for us not being in this business (and a good case), but let’s not say it’s due to superior righteousness. Let’s just admit that it’s because we’re a small power and we can do other things that are more useful and more effective, and spend our dollars more wisely than getting into a game that leads nowhere but to destruction.
Paul Hellyer, minister of national defence, 1963–67
Canadian public opinion had never really been very excited by the nuclear weapons controversy, and when the weapons finally arrived over the next few years there was no outcry—even though the ones with our NATO forces in Germany were clearly destined to be used in densely populated parts of Western Europe. And then, as the vehicles that carried them (Bomarcs, Voodoos, Starfighters and Honest John missiles) became obsolete and were scrapped, their nuclear warheads were quietly handed back to the Americans. Canada became a born-again nuclear virgin, and nobody in Washington minded all that much; by then twenty years had passed, and nuclear fashions had changed.
What really did bother Canadians was the U.S. war in Vietnam. President John F. Kennedy’s early commitment of U.S. forces to South Vietnam went virtually unnoticed in Canada, where he was liked and trusted, but the rapid escalation of the U.S. military commitment by the more abrasive President Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 quickly created a vocal opposition to the war in Canada that tracked the rapid growth of the anti-war movement in the United States itself.
Canada was never under serious pressure from the United States to send Canadian troops to Vietnam; no other NATO member sent troops either. (The Australians and New Zealanders did, of course, but they were a great deal closer to the scene, and their defence policy at the time consisted solely of a determination to send troops to help in every American war, however needless or futile, in the hope that such loyalty would guarantee U.S. military intervention to defend them if it ever became necessary.) The pressure on the Canadian government came from the radicalization of the youth in both countries, the steady flow of draft dodgers/war resisters across the border from the United States, and the growing demand that Canada should “take a stand” against the war. Since official Ottawa also thought that the Vietnam War was a great folly, it was willing to oblige—but at first it was all done through diplomatic channels. Mustn’t cause a fuss.
We said to the Americans… “We are against the war. We think you have made a mistake. I think it’s going to cause you a whole lot of trouble. We don’t intend to get into it.” And then [U.S. secretary of state Dean] Rusk said, “Oh well, it isn’t going to last as long as you think.” And I said, “How long is it going to last?” and [U.S. secretary of defense Robert] McNamara said, “If necessary, a thousand years.”
Paul Martin, secretary of state for external affairs, 1963–68
It was a particularly frustrating business for Charles Ritchie, the Canadian ambassador in Washington. “It was all very well to say, ‘you just trust the diplomatic channels’ and so on, but I would go down and see Rusk, and he’d be like this sort of Buddha, you know, nodding his head about Canadian views and suggestions and hesitations and so on. He would sort of take note of them. He would never discuss them, or refute them.” Nevertheless, Ritchie warned Pearson: “Don’t move into public criticism on the war in Vietnam. Try to influence through diplomatic channels, and through contacts between the Prime Minister and the President, but don’t make speeches about it.”
From Pearson’s point of view, however, the “softly, softly” approach had two major defects. Not only was it not working, but the fact that he was trying to get the Americans to see reason about Vietnam was not visible to the Canadian public. Safely back in office with a four-year mandate, President Johnson went for broke in 1965, increasing the number of U.S. ground troops in South Vietnam eightfold and plastering North Vietnam with bombs in “Operation Rolling Thunder.” The Americans had completely lost their sense of proportion. Pearson felt compelled to say something in public—and to say it in the United States.
In April 1965 Pearson was going to Temple University in Philadelphia to accept a World Peace Award, and he decided to address the Vietnam War directly. His speech was ultra-cautious, full of praise for the American decision to help the South Vietnamese government and warning that “no newly independent nation could ever feel secure if capitulation in Vietnam led to the sanctification of aggression through subversion and spurious ‘wars of national liberation.’ ” He was humble, he was tentative, he was polite almost to the point of sycophancy—but he suggested a partial ceasefire. “There are many factors which I am not in a position to weigh,” Pearson said. “But there does appear to be at least a possibility that a suspension of air strikes against North Vietnam, at the right time, might provide the Hanoi authorities with an opportunity, if they wish to take it, to inject some flexibility into their policy without appearing to do so as the direct result of military pressure.”
Immediately after the speech, Pearson was invited to Camp David by President Johnson, and as usual a helicopter was sent to pick him up. Charles Ritchie, who was still Canadian ambassador in Washington, accompanied Pearson to the mountain retreat, where they were greeted by Lady Bird Johnson and the president. As far as Ritchie was concerned, things started off badly: the president only had one Bloody Mary before lunch. Then he spent the entire time on the phone, often discussing Vietnam, while “Mike” and Lady Bird made polite small talk about their mutual interest in the Civil War, trying desperately to pretend that everything was fine.
Then after lunch, Mike sort of led by saying something like, “What did you think of my speech?” And then the President said, “I thought it was awful, awful.” After that I ceased to be part of the meeting because they went out onto the terrace, and I was taken for a walk by [national security adviser McGeorge] “Mac” Bundy, who kept needling and needling me about this whole thing. You know, how could I?, and hadn’t I taken it on board that he had said that this would be the result, and it was counter-productive, and it was so sad, and regrettable, and all the rest of it. And I got very fed up with this in the end and said that if they couldn’t get on with Mike Pearson they couldn’t get on with anybody.
Then there was this story that the President picked up Mike by the collar and swung him in the air or something. He didn’t do anything of the kind. In the first place, Mike was quite a solid person, besides he would have been intolerably insulted, it didn’t happen. What he did, he grasped hold of Mike by the lapel of his coat, and he was anguished, you know, shaking Mike, and sounding and resounding and appealing and recriminating and exh
orting. And Mike was sort of, you know, leaning against the terrace getting further and further back, while this great man moved in on him, getting closer and closer. It was a close encounter. Then it sort of quieted down. Mike wasn’t as shaken as I was. He was very India-rubbery.
Charles Ritchie, Canadian ambassador to Washington, 1962–66
If there had not been a kind of “et tu, Brute” feeling about the assault, without any personal unpleasantness of any kind, I would have felt almost like Schuschnigg [the Austrian chancellor] before Hitler at Berchtesgaden.
“Mike”: Memoirs, vol 3
It was, nevertheless, Canada’s muted declaration of independence from the ideologically driven Cold War policies of its giant ally, and when Pierre Elliott Trudeau succeeded Pearson as prime minister in 1969 he was able to go a good deal further. The Canadian public’s uncritical admiration of the United States, which had been Diefenbaker’s undoing, had pretty much dissipated by the end of the 1960s. The growing nightmare of the Vietnam War was sabotaging America’s reputation as an effective operator abroad just as the wave of urban violence was destroying its image as a bastion of justice and democracy at home, and the United States was coming to be seen in Canada as just another muscle-bound great power stumbling around without a clue. At the same time (and somewhat in contradiction to the above), the rise of détente, with frequent negotiations between the rival superpowers over various questions of arms control and nuclear security, created the space for a more detailed and leisurely examination of just what the panic of the early postwar years had got us into. So Trudeau launched a defence and foreign policy review that left no stone unturned.
Mr. Trudeau, for example, said we’re going to look at neutrality, we’re going to look at non-alignment, we’re going to look at just having a defence alliance with the United States—we’re going to look at them all. We start from zero and we examine every possible alternative.… He asked the question that nobody else dared to ask: “Are we on the right track?”
Mitchell Sharp, secretary of state for external affairs, 1968–74
It was a time when almost everybody was overwrought if not downright hysterical, and Trudeau was, as Pearson said, “the man to match the times.” Speaking at Queen’s University in November 1968, Trudeau declared: “Civilization and culture in North America are more menaced, more strongly threatened, by internal disorders than by external pressure. And this is the background of these reviews [of foreign and defence policy] in which we are embarked. I am not predicting what the outcome will be, but I am saying that in my scale of values I am perhaps less worried now about what might happen over the Berlin Wall than what might happen in Chicago, New York, and perhaps our own great cities in Canada.” And to be fair to Trudeau, the October Crisis in Montreal was less than two years away.
In the meantime, everybody who was anybody in Ottawa got stuck into the defence and foreign policy reviews. NORAD got next to no attention, having been reduced to near irrelevance by the collapse of the “bomber threat,” and the option of neutrality got only a cursory examination (although a group of Canadian parliamentarians got a nice trip to Sweden out of it). All the attention focused on NATO and Canada’s role in it, which seemed more than ripe for reconsideration. Canadian troops had been sent to Europe in the early 1950s during the panic caused by the Korean War; why were they still there twenty years later? There was a group of powerful ministers in the cabinet—Eric Kierans, Gérard Pelletier, Jean Marchand and Donald MacDonald—who favoured a military withdrawal from NATO, and possibly quitting the alliance altogether, but in the end they settled for a good old Canadian compromise. Canada stayed in NATO and the European commitment was kept, but half the Canadian troops in Europe were brought home.
Trudeau managed to pull this off without facing severe recriminations from the European NATO members because by then they had figured out that the presence of the Canadian brigade and air division in Germany was very important politically, but not so much so militarily. The Canadian troops were really there so that they would be involved in a war with the Warsaw Pact from the first shot, thereby guaranteeing that Canada would be fully committed to the ensuing war regardless of the (nuclear) risks to the Canadian homeland. For those purposes, five thousand Canadian soldiers were just as good as ten thousand, so the rest came home. And that was pretty much it for serious debates about Canadian defence policy for the next fifteen years. The one lasting defence-related achievement of the Trudeau years was the transformation of the Canadian Forces into a genuinely bilingual institution in which francophones were present in numbers that corresponded to their share of the national population and enjoyed the same promotion prospects as anglophones even at the highest ranks.
There was some excitement in 1970, when Trudeau deployed troops in the streets of Montreal during the confrontation with Front de libération du Québec terrorists at that time, but in general the Canadian Forces (as they were now officially known thanks to the “unification” of the three services under Defence Minister Paul Hellyer in the 1960s) entered a prolonged period of neglect and genteel decline. Indeed, this could be seen as the real consequence of the defence and foreign policy reviews, which concluded in essence that the Canadian Forces were still politically important as part of Canada’s foreign policy, but militarily almost irrelevant. Even peacekeeping, which had allowed Canadians to luxuriate in the belief that their army was actually an instrument of love, was losing popularity by the late 1960s, and was downgraded to the lowest level of priority in Trudeau’s defence review. The strength of the Canadian armed forces was cut from 120,000 in 1963 to just over 80,000 by the end of the decade, and new equipment purchases were few and far between during the next fifteen years: 128 used Leopard I tanks from Germany and 18 maritime reconnaissance aircraft from the United States in 1978, 137 new F-18 fighters in 1983, and six “patrol frigates” for the navy, for delivery in the late 1980s.
And the consequence of all these cuts and neglect was … nothing. They had no more effect on how the rest of the world unfolded during these years than cuts to the summer camp training budget for the Canadian militia would have had on the world in the 1880s. They wouldn’t have made any difference if we had all tumbled into World War Three, either. A few more fisheries surveillance vessels would have come in handy, but Canada’s maritime sovereignty was never at risk despite the alleged shortage of ships to enforce it. It was a perfect illustration of the extreme “elasticity” of Canada’s military requirements in the circumstances that prevailed then (and are even more pronounced in the current era).
The size and composition of the Canadian armed forces, to a far greater extent than those of most other countries, are not determined by the “threats” that face the country, and that might be deterred or defeated by military means. Broad oceans and Arctic ice protect us from the rest of the planet, and our one vulnerable border, to the south, is guaranteed not by force but by our commercial and treaty relations with the United States. So our options in national security are very wide. We could have very small armed forces and a minimal capacity for territorial and maritime surveillance—say, twenty thousand service personnel—and we’d still be all right. Since 1939 we have always been far above that level, but those choices are driven by the ideological fashions of the moment, by the expectations of our neighbours, allies and commercial partners (and how much we choose to give in to them) and by the needs and wishes of our own military-industrial complex. For almost half a century now, with the single exception of the Mulroney years, that level has never risen far above eighty thousand or fallen far below sixty thousand. That is, you might say, what the market will bear—and the fluctuations in the numbers occur almost independently of any external reality. As in the case of the great defence mini-buildup of the late 1980s.
Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: we win, they lose.
Ronald Reagan, Moscow summit, May 1988
There is an American political myth, cherished by the right, that President Ronald Reag
an “won” the Cold War by forcing the Soviet Union to spend itself into bankruptcy. He did this, it is alleged, by raising American defence spending to an unprecedented level and devoting it to various projects, like the “Star Wars” anti-ballistic missile programme, that forced Moscow to spend comparable amounts to keep up. Since the Soviet economy was much smaller than that of America, the Russians eventually went broke, Communism collapsed and the Cold War ended.
It is an agreeable story, especially if you happen to be in charge of the U.S. defence budget, but it is simply false. It’s true that excessive defence spending forced the Soviet Union to try to make fundamental reforms in the economy, and that the political repercussions of that effort destroyed the entire system, but the dates are wrong. Ronald Reagan inherited a defence budget of $440 billion in current (2013) dollars when he took office at the beginning of 1981. His own first defence budget, for 1982/83, was $488 billion. It then continued to rise until 1985/86, peaking at $580 billion—but the Soviet attempt at reform actually began in 1982, after the death of the long-ruling Leonid Brezhnev.
The first reformer in Moscow, Yuri Andropov, unexpectedly died in 1984, and was briefly succeeded by a conservative, Konstantin Chernenko, before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 and resumed the reform effort. Even in 1985, given the ponderous nature of the Soviet planning and budgetary processes, there had scarcely been time for Soviet defence spending to rise in response to Reagan’s higher budgets. Excessive defence spending did play a large part in bringing down the Soviet system, but Reagan was too late on the scene to have any appreciable impact. It was the relatively modest defence budgets of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon and Carter that brought the Soviet Union down.