Does Canada need a national security strategy? The world is in flux with China rising and the United States, caught up in election year politicking and an economy in difficulty, slowing down and cutting back its military spending. The European Union is desperately trying to hold together, with its weaker members cutting spending in an effort to balance the books. These events will certainly affect Canada, but they may not be the most important ones to occur in the rest of 2012. There are at least four particularly dangerous scenarios unfolding at the moment, some with possible interconnections, that all have the very real potential to involve or seriously affect Canada and Canadians.
The first is in Iran, where the Islamist theocracy running the nation seems determined to acquire nuclear weapons despite warnings from Israel and the United States that this will be unacceptable. The second is in Egypt, where the possibility exists that a new government, now slowly in the process of formation, might do what it hints at doing and abrogate its non-aggression treaty with Israel and re-militarize the Sinai desert. The third dangerous scenario is in Syria, where the Assad regime has cracked down so hard on dissidents that the pressure for a humanitarian/military intervention is growing irresistible. And finally, to escape the Middle East, there is North Korea, where the newly crowned "military genius" at the helm might be impelled to threaten to use his nation's nuclear weapons to solidify his hold on power.
Each of these crises has the potential to explode into a regional or even a global war. Each holds out the prospect that Canada and its allies might be obliged to intervene diplomatically and possibly to use force. Each conflict, at a minimum, holds major challenges for Canadian policy-makers. What do we do? How do we decide what role we must play?
The answer put forward by the Conference of Defence Associations Institute in a new Vimy Paper, The Strategic Outlook for Canada, to be released at its annual Ottawa conference on Thursday, is that Canada's national interests are at stake, and it is time for an overall strategy to take account of developments across the globe and inform our decisions on security and defence policy. Written by Paul Chapin, a retired senior foreign affairs official, and George Petrolekas, a widely experienced soldier, their Vimy Paper is the first that ties the unfolding strategic landscape to the requirement for a Canadian national security strategy.
We know that the policy-makers will have to decide what course Canada should follow. But in the immediate future, regrettably, Canada will once again find itself with few long-term markers to guide it in shaping the decisions it will need to take on the urgent issues engaging its security interests. About the only certainties are that Canadians will expect their government to do "the right thing" when a crisis arises, to work with Canada's closest allies to develop a consensus on the way forward and, in the event military measures are required, to act within a coalition. But what the government of Canada needs, and what the Vimy Paper recommends, is that the government should follow up on its initiative of establishing a national security committee of cabinet and commission the preparation of a comprehensive national security strategy for Canada.
We all expect the coming federal budget to be the focus of attention in the next two months. Everyone has speculated that most government departments will be subject to cuts, not least the departments of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and National Defence. But there has been little discussion of the options which might then present themselves and how Canada's international and national security interests can best be served in future years. In short, questions of national strategy have yet to be addressed and, as the dust settles after the budget, policy-makers must decide the best courses to follow given the scenarios outlined above.
The message of the Vimy Paper is that this nation needs a strategy, a plan into which defence and foreign policy, homeland defence, intelligence collection and analysis, and all the elements that make up national security can be fitted. Instead of being forced into short-term reactive thinking and crisis-mode behaviour because of the lack of a security framework and the thinking that must accompany it, with a strategy Canada would have a much better chance to be proactive. The economic, military, and political crises that are coming to the boil this year are very real ones, and short-term stopgap thinking will not be sufficient to deal with them. Canada's government needs to start thinking big . at last.
Original Article
Source: ottawa citizen
Author: J.l. Granatstein
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