Defence and Human Security

Good Governance and Arctic Security

Emerging security challenges in the Arctic require policies that squarely face changing conditions, strategic and environmental, but preserving the basic stability that still exists in the region must be a clear priority. Relying too heavily on military responses risks exacerbating rather than easing Arctic tensions, and it ignores the post-Cold War reality that vulnerability to military threats is linked as much to political as to military weakness. In other words, good governance at home – political stability, national unity, and ongoing public trust in the institutions of governance and accountability – and regional diplomacy should be at the core of Arctic security strategies.  Continue reading at The Simons Foundation.

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Inevitable or Inadmissible? Threatening Nuclear Weapons Use

Of the world’s nine states with nuclear weapons, two – Russia and Israel – are now fighting high intensity wars. Another three of the nuclear nine – the United States, the United Kingdom, and France – are deeply invested in both wars, supplying weapons and expecting to influence outcomes. The other four nuclear powers – China, India, North Korea, and Pakistan – are building up their arsenals, hoping to gain strategic advantage in their respective zones of chronic tension. Continue reading at CIPS Blog (University of Ottawa, Centre for International Policy Studies)…

US Strategic Ballistic Missile Defence: Why Canada won’t join it

Two Parliamentary Committees have recently recommended that Canada “reconsider” it’s 2005 decision against joining the US homeland Ballistic Missile Defence system. The Pentagon acknowledges the system has no capacity against Russian and Chinese ballistic missiles, and its operational design means it also has no capability against cruise and hypersonic missiles. With continental security concerns shifting to the latter, Canada is unlikely to seek direct involvement in strictly ballistic missile defence.

Continue reading at The Simons Foundation.

Towards Silencing the Guns in Ukraine

A discussion paper prepared for the Canadian Pugwash Group project on a Peace Table for Ukraine and Russia.

Though their land is torn by horrific war, what many Ukrainians fear is an early ceasefire. As deep as the desire to silence the guns may run, it is hard to get past the understandable suspicion that a ceasefire now would launch a settlement process that would reward aggression and ignore the full sovereign rights and interests of Ukraine. In a process driven primarily by the need to end the fighting, the ceasefire skeptics fear, it would be tempting to simply convert current military front lines into de facto boundaries – enshrining injustice rather than restoring peace.

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Towards a deliberately built peace: the inevitable negotiations on Ukraine

The likelihood of either side in this war ever being in a position to dictate settlement terms to the other is remote, and that means talks are inevitable.

Hill Times, Opinion, June 22, 2023

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Strategic Nuclear Patrols and an Arctic Military Code of Conduct

While rising northern tensions clearly challenge notions of the Arctic as a durable zone of peace, current tensions are rooted in fears of a European conflict spilling northward, not in conflict endemic to the Arctic. Two decades of high north military expansion have certainly added to the region’s strategic uncertainty, but even more consequential are the currently increasing levels and pace of competing strategic patrols in the Arctic and North Atlantic, especially those that undermine basic nuclear deterrence. Strategic patrols impacting geopolitical stability need to be guided by normative operational rules. Continue reading at The Simons Foundation.

From War Preparation to War Prevention: Submission to DND defence policy update

The Department of National Defence (DND) is updating its 2017 defence policy statement, “Strong, Secure, Engaged” (SSE),  pointing to a changed “geopolitical landscape” in which threats from that time “have intensified and accelerated…at an unprecedented rate.”  Among those rising threats, the Defence Department includes “rapidly accelerating climate change, more sophisticated cyber threats, Russia and China’s increasing military modernization, and Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine.” DND invited submissions to address a series of questions posed on its online “feedback” mechanism. The following submission of April 27 responds (with some additional edits) to selected questions. Continue reading at The Simons Foundation.

Doubling Down on a Retentionist Nuclear Posture: NATO’s 2022 Strategic Concept

Nuanced changes to the nuclear weapons elements of NATO’s new Strategic Concept do not alter its substance. Once again, the alliance propagates the dangerous myth that nuclear weapons are the “supreme” source of security, doubles down on the threat of nuclear weapons use in response to conventional attack, continues to insist that alliance security depends on stationing US tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. The overall nuclear posture remains stubbornly retentionist. It entrenches policies that bolster already daunting barriers to progress in nuclear arms control and disarmament and deepens strategic instability into the bargain. Continue reading at The Simons Foundation.

Arctic Security Cooperation – Still Needed, but is it Still Possible?

Russia’s brazenly illegal war on Ukraine certainly means business as usual is not a serious option for relations with Russia, including in the Arctic. But the effort to repel aggression in Europe should not be the occasion to escalate tensions and reject cooperation or engagement in a hitherto stable region. Given that pan-Arctic cooperation is a professed and genuinely practiced Arctic value, shutting down dialogue forums ought not to be the go-to Arctic response to conflict and gross violations of norms and laws outside, or inside, the region. Continue reading at The Simons Foundation.

Updating NATO’s Strategic Concept: The Nuclear Imperatives

The war in Ukraine once again confirms this inescapable nuclear reality – in war and in peace, nuclear weapons impose on humanity the daily, relentless imperative of figuring out how not to use them. Obviously, for no other weapon system is absolute prevention of its use the over-riding requirement. But the international community has declared nuclear weapons unique – the collective objective is to eliminate them, and most states, and certainly populations around the world, conclude that any use of a nuclear weapon would be “abhorrent to the principles of humanity and the dictates of public conscience.”[i] And yet the nuclear powers continue to threaten their use, with Russia the most immediate and alarming example, and to extol the utility of these doomsday weapons. NATO’s current Strategic Concept confirms continued reliance on nuclear weapons in the collective defence of allies. But that strategic guidance document is now under review, offering Alliance members the opportunity to construct policy off-ramps from the path of nuclear peril they now travel.

Continue reading at The Simons Foundation.

[i] From the preamble to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N17/209/73/PDF/N1720973.pdf?OpenElement