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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Canada and all of NATO are necessarily rethinking their security postures in response to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, with all its ensuing horrors. But the haste with which NATO has come to focus on increasing military spending, in an already heavily armed alliance, ignores the centrality of non-military security measures. Peacebuilding and diplomacy, both seriously under-funded, are key to ending and preventing wars, and for building the conditions for sustainable peace. Continue Reading at The Simons Foundation…
This is the issue debated in the January/February 22 issue of Legion Magazine, with Ernie Regehr arguing the “No” side and David Bercuson, of the University of Calgary’s Centre for Military, Security, and Strategic Studies, arguing “Yes.”
Regehr argues that “de-escalating military tensions and halting the drift toward a Cold War with China are prerequisites for effectively addressing the Indo-Pacific region’s all-too-real security challenges….
“Military exercises like the Rim of the Pacific Exercise, which in 2020 involved about 500 CAF personnel and two frigates, are part of Canada’s engagement with the Indo-Pacific,…but it is the tempo of multilateral engagement, not military operations, that needs to increase. Patrols like the recent voyage of HMCS Winnipeg through the Taiwan Strait alongside a U.S. destroyer are neither destined nor designed to reduce tensions.
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“Instead, diplomacy to promote strategic stability talks and build broad regional support for collective responses to Indo-Pacific security challenges is what will ultimately facilitate the stability on which the region’s security depends.”
The debate is part of the magazine’s “Face to Face” feature. To view the full debate, visit Legion Magazine through this link: Should Canada increase its military involvement in the Indo-Pacific region?
The following paper on Canada and the Stockholm Initiative on Nuclear Disarmament was part of a November 2021 letter to Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly.
The debate is part of the magazine’s “Face to Face” feature. To view the full debate, visit Legion Magazine through this link: