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Posted on: July 15th, 2015 by Ernie Regehr
When in 1997 Canada first joined the US-led Joint Strike Fighter program, critics, including this one, feared that what was then a strictly industrial participation program would in time be promoted as a de facto decision to buy whatever Or think about meditative and martial arts breathing which can release great amounts of stress or produce immense power. http://www.solboards.com/levitra-2972.html cialis canadian prices They are the similar effective medicines for curing the viagra professional australia impotence in men. Anticancer antibodies are specially engineered antibodies given with the goal of solboards.com price of levitra mimicking the form and function of blood vessels. The liver produces 4 cups of bile daily, a thick, bitter levitra cost of sales tasting fluid, in a system of ducts, which move the bile into the duodenum; the beginning of the small intestine. aircraft emerged from that venture – namely, the F-35. Of course, all assurances at the time were to the contrary, but by 2010 a decade-old industrial strategy had indeed become defence policy. Continue Reading at The Simons Foundation.
Posted on: April 29th, 2013 by admin
Urgent Question
The urgent missile defence question is not if Canada should co-operate with the U.S. on it (Conversation About Missile Defence Not Dead – April 25). The question is: Will the U.S. co-operate with Russia?
Were missile defence unambiguously defensive, Russia could be ignored and the debate could focus on whether it’s a technology that will ever work reliably. But we ignore Russia, for which U.S. missile defence is definitely not defensive, at our peril.
Buy Shilajit ES capsule from reputed online stores using a debit card cialis generic canada or credit card. It canadian pharmacy sildenafil is greatly recognised which an ingredient identified as cGMP thinks a vital component while in the damaging the actual clock. These milder reactions are more basic in men than the more genuine dangers, however your current wellbeing status will likewise influence the side effects which you may experience the http://miamistonecrabs.com/cialis-1650 cialis generic free ill effects of. headaches and headaches flushing or feeling greatly hot stomach surprises and aches sensitivity to light ? Headache ? Prolonged erection that extends the recommended four hours (Seek professional advice immediately) ? Dizziness Any user concerned with the side. Given that prostate cancer cells need testosterone to expand, removing their supply of testosterone viagra 50 mg miamistonecrabs.com could usually be an effective therapy for prostate cancer. Missile defence becomes a problem when it generates uncertainty and vulnerability among those who have the capacity to do something about it. What Russia can do about it is refuse all further nuclear disarmament; when the U.S. and Russia refuse further reductions, other nuclear powers will follow suit.
And when current nuclear powers collectively commit to indefinite retention of their nuclear arsenals, nuclear weapons will be legitimized for all. And when that happens, prospects for preventing the further spread of these weapons of heinous destruction – a word used a lot lately, and properly so, to describe crimes of much, much lower orders of destruction – become a lot dimmer than they already are.
Ernie Regehr, Waterloo, Ont.
Posted on: December 13th, 2011 by Ernie Regehr
The sale of a Canadian-built surveillance drone to Libyan rebels last summer may well have been in violation of the UN arms embargo. The Government says it has asked the RCMP to investigate.
(more…)
Posted on: October 21st, 2011 by Ernie Regehr
Professors David Bercuson and Jack Granatstein wrote that “Afghanistan’s lessons weren’t just military” in the Oct 17 Globe and Mail. The following response was sent as a letter to the editor:
Professors Bercuson and Granatstein have missed the central lesson of that war — namely that in intrastate conflict, military peace support forces rarely trump the consequences of a deeply flawed peace process.
A related lesson is that the military pursuit of security in divided societies is undermined, not advanced, by the dogged refusal to countenance engagement and negotiations with one’s adversaries in the interests of repairing a dysfunctional political framework.
Usually viagra super it is affected on those who are above 40 years of age. Management of Impotence Treatment of erectile purchase generic cialis dysfunction includes prescription medicines and lifestyle changes. For some the process is gradual and they notice the changes acquisition de viagra when they become apparent after some time. It is approved by the FDA; these prescriptions can low cost levitra successfully treat ineptitude issues without creating any genuine symptoms. Lakhdar Brahimi, the key architect of the 2002 Bonn agreement that set the process toward a new Government in Afghanistan, has acknowledged more than once that he and his colleagues made a grievous error when the defeated Taliban and the Pashtun communities in which they had their base were kept away from the peace table.
So the legitimacy of the Afghan Government, claimed by the victors in the initial phase of the war, was compromised from the start. It was further weakened by corruption and unholy alliances with serious human rights violators. Then international forces dealt the Government of Afghanistan a further blow when, in its defence, they for a time killed as many civilians as did the insurgents. International forces have improved their record significantly, but the legacy of misguided military assaults still reverberates.
I hope Canada has learned some of the important operational and domestic political lessons from Afghanistan cited by Bercuson and Granatstein, but those learnings will be secondary to the core lesson that foreign armed forces pursing security in deeply divided societies cannot prevail in the absence of the vigorous diplomatic pursuit of inclusive and accountable governance.
Posted on: April 18th, 2011 by Ernie Regehr
Was Libya on the verge of a major bloodbath in mid-March when the UN Security Council authorized intervention?[i] Or were the warnings of imminent mass atrocities simply part of the hype to justify military intervention by states looking for an excuse to attack the regime of Colonel Moammar Gadhafi?
The “responsibility to protect” doctrine (R2P) proposes UN Chapter VII interventions, including military, to protect civilians when “national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”[ii]
The formal doctrine makes no reference to the magnitude of existing or threatened war crimes or crimes against humanity, but the conventional understanding, as shaped by the earlier report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, is that to warrant military intervention these would have to be mass violations involving “large scale loss of life, actual or apprehended.”[iii]
That the regime of Col. Gadhafi was failing in its duty to protect its citizens is not in question, but whether it was of a magnitude that reached the “large scale” threshold and that demanded immediate intervention to protect vulnerable civilians is now increasingly debated.
One editorialist draws on a Human Rights Watch report that says the Gadhafi forces in Misrata in the west have not been targeting civilians – and concludes therefore that an attack on Benghazi, the prospect that was galvanizing international concern, would not have targeted civilians.[iv] Of course, that was not the tenor of the threat from Col. Gadhafi at the time. On March 18, with Gadhafi forces closing in on Benghazi he promised an attack without mercy, calling those who opposed him dogs and rats.[v] His threat was given urgency by reports of attacks on civilians, many by hired mercenaries, already taking place in Government-controlled areas.
But the sceptics include Richard Falk, the highly respected international law expert and human rights advocate and the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights, who recently wrote that “evidence” in support of the “prospect of dire bloodletting was never present much beyond the bombast of the dictator.”[vi]
On the other hand, both Human Rights Watch and the New York Times now report that attacks on civilians, including with cluster bombs and other munitions fired into civilian neighbourhoods, are a prominent feature of Government attacks on Misrata.[vii] At least 260 people have died there, with another 1,000 injured.[viii]
Estimates of overall deaths of combatants and civilians since the protests began in mid-February must now be put in the 4,000-plus range.[ix] Without any external intervention, those numbers could have more than doubled, with the possibility of Gadhafi back in full control of Libya and, with the UN having given intervention a pass, implementing a reign of terror and reprisal.
That is all speculation, of course, but it is the kind of scenario that the UN Security Council was facing – which explains why even those states with the greatest reluctance to intervene did not block the action. China and Russia each registered an abstention rather than a veto, emphasizing that none of the major powers wanted to risk being on the sidelines in the midst of the campaign of atrocities that was possibly coming.
The really high numbers apply to internally displaced persons and refugees. The UN is unable to estimate the number of displaced in the West of Libya because the UNHCR does not have access there. In the East, the UNHCR says it has staff in the cities of Tobruk and Benghazi that have identified at least 35,000 displaced people, mostly from Ajdabiyya and Brega – with a spokesperson saying it is likely to be around 100,000, since the population of Ajdabiyya is 120,000 and most people are thought to have left. UNHCR also estimates that more than 500,000 have fled Libya for Egypt, Tunisia, Niger, Algeria, Chad, Italy, Malta and Sudan.[x]
For some who oppose the intervention the question of magnitude is not particularly relevant because they oppose military interventions, period, and view R2P as just one more pretext for the powerful to invade the weak. For most, however, the question of magnitude is key. The numbers compared with Rwanda are small, but compared with most contemporary wars they are huge – for example, the annual war dead in Afghanistan, combatants and civilians, are estimated by the UN to have been 2,777 in 2010, with another 4,343 injuries.[xi] The WHO estimate of 2000 deaths by early March, before the intervention, reflected a combat death rate ten times that of Afghanistan.
The definition of “large scale” is not precise, but it obviously implies more than isolated incidents. Just as obviously, Rwanda is not the standard. By any count, 4,000 dead and more than half a million people driven from their homes over little more than a 2 month period qualifies as “large scale.” There can still be credible reasons for opposing the intervention, and certainly reasons to be critical of the way the intervention has been managed and is evolving, but there is no reasonable argument that the conditions in Libya did not meet the threshold for an R2P intervention.
eregehr@uwaterloo.ca
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Notes
[i] UN Security Council Resolution S/RES/1973, 17 March 2011. http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N11/268/39/PDF/N1126839.pdf?OpenElement.
[ii] General Assembly Resolution A/RES/60/1 (2005), paragraph 139.
[iii] The Responsibility to Protect, Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Soverereignty, December 2001, International Development Research Centre, Ottawa.
[iv] Alan J. Kuperman, “False pretense for war in Libya?” The Boston Globe, 14 April 2011. http://articles.boston.com/2011-04-14/bostonglobe/29418371_1_rebel-stronghold-civilians-rebel-positions.
[v] Maria Golovnina and Patrick Worsnip, “Gadhafi promises ‘no mercy’ unless rebels quit: Libyan leader warns foreign powers any attacks will prompt swift response, Montreal Gazette, 18 March 2011, Reuters. http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Gadhafi+promises+mercy+unless+rebels+quit/4461338/story.html#ixzz1JpOS8UcT.
[vi] Richard Falk, “Obama’s Libyan folly,” Aljazeera, 4 April 2011. http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/04/20114410410950151.html.
[vii] C.J. Chivers, “Qaddafi Troops Fire Cluster Bombs Into Civilian Areas,” New York Times, 15 April 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/16/world/africa/16libya.html.
[viii] “Mideast Notebook,” Toronto Star, 17 April 2011.
[ix] Robin Collins, in an April 14 email report on wikipedia’s tally of deaths – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_2011_Libyan_civil_war. “Based on the numbers, 1,694-2,224 opposition members/fighters (which includes also civilian supporters) and 757-830 Gaddafi loyalists have been killed by April 9, 2011, for a total of 2,451-3,054 reported deaths, of which some have not been independently confirmed….” Robin indicates these numbers are roughly in line with World Health Organization estimates of 2,000 deaths by early March and International Federation of Human Rights estimate of 3,000 deaths also by early March, or just three weeks into the crisis. Given the ongoing fighting since March, the number of dead could reasonably be expected to be twice those amounts.
[x] “Libya: UN warns funding shortfall could slow aid effort for victims of conflict,” The UN News Centre, 15 April 2011. http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=38122&Cr=libya&Cr1=.
[xi] “The situation in Afghanistan and its implications for international peace and security: Report of the Secretary-General,” A/65/783–S/2011/120, 9 March 2011. http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N11/250/34/PDF/N1125034.pdf?OpenElement.
Posted on: April 5th, 2011 by Ernie Regehr
On April 3 Ernie Regehr was on the CBC’s “The Sunday Edition” for an interview with Michael Enright. Topics covered include Libya, the responsibility to protect, and contemporary peace advocacy. To listen, go to:
http://www.cbc.ca/video/news/audioplayer.html?clipid=1864773190
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eregehr@uwaterloo.ca
Posted on: March 24th, 2011 by Ernie Regehr
The 2001 “responsibility to protect” report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS)[i] made a clear distinction between military protection operations and war.
With the first wave of attacks on Libyan military installations, following the UN Security Council’s unprecedented and welcome vote to authorize international action to protect vulnerable civilians in Libya,[ii] the pundits were already asking about what “the real” objectives and complaining about the lack of definition in the resolution.
But the Security Council’s action is straightforward. The objective is unambiguous – “to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack.” The objective is not to overthrow the government of Libya, it is not only to establish a no-fly zone; it is to “protect” people who cannot protect themselves from attacks.
The resolution also calls for a ceasefire. A ceasefire with the Gadhafi regime still in control in Tripoli is a not the nightmare scenario that some commentators have suggested; rather a real ceasefire would mean civilians were not being attacked and it would present a critical opportunity for diplomacy. Some political leaders have insisted that Mr. Gadhafi must go – they are free to voice that preference, and many who favour democracy will agree, but the Security Council resolution does not mandate them to pursue that end.
If the current situation lacks clarity, that needs to be understood as an acknowledgement of reality rather than as a complaint against the Security Council. Civilians generally don’t need the protection of the international community in situations of clarity, or that are predictable and uncomplicated. The 2001 ICISS report anticipated this very uncertainty, assuming it to be endemic to protection operations. It anticipated that there would be “differences in objectives…in discussions over the ‘exit strategy,’ with some partners emphasizing the need to address the underlying problems, and others focusing on the earliest possible withdrawal.” The report also predicted that it would not be able to determine in advance how an intervention would finally play out: “Unexpected challenges are almost certain to arise, and the results are almost always different from what was envisaged at the outset” (p.59).
There was and still is no clarity on what the impact or consequences of the military attacks will be. Whether the international forces have been measured or excessive is certainly open to debate, and how effective they will be in stopping attacks on civilians is also not yet clear. What is clear is that until now the military action taken has been well short, and properly so, of a “war” on the Gadhafi regime.
One of the hardest things for weapons-laden Presidents and Generals to accept is that their military might does not confer on them the prerogative to pick winners and losers or to distinguish between “good guys” and “bad guys.” Such distinctions may be politically comforting, but rarely are they a true reflection of reality. Enough is known about the Gadhafi regime to know that it is not credibly in the “good guy” category, but there is not enough known about the opposition groups to know where they fit or the kind of regime that they would like to establish. All that can be said with some confidence is that it is the Libyan people who have to be given the opportunity to make the choices they want to make – and the current focus of the international forces is to try to allow them to make that choice without the threat of civilians being attacked.
Thus the objective is to prevent mass assaults on civilians and to reach a ceasefire. It is not to “win.” It is in that sense that the intervention in Libya to date is not a war and should not become a war. A “war” is the resort to military action for the purpose of determining a final outcome. In a war, political process is set aside and outcomes are to be decided by dint of force. Military action short of war is action that is not designed to determine political outcomes. It is not designed to circumvent politics; instead it is designed to make politics possible. It is designed to create conditions that allow for political processes to take place and through them determine political outcomes.
Success for the military intervention in Libya will be the prevention of further attacks on civilians and the creation of an opportunity for Libyans to seek political accommodation and politically determine the future of their country.
Most of the time it is seen that some men take the medicine from local chemist or through viagra 25 mg online pharmacies without having prescription from a healthcare provider. This starts when levitra on line respitecaresa.org the man starts to face improper erections when he is making love. Ed. teacher has a good idea as to what weight best price for viagra category a patient fits into. Erectile dysfunction occurs cialis 40 mg respitecaresa.org due to an insufficient blood flow into the penis, like happened naturally, when a man is unable to achieve or maintain an erection long enough to have sex. This very distinction between war and military force short of war was clearly made in the original R2P report by the ICISS. It said explicitly that protection operations are not to remove a government or to defeat a state but to protect people: “A critical factor which will impact on the intensity of operations is the need for cooperation from the civilian population once the immediate objective of stopping the killing or ethnic cleansing has been achieved. This means first and foremost not to conduct military actions which will result in widespread hatred against the intervening nations. To win the hearts and minds of the people under attack is presumably impossible during the attack but planning has to be done in such a way that not all doors will be closed when the armed conflict comes to an end. This means accepting limitations and demonstrating through the use of restraint that the operation is not a war to defeat a state but an operation to protect populations in that state from being harassed, persecuted or killed” (p.63).
That is wise advice. It reinforces the essential fact that the international coalition has no mandate to engineer Libya’s future. The international community has a role to play in ensuring that Libyans have an opportunity to plan their own future without suffering massive assaults and without becoming victims of crimes against humanity.
The Arab League and the African Union should both be particularly actively engaged in trying to bring the Libyan parties together in a governance arrangement that allows for a credible and participatory planning for the future.
The International Criminal Court, in a separate process, will presumably move forward in efforts to bring alleged perpetrators of crimes against humanity to justice.
If there is no possibility of protecting civilians without all-out war and regime change, then the intervention itself must be questioned. All-out war for regime change has not shown itself, from Kosovo to Iraq to Afghanistan, to create environments of safety for civilians. Under the fog of war many thousands of civilians are killed and hundreds of thousands are invariably driven from their homes. That kind of action has not been mandated by the UN.
eregehr@uwaterloo.ca
Notes
[i] The Responsibility To Protect, Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. 2001. http://www.iciss.ca/pdf/Commission-Report.pdf.
[ii] United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 [S/RES/1973 (2011)], 17 March 2011. http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N11/268/39/PDF/N1126839.pdf?OpenElement.
Posted on: January 14th, 2011 by Ernie Regehr
On January 17, 1961 President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned Americans that an emerging “military-industrial complex” would wield unhealthy and unwarranted influence – “economic, political, and even spiritual”—0ver their political life if it was left unchecked.
The warning came in Eisenhower’s extraordinary farewell address to the nation, days before John F. Kennedy entered the White House. He described the unprecedented “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry.”[i]
A half century later it is clear that Eisenhower’s warning was both prescient and ignored. For what was unprecedented then remains unmatched today in the resources it consumes and the policy options it forecloses.
A globalized military-industrial complex now boasts more than 20 million men and women in uniform (another 54 million reservists are available), and with the arms and equipment they use, military forces cost some $1.5 trillion annually – spending that, adjusted for inflation, is now well over the highest levels of the Cold War era.[ii] Military industries, though concentrated in a few countries, are literally spread around the planet and sustained by, and in many cases dependent on, capital budgets of at least $400 billion annually.[iii]
But, as Eisenhower predicted, it is in the United States where this complex is most entrenched. US military spending, including the costs of current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, is expected to reach at least $712 billion in 2011 – in real term a post-World War II high. If nuclear and other defence-related programs in other departments of government are added, including $122 billion for veterans, US military-related spending will reach $861 billion this year.[iv]
The Pentagon supports a network of suppliers and contractors to the tune of about $300 billion per year, and the industry relies on another $25 to $50 billion annually in export sales to other countries.
One arrangement that helps to assure a continued convergence of military and industrial interests and world view is the high incidence of retiring senior military officials signing on as senior executives of corporations doing mega-business with the Pentagon. Many, while working with Pentagon suppliers, also serve as paid consultants to the Pentagon. A recent major investigation by The Boston Globe elaborates at length on this “revolving-door culture,” pointing out that “from 2004 through 2008, 80 percent of retiring three- and four-star officers went to work as consultants or executives.”[v]
The influence of that melding of military and industrial interests comes most clearly into public focus when, as is currently the case, there are prominent calls for spending to be brought under control and reduced. Eisenhower was not a conspiracy theorist, but he understood that when the gargantuan US military establishment became allied through shared interests to industrial elites, and was then supported by an intellectual army of strategic analysts and a national messianic spirit that understood America as destined to lead, it would have a profound impact on shaping American values and ambitions, and on models for global interaction.
So even though the US can already claim as much military capacity, measured in resources and technology, as all of the rest of the world combined, and even though its top military “rival,” China, spends only a fifth of what the US does on military preparedness, calls for military spending restraints in the US are predictably met with dire warnings of American vulnerability and the loss of American leadership in the world.
Newsweek headed its look at US Defense budget prospects with the heading, “The Risky Rush to Cut Defense Spending” – adding a tagline that “no one has figured out how to make cuts without jeopardizing security.”[vi] Polls show majority American support for defense spending cuts, but any “rush” to act on that has yet to materialize. Even after the recent announcements of cuts by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, spending on the core defence budget will continue to expand, if modestly, over the next few years[vii] — indeed some analysts assume that Gates is using heavily publicized pre-emptive cuts (to the rate of growth) to forestall actual and significant cuts which he said would be “potentially calamitous.”
Much of mainstream commentary in the US continues to lament “pressures across the board to reduce our level of expenditure at precisely a time when our challenges, at the very least, are getting more complicated.” They invoke everything from the dangers of North Korea, to the continuing gap in missile defence, to the political threats from Wikileaks to dramatize US vulnerability. Spending cuts are themselves understood as “attacks” – the Financial Times, speculating on the impact on defence industry stock prices of any cuts (by which they really mean slowed increases), referred to the need for debate on “the why, where, what and (against) whom” of defence spending cuts.[viii]
And when the tabloid press get involved the silliness is boundless. A new York Post column, referring to the Gates restraint package, put it this way: “Call it President Obama’s ‘conditional-surrender Pentagon budget’ – and bad news for the US economy.” And the Post ran it all under the headline, “Don’t let O disarm our military.”[ix]
As to the policy options that the military-industrial complex forecloses, we can again turn to Eisenhower and a speech from the early days of his presidency: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. [x]
The truth of that lament is confirmed in the current Republican House “principle” that any new spending must be paid for, not by tax increases or even closing tax loopholes, but by cuts to spending in other government programs. Since security spending is largely exempt from austerity measures, the cuts will be focused on discretionary social programs. Furthermore, any savings in defence spending are to be “reinvested” in other defence programs. The costs of tax cuts, on the other hand, are exempt from this pay-as-you-go rule.[xi]
The cost to other urgent programs is illustrated by the continued impoverishment of climate change programs. Increasingly identified as having serious security implications, US spending on climate change responses is increasing significantly – even so, defence spending dwarfs it at a ratio of 41 to 1.[xii] What the ratio should be is hard to say, but the comparison does have something to say about priorities – or at the very least it confirms that the environment-industrial complex has yet to infiltrate the centres of power in Washington.
Perhaps the most telling comment on priorities comes from New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof. Referring to “a billionaire military and a pauper diplomacy,” he says that “the U.S. military now has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has in its foreign service.”[xiii]
To say that military spending is sacrosanct is simply to acknowledge the truth of Eisenhower’s 1960s confession that the influence of the military-industrial complex is felt in every city, state, and federal government office, not to mention in every Congressional office and in quite a few University and Think Tank research offices.
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(A shortened version of the above appeared in The Record of the Waterloo Region, 14 January 2011.)
eregehr@uwaterloo.ca
Notes
[i] Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the Nation, January 17, 1961. Available at: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ike.htm.
[ii] The Military Balance 2010, The International Institute for Strategic Studies (London, 2010), p. 462f.
[iii] SIPRI Yearbook 2010: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security, p. 268.
[iv] Todd Harrison, “Analysis of the FY 2011 Defense Budget,” Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. http://www.csbaonline.org/4publications/publibrary/r.20100629.analysis_of_the_fy/r.20100629.analysis_of_the_fy.pdf.
[v] Bryan Bender, “From the Pentagon to the private sector,” the Boston Globe, 26 December 2010. http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/12/26/defense_firms_lure_retired_generals/?page=full.
[vi] Douglas Schoen, “The Risky Push to Cut Defense Spending,” Newsweek, 8 January 2011. http://www.newsweek.com/2011/01/08/the-risky-rush-to-cut-defense-spending.html.
[vii] Gprdon Adams and Matthew Leatherman, “A Leaner and Meaner Defense,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2011, available at The Stimson Center. http://www.stimson.org/summaries/a-leaner-and-meaner-defense/.
[viii] John McDermott, “Defence stocks on the defensive against budget cuts,” Financial Times, 10 January 2011. http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2011/01/10/453876/defence-stocks-on-the-defensive-against-budget-cuts/.
[ix] Arther Herman, “Don’t let O disarm our military,” New York Post, 10 January 2011. http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/don_let_disarm_our_military_Vg8BTKN1WuODmeW4fCfumL.
[x] Dwight D. Eisenhower, from a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953. Available at: http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Dwight_D._Eisenhower/.
[xi] Robert Greenstein and James R. Horney, “House Republican Rule Changes Pave the Way For Major Deficit-Increasing Tax Cuts, Despite Anti-Deficit Rhetoric,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 5 January 2011. http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3359.
[xii] Miriam Pemberton, “Military vs. Climate Security: The 2011 Budgets Compared” (Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, October 25, 2010). http://www.fpif.org/reports/military_vs_climate_security_the_2011_budgets_compared.
[xiii] Nicholas D. Kristof, “The Big (Military) Taboo,” The New York Times,” 25 December 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/opinion/26kristof.html.
Posted on: December 5th, 2010 by Ernie Regehr
The new Strategic Concept of NATO is certainly no nuclear abolitionist document, nevertheless it does, as Canadian NGOs urged a year ago, situate NATO nuclear policy unambiguously under the disarmament imperative of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
In January 2010 a group of Canadian civil society organizations[i] hosted an Ottawa conference of 65 experts, including academics and civil society representatives, and officials, from the UN, NATO, and the US and Canadian governments, to explore “Practical Steps to Zero Nuclear Weapons.” The sponsoring organizations, taking into account the deliberations at the conference, followed up with a set of recommendations directed at the Canadian Government.[ii]
Several of the recommendations dealt with the new Strategic Concept (SC) that NATO was then in the process of developing. Each of the recommendations is repeated below, and is followed by references to the new Strategic Concept[iii] and an assessment of the extent to which the recommended action is addressed. The recommendations were formulated as a message to Canada, but were focused on the changes to the NATO Strategic Concept.
1. The Canadian Government should…encourage a NATO Strategic Concept that: welcomes and affirms the groundswell of calls for a world without nuclear weapons; confirms NATO’s commitment to the objectives of the NPT; and declares that the intent of Article VI is a world free of nuclear weapons.
While not referring to the groundswell of calls for nuclear zero, the new SC does state unambiguously that NATO States “are resolved to seek a safer world for all and to create the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons…” (para 26). That is a new collective statement for NATO and the previous Strategic Concept lacked even basic references to arms control.
Also new is the added statement that a world without nuclear weapons is “in accordance with the goals of the NPT” (para 26). That essentially meets the second and third demands of the above recommendation, namely, that NATO confirm its commitment to the NPT and that the intent of Article VI is a world free of nuclear weapons. The 1999 SC[iv] had only one reference to the NPT (para 19) which acknowledged its indefinite extension and the accession to it of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine.
In line with the last part of the above recommendation, the new SC includes a new commitment to arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation – and that includes the statement that “NATO seeks its security at the lowest possible level of forces” (para 26 – a welcome allusion to Article 26 of the UN charter).[v]
Two of the civil society recommendations focused on removing US nuclear weapons from the territories of European NATO states:
2. The Canadian Government should…encourage a NATO Strategic Concept that: commits NATO to security and arms control policies that ensure full conformity to Articles I and II of the NPT [by eliminating nuclear sharing], and that are designed to achieve the nuclear disarmament promised in Article VI).
3. Support new initiatives within Europe and publicly indicate its support for the removal of all remaining non-strategic nuclear weapons from European soil, in support of longstanding international calls that all nuclear weapons be returned to the territories of the states that own them.
Articles I and II prohibit the transfer of weapons to non-nuclear weapons states and prohibit the receipt of such weapons – and thus the reference to these Articles in the recommendation is a call for the US to remove all nuclear weapons from the territories of non-nuclear-weapon states (NNWS) in Europe.
NATO clearly lost a major opportunity in rejecting that move, but there has been a welcome movement away from NATO’s earlier claim that nuclear weapons in Europe are essential to security and to North Atlantic solidarity. Thus the new SC says the Alliance will “maintain an appropriate mix of nuclear and conventional forces” (para 19), but it drops the earlier reference to such forces being based in Europe.
NATO claims credit for already having “dramatically reduced the number of nuclear weapons stationed in Europe” (para 26) and then promises to “seek to create the conditions for further reductions in the future” (para 26). It then says any decision on future reductions “should take into account the disparity with the greater Russian stockpiles of short-range nuclear weapons” (para 26).
None of this supports the NGO proposal that the elimination of all NATO weapons from Europe, weapons that have no military or deterrent utility, should be undertaken unilaterally as a required action to conform to Articles I and II of the NPT. It is worth noting that the refusal to take such action is undoubtedly related at least in part to domestic US politics and the struggle to get the START treaty through Senate ratification. Part of the Republican opposition to START is premised on the Treaty’s failure to address Russian non-strategic nuclear weapons – so the formulation in the SC is in part an effort to provide evidence that Russian non-strategic weapons are on the radar.
In short, the removal of nuclear weapons from Europe would have been a significant step toward conformity with the NPT and would have signalled a major change in NATO. As it is, the new SC makes a modest but discernable shift. By removing language about the necessity of nuclear weapons in Europe it allows for at least the possibility of withdrawal – but the position taken is rather less than bold, or, more to the point, less than what full compliance with the NPT requires.
Another recommendation addressed relations with Russia.
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4. Support the development of an improved strategic relationship with Russia including initiatives such as upgrading the NATO-Russia Council; promoting continuing strategic dialogue between the US and Russia in support of a new nuclear disarmament treaty; and follow-on measures that engage other states with nuclear weapons, including China.
The new Strategic Concept offers a welcome posture toward Russia along the lines called for. It promises to “use the full potential of the NATO-Russia Council for dialogue and joint action with Russia” (para 34). Two paragraphs (33 and 34) emphasize the importance of cooperation with Russia and NATO declares: “we want to see a true strategic partnership between NATO and Russia” (para 33). There is no reference to China in the Strategic Concept.
There were two additional, broadly formulated, recommendations:
5. Work to forge a consensus within NATO and its NWS member states in support of the global norm, which has existed since 1945, against the use of nuclear weapons; and
6. Encourage the Alliance to take advantage of the present climate of global support for nuclear disarmament to phase out any role for nuclear weapons in its security policies.
Contrary to these recommendations, the new Strategic Concept reaffirms the role of nuclear weapons in the alliance. That said, it also says, as did the earlier version, that “the circumstances in which any use of nuclear weapons might have to be contemplated are extremely remote” (para 17). It claims to “have dramatically reduced the number of nuclear weapon stationed in Europe and our reliance on nuclear weapons in NATO strategy” (para 26).
The 2010 SC adds a reference to ballistic missile defence in one significant sub-paragraph (para 19), a link to the 1999 reference (para 64) to the need for future changes that respond to the changing security environment. the new SC says the Alliance will “develop the capability to defend our populations and territories against ballistic missile attack as a core element of our collective defence, which contributes to the indivisible security of the Alliance.” That reference is at least tempered by the added promise that “we will actively seek cooperation on missile defence with Russia and other Euro-Atlantic partners.”
The declaratory policy of NATO has improved. It is not yet fully in line with the NPT, and NATO continues to be out of step with the global support for zero nuclear weapons. But policy and intention have changed, now its time for civil society to convert intention into implementation.
eregehr@uwaterloo.ca
Notes
[i] The Canadian Network to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the Canadian Pugwash Group, Physicians for Global Survival, Project Ploughshares, and World Federalist Movement – Canada.
[ii] Practical Steps to Zero Nuclear Weapons: Conference Report, January 25-26, 2010, Ottawa, Canada. http://www.ploughshares.ca/libraries/Abolish/ZeroNukesConfReptJan2010.pdf.
[iii] Active Engagement, Modern Defence: Strategic Concept for the Defence and Security of The Members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation adopted by Heads of State and Government in Lisbon, November 19, 2010. http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_68580.htm.
[iv] The Alliance’s Strategic Concept: Approved by the Heads of State and Government participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council in Washington D.C. 24 Apr. 1999. http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_27433.htm.
[v] Article 26 of the UN Charter reads: “In order to promote the establishment and maintenance of international peace and security with the least diversion for armaments of the world’s human and economic resources, the Security Council shall be responsible for formulating, with the assistance of the Military Staff Committee referred to in Article 47, plans to be submitted to the Members of the United Nations for the establishment of a system for the regulation of armaments.”
Posted on: November 18th, 2010 by Ernie Regehr
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