Say "No" To Missile Defence

Lloyd Axworthy

Chalk up yet another potential casualty of the Iraq war: Canada's impending loss of an independent voice on matters of peace and security.

Ottawa is under enormous pressure to join the Bush administration's plans for a missile defence system to demonstrate that our apostasy in not joining the war was but an aberration. Paul Martin's declarations in support of this initiative, and of closer security ties with the United States, only add weight to that pressure.

At stake is our freedom of action in international affairs, including not least our ability to play a constructive role in a global system based on co-operation and agreed rules rather than the threat and use of armed force.

Even a cursory examination of the missile defence initiative indicates that it has little to do with protecting our continent against terrorists or "rogue states." The technology is yet unproved, and the primary threat comes not from missiles but from the ability of international criminals to infiltrate our borders and deploy asymmetric force in the form of box cutters, pathogens and primitive "dirty" bombs.

To the degree that a threat from intercontinental missiles does exist in North Korea, perhaps is largely a response to the bellicose foreign policy now emanating from Washington. In other words, the strongest advocates of missile defence are those most involved in creating an international climate in which it might become justified.

Canada thus has a choice. Do we hitch our country to the neoconservative juggernaut, thereby committing ourselves to a self-perpetuating cycle of threats, armed responses and dramatically increased defence budgets? Or do we maintain some foreign policy space of our own, deploying our money, expertise and considerable global reputation on strengthening a multilateral system to control this kind of criminality, and restoring our capacity to contribute to humanitarian and peacemaking missions that address the root causes, including civil conflict, the breakdown of law and order, and egregious violations of human rights. In choosing the latter approach, Canada would not be abrogating its responsibilities; to the contrary, violence of this kind caused the deaths of 250,000 people in the past year alone.

Participating in a missile defence system would culminate an effort by our armed forces to achieve complete "interoperability." The benefits to our generals are obvious: increased expenditures and the opportunity to work with the world's most powerful military force. But the non-financial costs could be extreme: We would lose our capacity to make independent choices on the deployment of our troops and the tasks given to them, and find ourselves having to backtrack or renege on existing policies and treaties. In the Arctic, a critical area, we would risk becoming unable to engage in the surveillance and protection of our land and interests. Important elements of sovereignty would thus be compromised.

Joining the missile defence system would also run counter to the long held position that Canada has maintained as an advocate and architect of arms-control agreements. For decades, Canadian governments have insisted that all countries must live up to their commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the chemical and biological weapons conventions. Our adherence to missile defence would condone the Bush administration's preference for military and technological, rather than co-operative, solutions to threats posed by weapons of mass destruction.

As a country with significant commercial interests in outer space, Canada has been a leading advocate of measures to prevent the weaponization of that arena. The Bush missile defence proposals go way beyond the limited plans of the Clinton administration, prescribing a multitiered architecture, potentially including weapons deployed in and from outer space.

Our adherence to the proposal would discredit any future efforts by our negotiators to secure a treaty setting limits on military space developments. By signing on, we could even be helping to ignite a new arms race a race in which Canada would necessarily be a bit player, rather than the leader in multilateral approaches it is today.

If these are the potential risks, they must be carefully and openly explored before any decision is taken. Governments can and do legitimately surrender aspects of sovereignty, but surrendering sovereignty by stealth is the antithesis of democratic, responsible governance.

So why the current push to sign up quickly and quietly? The answer is simple atonement for the sin of disagreeing with Washington's hawks, who might otherwise retaliate against us. This is an argument that has received a powerful push from Paul Cellucci, the U.S. ambassador-turned-proconsul.

It has been joined in by some in the opposition parties, in the business community, and by associated intellectuals who (like Chicken Little) predict dire acts of economic retaliation if we fail to support the Americans' military doctrines. They are untroubled by the absence of historical evidence for such threat and oblivious to the opposition that the Bush administration's policies are generating within the U.S.

The same faulty reasoning flows from the "security community" of academics and think tanks, most of whom are funded by the Department of National Defence. Their views that Canada's interests must be aligned without question to those of the U.S. government of the day, even if that government is opposed to multilateral institutions, systems of justice and forms of international co-operation in which most Canadians firmly believe.

Herein lies the central point. Joining in missile defence would take us dramatically away from a course chartered by generations of Canadian governments a foreign policy based on the belief that a predictable rule of law, and not the arbitrary rule of men, is the best way of ensuring both national and global security.

The early 21st century should be Canada's moment: leading the multilateral effort to meet the real threats of our interdependent world international crime, civil conflicts, pandemic disease, gross economic inequalities, egregious human-rights violations, environmental degradation. Each of these threats, if not adequately addressed through the collaborative means that Canada has long mastered, could cause disruption and turmoil comparable to that potentially resulting from military aggression on the part of rogue states.

With so much at stake, the onus is on our public representatives to maintain our capacity to act according to our own determinations of where we can do the most good. This is a role now hanging in the balance, desperately in need of a full airing in Parliament and among the public before any choice is made.

Lloyd Axworthy, foreign affairs minister from 1996 to 2000, is director of the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia. Michael Byers is a law professor at Duke University and a visiting scholar at the Liu Institute.