Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (41 page)

Canada would have been involved from the start, for the main purpose of stationing Canadian forces in Europe was exactly the same as it was in the American case: to guarantee to the Europeans that Canada would be in the next world war from the opening shot. Our country had no direct role in the central relationship of nuclear dependency between the United States and Western Europe, but we were certainly complicit in it, and the presence of Canadian troops in Europe, by making the presence of American troops there seem less of an anomaly than it really was, helped to blur the otherwise stark outline of that central relationship.

The alliance that the West created in the late 1940s and the early 1950s was indeed a “dreadful mistake,” but it never actually tumbled into a nuclear war, and the fact that the Soviet Union never attacked Western Europe was frequently offered as proof that
NATO
was necessary. It was an inherently unanswerable argument, but reminiscent of the story about a man who was sitting in a train, tearing up little bits of paper and throwing them out of the window. Somebody asked him: “What are you doing that for?”

“To keep the elephants away,” he replied, tearing off another piece of paper.

“But that’s crazy, there are no elephants around here.”

“Of course not,” he explained patiently. “I’m keeping them away.”

For the Canadian forces—and especially for the army, given the unlikelihood that anyone would ever invade Canada’s own territory—
NATO
was a godsend. Being part of the alliance gave meaning and interest to our soldiers’ careers: their spiritual home was Europe, where they could be competitive and well-respected professionals playing in the military big league. They got to play there for two whole generations, and most of them never questioned the politics or the strategy of it. And, of course, they would have died bravely and uncomplainingly if that was the
ultimate price of being able to practise the profession they loved in the service of the country they loved.

The great expansion of the Canadian forces in the 1950s, which carried them from 35,000 men in 1948 to 120,000 in 1960, virtually smothered the old militia spirit, for the new armed forces were entirely professional. They were, of course, motivated by patriotism as well as by the attraction of practising their profession at the highest level, but they were never asked to choose between the two: after 1950, the defence of Canada was fully equated with membership in the alliances that gave our forces access to the military big league. They would no more have volunteered the argument that Canada’s defence could be separated from the NATO alliance than they would have suggested before 1939 that it was separable from the British imperial context. Asking our soldiers if
NATO
was a good thing was like asking the barber if you need a haircut.

There is no deliberate deception or conscious self-interest in it, but no other section of Canadian society subscribed with such near-unanimity as our armed forces to the view that having heavily armed alliances is the best and indeed the only way to prevent the “other side” (defined by the alliance system) from starting a war. Like many theological propositions, this was neither provable nor disprovable by logic, nor was it desirable to settle the argument by experiment. But by the mid-fifties, as the panic
engendered by the Korean War wore off, for people like Lester Pearson the alliance case was starting to lose its glitter.

Late in 1955 Pearson was the first Western foreign minister to visit Moscow since the Cold War had begun. On the last day of his visit he was flown down to the Crimea to meet Nikita Khrushchev, the man who was already clearly emerging as “first among equals” in the post-Stalin collective leadership. Khrushchev, whom Pearson described in his report to Ottawa as being “as blunt and volatile as only a Ukrainian peasant turned into one of the most powerful figures in the world can be,” came straight to the point: why didn’t Canada leave
NATO
, which was “an aggressive alliance and a direct threat to Russia and to peace”? The usual futile argument ensued, but after things had mellowed a bit Khrushchev returned to the subject in a subtler way, referring to the repeated Soviet efforts to embarrass the West by pretending to take the NATO treaty literally. If it was really a regional collective security organization authorized under Article 51 of the UN Charter, Moscow kept asking, then could the Soviet Union please join too?

And besides, Pearson added, the Soviet Union might be worse off without
NATO
, since it would then face “the United States ‘going it alone’
and Germany freewheeling in the centre of Europe, without the cautious and restraining influence of countries like the United Kingdom, Belgium, France and Canada.” It is not recorded whether Khrushchev expressed his gratitude for Canada’s restraining influence.

Like most of the generation who had helped to create the NATO alliance, Pearson had a sense of parental pride that would never allow him to renounce it entirely, however disillusioned he might become with its practical shortcomings. But although most Canadians still considered NATO to be necessary, it was quite clear to them by the mid-fifties that the alliance was
not
in any practical sense a part of the UN process. In fact, it was mostly a rival to it, and many Canadians still believed in the United Nations too. Moreover, many Canadians were feeling stifled within the alliance, where Canadian compliance was increasingly taken for granted, and—although this was mostly just the result of the relative decline in Canada’s power as the rest of the world recovered economically from the war—it chafed at the national pride. So peacekeeping, the great Canadian invention of 1956, was a cause for much national self-congratulation.

Peacekeeping was a last-ditch invention by the disillusioned idealists of the 1940s when their dream of a world made safe by collective security had collapsed under the weight of postwar rivalry and suspicion.
It was a pale facsimile of what the United Nations was supposed to do by way of keeping the peace, done on a voluntary rather than an obligatory basis, with forces that could only cajole, not compel. It operated only in places where peacekeeping forces had been invited by the local government, and never on the territory of a great power. But peacekeeping was the only vestige of the original vision of a more orderly world that became a kind of reality—and it came into existence during the week that saw the most concentrated outburst of international stupidity and bloody-mindedness since the 1945 war.

In the same crowded week in late 1956, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to crush a revolt against Communist rule, and Britain and France invaded Egypt (in collusion with Israel) in order to force it to submit to European interests. Both were attempts to reimpose imperial discipline on restive subject peoples, the only significant distinction being that Hungary was in thrall to one of the new informal empires cloaked by ideology and military alliances, while Egypt had only recently emerged from one of the old colonial empires that were based on naked power.

But that was a very important distinction in practice, for the new-style empires had a basis in the realities of power, and a credibility in terms of the prevailing psychology of the time, which allowed them to rebuff any outside interference from the United Nations or anywhere else. The crumbling European colonial empires, on the other hand, lacked both power and credibility. The United Nations was no more able to prevent the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolt in 1956 than it could have stopped the U.S.-backed “rebel army” in CIA pay that had invaded Guatemala and overthrown the elected left-wing government of that country two years before. But Egypt was different.

The “Suez crisis” was a quarrel between Britain and France on one side and Egypt on the other over the control and profits of the Suez Canal. Britain reflexively saw the canal as a “lifeline of empire” even though its remaining imperial interests “east of Suez” were already in
the process of liquidation; the Suez Canal Company, which owned and operated the canal, was a private French company with many influential shareholders. Moreover, both European powers were then critically dependent on oil imports from the Gulf. A group of nationalist, pan-Arab officers led by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser had seized power in Egypt in 1952, and both the British and their French allies were concerned that Nasser might close the canal to them in a crisis.

Meanwhile Israel was angry at Nasser for allowing Palestinian guerrillas to operate out of the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula, and U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles was corralling various countries of the region, including Iraq, Iran and Pakistan, into the Baghdad Pact, yet another alliance to “contain” the Soviet Union. (Pearson described it as his “passion for surrounding the Communist bloc with a ring of mini-NATOs.”) What triggered the Suez crisis, in fact, was American displeasure with Nasser’s attitude toward the Soviet Union:

Washington, afraid that the Egyptians would seek aid from the Soviet Union for their ambitious plan to dam the Nile at Aswan, offered to help finance the project. Nasser accepted the offer but remained friendly with Moscow, recognized Red China and kept up a stream of propaganda insisting that the Arabs ought to be creating an alliance against Israel, not the Russians—so Dulles suddenly announced in July of 1956 that the United States would withdraw its support of the dam. The Soviet Union, seizing the opportunity that the West had created, said it would give “favourable and friendly consideration” to any economic aid that Egypt might ask for. The Aswan High Dam was eventually built
with Soviet aid (and Egypt did not catch Marxism or join the Warsaw Pact as a result), but President Nasser was furious: “Let [the Americans] choke with rage,” he said, and nationalized the Suez Canal. He promised to compensate the shareholders, but his aim was to finance the dam with the tolls from the canal, which meant that they would probably have a long wait for their money.

Britain, under the Conservative government of Sir Anthony Eden, was incensed. “We believe that we should seize this opportunity of putting the Canal under proper international control,” said Eden—and in a cretinous outburst of late-imperial machismo, Britain began conspiring secretly with France and Israel for a surprise attack on Egypt. Lester Pearson, anxious to stop Britain from doing something criminally foolish, tried to have the Suez crisis discussed at
NATO
meetings without much success, and he also tried directly to talk the British down off their high horse. It seemed as if they were listening, but while London was sending reassuring telegrams to Ottawa and the other Dominion capitals, the secret talks with the French and the Israelis about a surprise attack on Egypt were continuing at a “safe house” outside Paris.