Paterson Chair in International Affairs, Norman Paterson School of International Affairs
Monday, we learned of a meeting in Paris this week about the
future of the anti-ISIS effort by the significant contributors to the current
effort, and that Canada is apparently not
invited. The
natural questions to ask are: why and so what? It is easier to answer the
second than the first, but I will try my hand at both.
Before starting out, one thing needs to be clear: this is not the first time
Canada has been left out of a major meeting aimed at figuring out the future of
an allied effort. In 2002, there was a meeting of the “Quint” to
set NATO’s agenda about the future of the various Balkan missions
(Bosnia/Kosovo/Macedonia). The Quint included the five largest providers
of troops — U.S., UK, France, Italy and Germany. During the military
mission in Afghanistan, things had changed quite a bit as it was no longer
about the size of the force but where the countries’ troops were and what they
were doing. As a result of Canada’s key commitment, Canada was at the table and
some of the bigger contributors were either not invited or simply not that
relevant (Italy, Germany).
With that caveat in mind — that this is nothing new — what is going on now? My
first question was, when I heard the news, were the Australians invited? Why? Because their force posture is not that different than Canada’s at
the moment. While considered the second largest after the U.S., it is
composed of 300 soldiers, Special Operations Forces, six F/A-18s, a tanker and
an airborne warning and control aircraft. Canada has a similar air
package — six CF-18s, a tanker and two Aurora recon planes — 69 or so SOF, and
heaps of logistics people but no other soldiers. To answer the question, the Australians have been invited. Basically, if it is
about current commitment, then the Canadians should be there. And then I
learned the Dutch were also going to this meeting, and they have eight F-16s and some trainers on the ground.
So, yes, there is something going here besides the old Balkan rules about the
size of the deployment. Everyone is pointing to the U.S. being upset
about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s commitment to pull out the CF-18s, including National
Post columnist Matthew Fisher who is citing highly placed sources in Europe.
I had
not heard that the U.S. was this miffed. I don’t remember similar upset
when Canada pulled out of the much more significant contribution in
Kandahar. But if the U.S. is this upset, I am still surprised that it
would exclude Canada, since Canada’s commitment is still in the air. Excluding Canada might lead to a much smaller, less helpful Canadian training
mission. Still, given that other similar players are included, it does
seem likely that the exclusion here is about the CF-18s and perhaps that the
Canadian government has taken longer to figure out the next steps than its
allies would like.
How significant is this exclusion?
Not
much and very. Not much since Canada was always going to be in the
position of a strategy taker and not a strategy maker in this campaign — the
contribution was always going to be small and risk averse — so either the old Balkan rules or the newer
Afghanistan rules of who matters would limit how much the Canadians would be
heard. The exclusion is very significant in that it is a sign that the U.S.-Canadian
relationship is strained, even if the prime minister is about to have a state
dinner with U.S. President Barack Obama. It will ramp up criticism of the
government — that the honeymoon is over. That latter part, of course, we
knew already.
Given that this government promised to improve
relations with the U.S. after years of Stephen Harper hectoring about pipelines, this
is not a good start. Should the government have made a faster
decision? I am not sure, since calls for passion and impatience are just, um, dumb, and this government had to spend its first month running
off to four summits. Still, figuring out a training mission is on the low
end of the complexity spectrum. Harper announced one in 2010 with little of the homework actually being done— Kabul
only became Kabul-centric ultimately. So, this government could have made
some kind of decision and figured out some of the details later.
In sum, this dynamic of excluding lesser
players from the strategy sessions is not new, Canada has been excluded before,
but this is still pretty strange and quite unfortunate. Trudeau and his
team have some explaining to do.
