Global Brief | Winter/Spring 2016 by Global Brief Magazine/Institute for 21st Century Questions

Build Bridges, and Stitch Between Them

EDITORS’ BRIEF

Even when you fill in the gaps, new gaps appear. The stitches between the stitches are the realm of the interstitial – the potential cause of great calamity

COVER ILLUSTRATION: ANITA KUNZ

of the Persian Gulf as they struggle to reckon with the sliding price of oil. Finally, Irvin Studin advances ten theses on Canadian foreign policy. In Tête à Tête, GB sits down with Andrew Coyne of the National Post to discuss the recent Canadian federal election and the strengths, weaknesses and challenges of the new prime minister (Trudeau) and his government. GB also breaks bread with David Malone, rector of UN University in Tokyo, to better understand the strategic pressures on Japan, India and even the UN system as the search for the next Secretary General enters its final stages. (Long-time GB readers may wish to look back at our interview with the recently departed Boutros Boutros-Ghali in the Fall 2010 issue.) In Query, Alexander Sergunin and Valery Konyshev of St. Petersburg State University outline Russia’s interests in the Arctic. GB Associate Editor Michael Barutciski then asks whether the EU’s Schengen experiment has had its day, and considers what may need to happen to rescue it. In Nez à Nez, David Biette of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s new Polar Initiative debates Jeremi Suri of the University of Texas at Austin on the merits and demerits of the US deeming Russia a friend (or foe) in the still peaceable Arctic theatre. In The Definition, GB assesses the practical consequences of the recent Paris climate deal. Lindsay Iversen of the US Council on Foreign Relations, Kishore Mahbubani of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Sergey Bobylev of Moscow State University, and Roger-Mark De Souza of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC variously weigh in. In Strategic Futures, Dalhousie University’s David Black, Carleton University’s Elinor Sloan, and the University of Ottawa’s Thomas Juneau tell us where Canadian foreign policy, new government oblige, may be by the year 2020. In Situ reports come to us from O.P. Jindal Global University’s Ramaswamy Sudarshan in New Delhi and also Jakarta, as both India and Indonesia struggle with Islamist violence, as well as from the University of Ghana’s Raymond A. Atuguba in Accra in the context of Ghana’s notorious energy struggles. Lastly, GB is in Panama’s Cabinet Room to listen in on comparisons between the newly expanded Panama Canal and competing arteries like the Northwest Passage, the Suez Canal and the Strait of Malacca. George Elliott Clarke, newly appointed Canadian parliamentary poet laureate, closes the book in Epigram. Enjoy your Brief. | GB

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does not do morality plays. We are much too serious and selfserious for that. Instead, we aim to drive understanding of the world’s manifold issues and problems, and to offer solutions wherever our gifted writers see them. One of the wicked problems in today’s international relations is what we might call ‘interstitial problems.’ In his latest book, Kissinger pushes for a 21st century that includes the construction and refinement of vast regional regimes – legal-political-economic-geopolitical regimes – as a basis for global order or stability. If we consider – to take a major example – the EU regime as having served as the cornerstone for the peace that has reigned in Europe since WW2, then Kissinger’s construct seems eminently reasonable. But what happens to the gaps between the regimes – that is, to those countries, regions and spaces that are not captured by these international regimes? What happens when two or more regimes compete – consciously or unconsciously – for these ‘interstitial’ spaces? Answer: absent great skill and prudence, considerable damage. The spaces can be torn asunder by the gravitational pulls of the competing regimes, or even become theatres for direct clashes between these international regimes or their member states. Without stitches between the bridges themselves, the bridge-building exercise could well result in the burning of all of the bridges. Alan Middleton kicks things off in the One Pager, revisiting his predictions for global business futures of five years ago in these pages. In the lead Feature, Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, explains how the last 25 years were a period of strategic ‘anomie’ for Russia and why it has assumed an emergency posture to prepare for any eventuality in an international order without reliable institutions. By juxtaposition, former CIA Director John E. McLaughlin outlines what should be America’s national strategy (and strategic mindset) from next year, when the new US president takes office. GB Editor-in-Chief Irvin Studin makes the case for a Europe 2.0 framework, built trilaterally between Brussels, Moscow and Kiev – Ukraine being the world’s leading interstitial problem – as the only way to secure a longterm European peace, and as logically prior to the world having any chance of taming the growing chaos in the Middle East. Richard Rousseau of the UAE’s American University of Ras Al Khaimah examines the various pressures and survival strategies of the monarchies

N O .1 9

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF & PUBLISHER Irvin Studin

WINTER • SPRING 2016

D E PA R T M E N T S

MANAGING EDITOR Sam Sasan Shoamanesh ART DIRECTOR Louis Fishauf ASSOCIATE EDITOR Michael Barutciski ASSISTANT EDITOR Marie Lavoie

EDITORS’ BRIEF. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 ONE PAGER

Alan Middleton | Global business futures, take two. . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

SENIOR EDITOR & ASSISTANT PUBLISHER

Jaclyn Volkhammer

IN SITU

SENIOR EDITOR Milos Jankovic

Ramaswamy Sudarshan | India, Indonesia and Islam. . . . . . . . . . . 6

JUNIOR EDITORS

Raymond A. Atuguba | Ghana’s energy paralysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Patrick Baud, Navdeep Johal, Misha Munim, Ryan Nichols, Zach Paikin WEB DESIGN Dolce Publishing PRINTING RJM Print Group

TÊTE À TÊTE Andrew Coyne | Political transformation and Canadian futures. . 18 David Malone | Strategic space-time, from Tokyo to UNHQ . . . . . . . 40

ADVISORY COUNCIL

QUERY

Sam Mizrahi, Don Ferencz,

Alexander Sergunin & Valery Konyshev | Russia’s Arctic interests . . . 14

André Beaulieu, Tim Coates, David Dewitt, Paul Evans, Drew Fagan, Dan Fata, Margaret MacMillan Mailing Address Global Brief Magazine 63 Oatlands Crescent Richmond Hill, ON L4C 9P2 Canada General Enquiries, Feedback & Suggestions globalbrief@globalbrief.ca Subscriptions subscriptions@globalbrief.ca Advertising advertising@globalbrief.ca Article Submissions: submissions@globalbrief.ca

Michael Barutciski | La fin de l’espace Schengen?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 IN THE CABINET ROOM Dusan Petricic | Panamania and the Northwest Passage . . . . . . . . 39 NEZ À NEZ David Biette vs. Jeremi Suri In the Arctic, Russia and the US are friends. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 THE DEFINITION

“The chief consequence of the Paris climate deal…”. . . . . . . . . . 60 STRATEGIC FUTURES “In 2020, Canadian foreign policy will be…”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 EPIGRAM

George Elliott Clarke | Transcript of the Berlin Conference. . . . . . 64

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Global Brief® is published quarterly in Toronto, Canada by the Institute for 21st Century Questions and the Global Brief Society. The contents are copyrighted. Subscription Rates One year (four issues) for CDN $38. Two years (eight issues) for CDN $72. HST or GST applies only to purchases in Canada. Shipping and handling charges apply only to purchases outside of Canada. The Institute for 21st Century Questions The Institute for 21st Century Questions (21CQ) is a vision and strategy tank that, in association with Global Brief magazine, aims to analyze and help provide real-life solutions to – and ambitiously participate in solution-making for – some of the major geopolitical, political and social questions of this new century. www.i21CQ.com

F E AT U RES

THE LOST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS Why no new world order has been built since the end of the Cold War BY FYODOR LUKYANOV

AMERICAN STRATEGIC CULTURE The US will remain indispensable to global problemsolving, provided updated institutions and alliances are in place BY JOHN E. McLAUGHLIN

EUROPE 2.0 OR A MARCH TO WAR The European peace is logically prior to the Middle Eastern one, and it can only be built trilaterally BY IRVIN STUDIN

LE QUATRIÈME CHOC PÉTROLIER Les réajustements financiers et fiscaux risquent

TEN THESES ON CANADIAN FOREIGN POLICY Why the means are more important than the ends, and how to transform the national strategic psychology BY IRVIN STUDIN

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de révéler le fonctionnement réel des monarchies pétrolières PAR RICHARD ROUSSEAU

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Global Business Futures, Take Two

ONE PAGER

Revisiting the last five years in world commerce to profile the next half decade BY ALAN MIDDLETON

and Kenya – are being driven by a youthful population, the ageing populations of countries like Brazil, China and Russia have also continued to account for substantial income and wealth creation. Growth in those countries will moderate relative to those with a more youthful profile, but the application of technology, postponement of retirement, and longer healthy life spans will continue to power the economies with an older demographic profile. The fourth prediction was that while global brands would grow, they would not dominate, as local brands would also thrive. This has been borne out. While more countries expand their brands globally, local or domestic brands like Alqueria in Colombia, PIL in Brazil, Parte in India, Master Kong in China, Indomie in Indonesia, Chipotle in the US, and Canadian Tire and President’s Choice in Canada have had growing countervailing strength. Watch for two additional trends over the next five years. One is the growing security threat to both person and organization. Politico-religious violence will continue to affect people and individuals around the world, but there will also be sophisticated threats to organizational cyber-data (strategy, R&D, production, marketing, financial) and personal cyber-data (financial and health). These threats will drive business for counter-cyber-crime services. Firms in this space include familiar US names like Cisco, IBM and Symantec, as well as newcomers like Finmeccanica from Italy, Kaspersky from Russia, Sophos from the UK, Thales from France, and ThetaRay from Israel. The second is the re-emergence of a more mixed or hybrid economy model of enterprise globally. In most countries, the move toward privatization of organizations directly engaged in product and service creation will likely intensify. However, there will be increased national government supervision and strategic alliances between governments and the private sector. The P3 model of private-public partnerships will grow in order to fund necessary improvements in national physical and virtual infrastructure. And certain industries deemed strategic to a nation’s economy will have blended ownership models: examples in China include state-owned industries like Sinopec, China National Petroleum, ICBC and China Mobile. Of course, other countries also have their government-supported champions: Canada’s Bombardier – a ‘soft’ national champion – comes to mind. Bref, six trends in all, updated. Barring ‘black swans,’ of course. | GB

Alan Middleton is Executive Director of the Executive Education Centre, and Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto.

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ive years ago in GB, I made four predictions about mega-trends in global commerce. How did things turn out, and what does this suggest for the next five years? I originally asserted, for context, that small, unpredictable events would have huge impacts on business. ‘Black swans’ since then have included the oil price crash, from a high of US$146 per barrel to slightly over $30 per barrel. Copper has dropped from $4.48 per pound to slightly over $2.00 per pound. There has been political upheaval in the Greater Middle East and Eastern Europe. Terrorism has been commodified by the ISIS movement. West Asia and Europe have seen the emergence of one of history’s great refugee crises. The BRIC countries have become much weaker economically. And new technology – particularly social media, but also in resource extraction – has caused great disruption. The first prediction was that global economic growth would come primarily from both the BRIC economies and from other emerging markets. This remains generally valid, allowing for significant modifications from the ‘black swans.’ Although slower, Chinese GDP is still growing at 6.9 percent and accounts for 13.3 percent of gross world product. Indian GDP is growing at 7.4 percent and accounts for 2.6 percent of gross world product. Brazil and Russia are the ‘problem BRICs’ in GDP growth due to problems of political or geopolitical provenance. The second prediction was that global commerce would continue to be powered by major multinational enterprises, including new ones from the developing world. Indeed, of the 500 largest corporations by revenue in the world today, 98 are Chinese, with names like Huawei, Ping An Insurance and Tewoo becoming familiar. In India, there are seven, including Reliance and Tata. In Brazil, there are Petrobras, Itau, Vale and Votorantim. In Russia, there are Gazprom, Rosneft, Lukoil and Sberbank. Emerging markets now account for 75 percent of mobile phone subscriptions, over 50 percent of all retail sales and motor vehicle sales, 75 percent of foreign exchange reserves, and 25 percent of worldwide financial assets. The third prediction about the economic impact of not only a ‘youth demographic,’ but also about the importance of the ‘older demographic’ in the world, also turned out to be valid – with caveats. While countries like Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and most of Africa – especially Nigeria, Tanzania, the DRC, Uganda

India, Indonesia and Islam outside the Middle East

IN SITU

Modi, Jokowi and the common test of radical Islamist groups RAMASWAMY SUDARSHAN reports from New Delhi & Jakarta

W Ramaswamy Sudarshan is the Dean of the School of Public Policy, O.P. Jindal Global

G LO B A L B R I E F • W I N T E R | S P R I N G 2 0 1 6

University, New Delhi.

hile the leaders of both India and Indonesia face some common longterm challenges in managing their respective political systems, they both face the more pressing challenge of countering the rise of violent Islamist groups intent on undermining political stability and order in the two countries. In India, on January 2nd of this year, a heavily armed group attacked the country’s Pathankot Air Force Station. Up to six attackers and seven Indian military personnel were killed. It took the Indian military some four days to put down the attack. The attackers were suspected members of Jaish-e-Mohammed, an Al Qaeda-linked Islamist militant group based in Kashmir. Indonesia’s violent Islamist groups include Jamaah Anshar Khilafah (JAK), the Mujahidin of Eastern Indonesia, based in Sulawesi, and various outfits affiliated with Indonesians fighting for ISIS in the Middle East. On January 14th of this year, a group of militants likely affiliated with or funded by ISIS, launched an attack in the centre of Jakarta, the Indonesian capital. At least eight people were killed, including five of the assailants. Nearly two dozen people were injured. After a series of terrorist attacks around the world instigated by violent Islamist groups, many Indian Muslim organizations have condemned ISIS as unIslamic and have issued fatwas against the organization. In Indonesia, the Nahdlatul Ulama, an organization of Muslims with over 50 million members – and whose leader, Abdurrahman Wahid, was Indonesia’s president between 1999 and 2001 – has produced a 90-minute documentary condemning ISIS. Apart from traditional trade and economic relations, there is urgency for India and Indonesia to initiate a process of mutual learning about how to safeguard the forms and practices of Islam in the two countries, which have historically – and generally – emphasized pluralism and tolerance toward adherents of other faiths. Nearly 13 percent of the world’s Muslim population lives in Indonesia, which makes it the world’s most populous Muslim nation. India has the world’s third largest Muslim population – that is, some 14 percent of its huge population. Indonesia’s polity is today being challenged by various Islamist groups that are bent on using violence and terrorism to establish an Islamic state to replace the secular republic. India’s social fabric, too, is coming under

increased pressure by communal riots between Muslims and Hindus, reminiscent of the violence that occurred when India and Pakistan emerged as two new countries gaining independence from British rule. Of course, India embraced democracy well before its republican constitution came into force in 1950. Indonesia, for its part, had a chaotic period of parliamentary democracy until 1957, when Sukarno established an autocratic system called ‘guided democracy.’ Sukarno was effectively stripped of his powers in 1965 by the military, leading to the formal installation of General Suharto as president in 1968. Indonesia under Suharto’s administration was touted as an economic miracle. The UNDP awarded him a Citation of Achievement in 1997, showcasing official figures that claimed that the number of poor in Indonesia had fallen from 60 percent of the population in 1970 to 11 percent in 1996. And yet, barely a year later, Suharto’s fortunes plunged when Indonesia was caught up in the financial crisis and protests by students against the government. Suharto fell in 1998, and Indonesia was able to hold its first ‘free and fair’ democratic elections in 1999. Democratic elections have brought new leaders to India and Indonesia. In India, Narendra Modi led the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to victory in the 2014 parliamentary elections. In Indonesia, the 2014 direct election led to Joko “Jokowi” Widodo being sworn in as president. The majority of Indonesia’s voters saw him as the best choice to replace President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who had been in office for 10 years. In India, Modi, prior to becoming prime minister, had been the chief minister of Gujarat state from 2001. Like Modi, Jokowi’s meteoric rise began with success in managing a municipality – Surakarta – and later the special province of Jakarta. Both leaders owe their national success and popularity to the many breakthroughs that they made at the provincial level – to wit, in managing the economy, infrastructure and public services with a hands-on approach. Both leaders also face significant challenges in garnering support for their policy programmes in their respective parliaments. For Modi, who commands a majority in the Lok Sabha (the lower house, comprising directly elected members), the challenge is the lack of majority support in the Rajya Sabha (the upper house, comprising members who are

PHOTOGRAPH: AP PHOTO / ACHMAD IBRAHIM

Despite the similarities in their personalities and their parcours to power, it is surprising that the leaders of today’s India and Indonesia have not yet met to understand and learn from one another about how to cope with the consequences of Islam becoming radicalized in both of their countries. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the first Indonesian president, Sukarno, famously sowed the seeds for bilateral friendship. Nehru hosted the first

Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi in 1947 to discuss the Indonesian problem. It brought together leaders of Asia’s independence movements and was, for all intents and purposes, the first effort to forge Asian unity. Biju Patnaik, future chief minister of Orissa, flew an aircraft to Indonesia to rescue Vice-President Mohammad Hatta and Prime Minister Soetan Sjahrir from the Dutch. He brought both of them to New Delhi to attend the conference. Years later, President Suharto conferred on Biju Patnaik the state honour of Bumiputra. Nehru went on to host the Indonesia Conference in 1949 to discuss the Dutch aggression on the nascent republic. These two conferences were precursors to the Bandung Conference of 1955, hosted by Indonesia – the first Afro-Asian event where both Nehru and Sukarno invoked the “spirit of Asia” and laid the foundation for the non-aligned movement. When India’s Nobel laureate in literature, Rabindranath Tagore, visited Java in 1927, it seemed as if, at that moment, the two countries recognized an ancient bond and the possibility of a new partnership. Nearly a century later, that partnership has not materialized to the extent imagined. Perhaps most importantly, bilateral relations have not focussed on a mutual quest for a better understanding of Islam. After the recent terrorist attacks in the two countries, it is imperative that a far better and deeper understanding of Islam and its recent evolution should become the top common priority for both India and Indonesia, and should be agenda item number one for a major Modi-Jokowi summit that should happen in the nearest possible future. | GB

An Indonesian woman holds a poster outside a Starbucks café in Jakarta, Indonesia, that was attacked in January, 2016.

The leaders of today’s India and Indonesia have not yet met to understand and learn from one another about how to cope with the consequences of Islam becoming radicalized in both of their countries. G LO B A L B R I E F • W I N T E R | S P R I N G 2 0 1 6

elected by legislators in state assemblies). As the Congress Party controlled many state assemblies during the decade when Manmohan Singh was prime minister, Modi’s prospects of gaining control of the Rajya Sabha depend on the success of his party in state assembly elections. Of course, the results of recent state elections in Delhi and Bihar, where the BJP lost, indicate that he may have a long wait. The consequence has been an impasse in the enactment of important federal legislation, forcing the Modi government to resort to ordinances (emergency executive laws), and to suffer the humiliation of having ordinances lapse when they could not be approved by both houses of parliament. Of course, unlike India, Indonesia has a presidential system. The Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P)-led coalition that secured Jokowi’s presidency has fewer seats in parliament than the opposition coalition. Jokowi’s administration therefore faces the unenviable prospect of wheeling and dealing for support in parliament for its legislative agenda. The difference between India and Indonesia is that the want of parliamentary support for Modi in the upper house is a temporary situation that is likely to be resolved through the very longevity of his government. However, for Jokowi in Indonesia, relations with parliament are endemically difficult because members of the coalition of parties represented in his cabinet have no incentive to support the executive branch unless they are individually persuaded. Unlike Modi, Jokowi has no parliamentary whip on whom he can count to have his way. Indonesia’s constitution is not based on Sharia or Islamic law, even though Muslims were the mainstay in the struggle for the country’s independence. Indonesia is, instead, based on Pancasila – that is, five interconnected principles: first, the belief in one god; second, a humanity that is civil and just; third, a united Indonesia; fourth, wise representation of democracy; and fifth, social justice for every Indonesian citizen. More recently, of course, in the aftermath of the peace accord that ended the liberation struggle in Aceh, the province has begun to enforce Sharia for Muslims, and some Sharia-like bylaws have been passed in different localities. In India, the pioneering Constituent Assembly had to make a similar compromise in the interest of religious pluralism. The demand for a uniform civil code, replacing the separate personal laws of Hindus, Christians and Muslims, was acknowledged by its inclusion in the chapter on the Directive Principles of State Policy, which were declared to be non-justiciable. And apart from amending some provisions of Hindu law, India has wisely left the personal laws of Christians and Muslims untouched, declaring that their reforms must come from representatives of those faiths, and must not be imposed by majoritarian legislation.

Fyodor Lukyanov is Editor-in-Chief of Russia in Global Affairs, Research Professor in Moscow’s Higher School

Why no new world order has been built since the end of the Cold War

of Economics, and Research Director of

BY FYODOR LUKYANOV

the Valdai International Discussion Club.

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THE LOST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS

wenty-five years ago, on March 17th, 1991, the first and only nationwide referendum took place in the Soviet Union. More than threequarters of its participants voted in favour of “the preservation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics in which the rights and freedoms of an individual of any nationality will be fully guaranteed.” This was Mikhail Gorbachev’s final attempt to stop the disintegration of a major country. Nine months later, following a referendum on Ukraine’s independence on December 1st, the Soviet Union officially ceased to exist. The Ukrainians, of whom more than 70 percent had voted to preserve the Soviet Union in the March referendum, this time voted 90 percent in favour of independence. A quarter century has passed since those turbulent events, but they have never truly become history. In fact, much of what is happening in present-day Russia and in world events is rooted in the events of 1991. That year marked not just the end of one more empire – indeed, the last remaining one – but also the destruction of one of the two pillars of the bipolar world order built in the second half of the 20th century. It was a tectonic shift that brought about fundamental global changes and engendered differences that have never been resolved and have – to be clear – become more acute since 2014. For the West – the US and its allies – the collapse of the Soviet Union was a manifestly positive event that ushered in ‘a new world order’ – one in which Western countries had not only a political but also a moral right to organize the world as they saw fit. From Russia’s point of view – a view that became stronger over time – no new order had been built. Indeed, what little remained of the previous order gradually fell apart. The international system sank into chaos as its institutions – reasonably effective in the last century, but unable to adapt to new-century realities – eroded. Attempts to create a ‘centralized’ or unipolar global system of governance simply failed.

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ILLUSTRATION: ANITA KUNZ

n 2005, Vladimir Putin described the disintegration of the Soviet Union as a major geopolitical catastrophe. The West viewed this statement as evidence of Putin’s nostalgia for the days of Soviet – and with it, Russian – superpower status and of his desire to revive or restore it. And yet there is nothing in that particular Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly, where these words were first spoken (Putin repeated them, two years later, at the 2007 Munich Security Conference), to support such an interpretation. Instead, President Putin spoke about the painful efforts that Russia was undertaking to get out of the crisis caused by the collapse of the previous model, stating: “That was precisely the period when […] our society was generating not only the energy of self-preservation, but also the will for a new and free life.” More than a decade after Putin’s speech, the most important question facing Russia has not changed

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The Crimean annexation was a key step by Putin’s team to deconstruct what remained of the Soviet Union – by overcoming the loose taboo about revisiting administrative borders drawn by the Soviet authorities. The ghost of the Soviet Union was at last vanishing.

a great deal. It is as follows: how do Russian society and Russia’s political class view their country – as a state with certain intrinsic, deeply rooted values or, alternatively, as a shard of a ‘real,’ far greater country that was ruined? The former interpretation suggests that Russia’s search for its place in the world will likely end successfully despite all of the bumps in the road. The latter interpretation, however, is more problematic – not least in practical terms – as it suggests a desired revival of superpower status, one way or another. Indeed, prima facie, the multiple crises of 2014-2015 and Russia’s interference in the conflicts in Ukraine and then Syria seem to be consistent with this second interpretation. Upon closer inspection, though, this is not the only possible interpretation of events – that is, one could well argue that these two military-political moves by Moscow were, in important respects, dramatically dissimilar in nature. Indeed, one of the plausible reasons for Russia’s Syrian intervention was Moscow’s interest in making up for the negative

effects of its Ukrainian campaign, which not only failed to raise the country’s international status, but actually harmed it and came at the expense of national economic development. When the leaders of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine dissolved the Soviet Union in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha National Park in December 1991, they did not risk raising the issue of Crimea, as their main priority was to get rid of centralized Kremlin rule and to redistribute power into the hands of the 15 constituent republics. Instead, the Crimean question exploded in 2014, causing a chain reaction and becoming a turning point in the history of what we may call ‘Soviet decentralization.’ The Crimean annexation was, on this logic, a key step by Putin’s team to deconstruct what remained of the Soviet Union – to wit, by overcoming the loose taboo about revisiting administrative borders drawn by the Soviet authorities. The ghost of the Soviet Union was at last vanishing. The history of the Soviet Union, then, did not end in December 1991, and any jubilation over the ‘civilized divorce’ of its component parts and within its general sphere was premature, as evidenced during the Balkan nightmare. The Yugoslav syndrome caught up with Russia more than two decades later in Ukraine. Gorbachev’s perestroika, for its part, was laid to rest first and foremost by the separatism of Russia’s nomenklatura. In other words, the Soviet Union became doomed when Russian political elites, more than those in any other Soviet republic, stopped associating themselves with the central government in Moscow – albeit for different reasons: progressives and democrats had one set of motives; retrogrades and communists had a contrary set of motives. Neither the Baltic nor the South Caucusus republics, nor even Ukraine could have caused as big a country as the USSR to disappear so quickly. Only the will of the Russian establishment – the old one that was trying to hold onto the reins of power by distancing itself from Gorbachev, the experimenting General Secretary, and the new one that wanted to assume control of the state – could bring about the demise of the Soviet empire. Some 25 years later, the ideological descendants in the Russian leadership of those who put an end to the Soviet state are, perhaps not that surprisingly, moving along the same vector. In explaining the need for the incorporation of Crimea into today’s Russia, Vladimir Putin put forth the ‘Russian world’ concept – meaning that Russians carried a conspicuous responsibility toward their compatriots who ended up outside of Russia’s borders after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. To be sure, Russians became one of the most divided peoples in the world in 1991, with

some 25 million of them suddenly transformed into foreigners without having, in reality, moved anywhere. In his interview with Germany’s Bild in January of this year, Putin stressed: “For me, it is not borders and state territories that matter, but people’s fortunes.” Some commentators again took this as proof, or further proof, of his imperial ambitions, even though his reference to Russians more properly betrays the drawing of an ethnic or mental border – not an imperial or administrative one – that evidently serves to exclude ‘the other’ or ‘non-Russians.’ Properly viewed, this is not a move toward Russian isolationism, but rather toward inward or domestic consolidation of the Russian state system at the expense of all other policy initiatives. Of course, events have clearly changed this logic: the Kremlin finally concluded that its chances on the minor Eurasian stage (the Ukraine conflict) would diminish over time without active participation in the major Middle Eastern arena (Syria). Bref, the main problem in today’s Russia is a crisis of ideas – that is, the absence of a vision for the future. The search for ideas ended with perestroika. Intellectual life in the late Soviet Union was rich – partially underground at first, but then increasingly public. The Soviet project, for all its troubles, was always an impressive undertaking, and attempts to transform it were similarly grand. In fact, they reverberated around the world. The renewal of older ideas therefore sparked heated debates inside the country and internationally. These debates in many cases reproduced perennial Russian disputes related to the means of national development, but never sounded parochial because the Soviet Union was a global power and thought globally. In other words, the Kremlin intended to change the world by changing the Soviet state. This – to be sure – was Gorbachev’s grand plan. Of course, the global aspirations faded with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia began to focus on its own problems, even though its impact on the rest of the world was still significant by virtue of its size and importance. But deep reflection was evidently not a priority after the Soviet Union’s breakup – economic and political survival was. This survival imperative gradually gave way to extemporized pragmatism – commensurate with the need to repair and invigorate the state system. This succeeded partially, reviving the urge for new quests – even if Russia’s ability to think globally had by that time been lost.

erestroika was the last period in Russia’s national history when the country not only earned international attention, but also offered up a big idea in a bid to attract the world to its side. After the Soviet collapse, Russia deliberately followed other countries – initially in the hope of fitting into the realm of Western concepts. Over time, however, it became more and more withdrawn, nurturing grudges about its own failure to succeed. These grudges laid the foundations for a protective and defensive ideology that did not inspire the country to look beyond its borders, but instead to fortify the wall and deepen the moat in the context of the chaotically changing and dangerous world around it. Perestroika and today’s Russia are, as such, antipodes. The optimism and idealism of the late 1980s stand in stark contrast to the gloomy real-

Perestroika and today’s Russia are antipodes. The optimism and idealism of the late 1980s stand in contrast to the gloomy realism of the mid-2010s. And yet there is one thing they have in common: in both cases, politics trumped economics.

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ism of the mid-2010s. And yet there is one thing that they have in common: in both cases, politics trumped economics, even if the gap between the weakening economic base and the ambitious political superstructure is a clear source of national vulnerability. In 2015, not only did political logic outweigh economic calculations, but external policy was more important than internal policy. Witness the instantaneous rupturing of ties with Ankara after Turkey downed the Russian military aircraft. This move by the Kremlin showed that it considered national prestige to be more important than mercantile considerations. In effect, national prestige has replaced the national idea and national identity. The search for elements that can bind Russian society and the state were on display in 2012 when Vladimir Putin reassumed the presidency amid public demonstrations. Protests in Moscow, beginning in late 2011, brought together members of the bourgeoisie and certain groups – including nationalists and leftists – who insisted on increased civil and

political liberties and, more generally, deep reform of the national system of government. Superficial modernization started during Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency. It left a strange aftertaste by ending so abruptly. It did, however, bring an end to the period of relatively care-free consumption of the 2000s, which followed the depression of the 1990s and the struggle for Russian survival. The tragic 1990s also cut off perestroika, leaving disputes on the future of the country unfinished.

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The internal system of the Soviet state was not based on foreign policy, and instead on a rigid socioeconomic structure. Outward expansion was driven largely by ideology, which developed into a more general strategic instinct for competition with America.

iewed today, the late 1980s now seem an ephemeral intermezzo in Russian history. And yet, as mentioned, the declining Soviet empire was still bustling with great debate amid the kaleidoscopic mess, as it tried to explore fundamental issues of state, society, and international community from different angles, and to set tasks for the future. The collapse of the Soviet Union interrupted this process, replacing it with the struggle for power and property. A quarter century later, it is clear that the interrupted Soviet-era dispute will have to be resumed. The first indication of such a resumption was in 2012-2013 when Vladimir Putin, who is very sensitive to the public mood, began to speak regularly about ideological and moral issues. His appeals to conservative authors and controversial attempts to revive and refashion traditional values were a response to a latent but obvious demand in the body politic. The Ukraine crisis torpedoed this process. Since its outbreak, the Russian state has been functioning in emergency mode, responding and improvising to the ever-changing situation. Debates about perennial Russian topics have been sidelined decisively in favour of urgent national mobilization. Such national mobilization, of course, is best accomplished by appeals to ‘blood and soil.’ And while the ‘Russian world’ concept has not mended the divide that came to light in late 2011 – when many middle-class Russians protested in Moscow against the lack of democratic development – it has changed the balance of the national mood dramatically: some of Putin’s initial opponents have ‘gone to war’ and dropped their complaints, while the minority, more opposed than ever to the Kremlin, has been further sidelined. Consolidation has been achieved. It took extraordinary external factors to strengthen the internal base. In a paradoxical way, then, foreign policy has performed its main role in creating conditions for domestic development (loosely conceived). Success in countering external challenges and proof of the state’s ability to be a major player on the international stage have become a neces-

sary condition for internal stability and legitimacy. This has become all the more true – even if partly in a self-fulfilling way – now that widespread instability is no longer a Kremlin fantasy but indeed objective reality. To be sure, the Ukraine crisis and the ‘Russian world’ discourse have together been part of a larger identity debate. The separation of Russians and Ukrainians, who have always been very close, betrays a painful Russian (and indeed Ukrainian) search for national identity. But nationalist passions, galvanized by the Ukrainian tragedy, are explosive, and the Kremlin realized this very quickly. It has taken its foot off the pedal, as it were. The operation in Syria is a different case altogether, consistent with a national objective of regaining superpower status. Russia intruded on what has been the main prerogative of the US since the end of the Cold War – to wit, the use of force to restore order wherever necessary. The show of force demonstrates Moscow’s capacity to carry out such missions on a regular basis. The offer of cooperation with the West in this field demonstrates co-equal status. And Moscow’s readiness to abruptly alter relations with those that do not recognize this status is a sign of self-confidence. This is not, however, a return to the Soviet model. The Soviet Union had an activist foreign policy, frequently using different versions of the ‘besieged fortress’ excuse. However, the internal system of the Soviet state was not based on foreign policy, and instead on a rigid socio-economic structure. Outward expansion was driven largely by ideology, which over time developed into a more general strategic instinct for competition with America. Strange as it may seem, the current situation has certain parallels with the Gorbachev period. Gorbachev’s failure resulted largely from the fact that his foreign policy appeared to be not just much more successful than his domestic initiatives, but that it had actually taken centre stage. His main treatise was called Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the Whole World. To this end, the “whole world” quickly overshadowed “our country.” The idea to “change the world by changing oneself” was turned inside out – internal development of the Soviet Union became a function of global transformation initiated by the Soviet leader. Everyone knows how this turned out. And yet today’s world is much less stable than it was 30 years ago, and dependence on global transformations in order to drive domestic change would be even more risky. Of course, a fundamental difference between today and the era of Gorbachev is the total absence of illusions among Russian leaders and, with this, of good examples to follow. Let us recall that the intelligentsia in the late Soviet Union looked to the West with hope as a model for emulation, while the

Soviet leadership believed in a convergence of the two systems. Gorbachev thought that a new world order would emerge through the integration of East and West on a completely equal basis. His approach echoed the views of such respected intellectuals as Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin and Nobel Peace Prize winner and dissident Andrei Sakharov. Of course, the disintegration of the Soviet Union put an end to the idea of equality and of joint construction of a European and global order (see the Feature article by Irvin Studin at p. 30). The new Russia, which at birth was thrust into the throes of existential crisis, was no longer viewed by the West (and indeed by the East) as a potential co-creator of a new world order. The ‘end of history’ construct triumphed. The Western model carried the day. Russia was essentially told to find its place in the US-centric system (see the Feature article by John E. McLaughlin at p. 22). Although initially, in the early 1990s, the Soviet leadership was almost ready to agree to this, the national psyche did not abide such a scenario. For all practical intents and purposes, a large country with the mentality and history of an independent great power simply could not overnight turn itself into a ‘big Poland’ and follow in the footsteps of states seeking admission to the EU and NATO – institutions that, in any event, never offered membership to Russia. To be sure, another important factor in Russia’s strategic mentality today is the lack of faith in the rationality of the West. The overall feeling is that good judgement in the US and Europe has given way to ideologized arrogance and unlimited dominance of left-liberal political correctness. The results of this are seen everywhere from the Middle East – laid to waste by senseless interventions – to Europe, where the authorities are hesitating to take action against criminal activities by recent waves of migrants for fear of angering human rights activists. The West is therefore no longer viewed as a source of inspiration – even if there is nothing else to take its place just yet.

The Kremlin finally concluded that its chances on the minor Eurasian stage (the Ukraine conflict) would diminish over time without active participation in the major Middle Eastern arena (Syria). Bref, today’s Russia is a country that has not yet made up its mind about its image and future place in an utterly unpredictable world. There is no one for it to use as a beacon (as all countries are living through crises), there is nothing to fit into (old communities and regimes are falling apart, and new ones are still embryonic), and it has no real resources – financial or intellectual – to launch its own big project. The current course is therefore not tactical, but rather fatalistic, underlain by a belief that nothing can be foreseen. The only way to go about the business of state, on this logic, is to be ready to respond to any change quickly and decisively. And this means enhancing all national capabilities in order to meet any emergency. By all appearances, the era that began with the end of the Cold War has ended. For the West, that era was marked by the euphoria of victory. For Russia, it was felt via the sting of inferiority that came from strategic defeat. Both sensations led to a dead end, and there is no way out in sight – even if such an exit will have to be found urgently. | GB

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longside the painful transformations in Russia, which over the past 25 years has still not come to understand what it wants to be and do, the international system has also been going through turbulent twists and turns. No proper unipolar world has been built, and existing institutions will be unable to function effectively in a polycentric system. This is most vividly borne out by the deep crisis of the EU, which not only profited the most from the end of the Cold War confrontation, but became a candidate-prototype for the future world order. Now,

alas, the EU is shrinking into itself, trying to save a vast integration project that has failed to adapt to dramatic changes (see the Query article by Michael Barutciski at p. 36). NATO, for its part, is undergoing an even more interesting transformation (see Strategic Futures at p. 62). Having won the Cold War and obtained full freedom of action, it has been unable to identify its core raison d’être. It simply cannot consistently divine missions that will succeed in uniting allies in the absence of bipolar confrontation. The experience of using force outside of the core NATO zone of responsibility has to date ranged from unsuccessful to disastrous. Of course, the alliance has managed to achieve some semblance of unity by opposing Russia during the crisis in Ukraine, but this too will not last long. For Russia is not the Soviet Union, and it cannot pose the same species of threat to the West no matter how hard it tries. At the same time, major strategic challenges like radical Islam and the return of China cannot be addressed by a NATO that operates along Cold War lines.

QUERY What are Russia’s interests in the Arctic? Why Moscow’s primary concerns in the High North are still domestic, and not international BY ALEXANDER SERGUNIN & VALERY KONYSHEV

W Alexander Sergunin and Valery Konyshev are both professors at St. Petersburg State University,

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Russia.

ith the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis in 2014, the Western policy and academic communities accused Russia of militarism and expansionism not only in Eastern Europe but also in the Arctic. They argued that since Russia is economically and technologically weak in the High North, the Kremlin must be placing an emphasis on Russia’s military strength in order to protect the country’s interests in the region (see the Nez à Nez debate between David Biette and Jeremi Suri at p. 56). According to an alarmist or pessimistic school of thought, there is growing competition among the regional players for the Arctic’s natural resources and sea routes. Such competition must inevitably lead to territorial disputes, remilitarization of the High North, and future military conflicts. Naturally, Russia is viewed as a driver of this dangerous process. To be clear, this is an erroneous representation of both the situation in the Arctic and of Russia’s intentions. Conceptually, Russia’s leadership now realizes that most of the threats and challenges to the Arctic Zone of the Russian Federation (AZRF) originate from inside rather than outside the country. These problems are rooted in a confluence of factors, including the degradation of Soviet-made economic, transport and social infrastructure in the region, the current resourceoriented model of the Russian economy, and the lack of funds and managerial skills in Russia to properly develop the AZRF. It follows that Russia’s current Arctic strategy is of an inward- and not an outward-looking nature. It aims to solve existing domestic problems rather than focus on external expansion. Moreover, in developing the AZRF, Moscow seeks to demonstrate that it is open for international cooperation and to foreign investment and know-how. As for existing territorial disputes with other coastal states, the Kremlin has repeatedly underlined that all of these disputes should be solved in a peaceful way and on the basis of international law (e.g. the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and also the 2008 Ilulissat Declaration). It is noteworthy, on this logic, that Moscow brought its dispute with Denmark and Canada over the underwater Lomonosov ridge,

potentially rich in oil and gas, to the UN Commission on the Limits of Continental Shelf. Bref, in the Arctic, Moscow has played strictly by the rules established by the international community. Some Western analysts expected that in the wake of the Ukraine crisis, Moscow would dramatically increase its military activities and presence in the Arctic, and also accelerate its massive military modernization programmes, thereby provoking military countermeasures from neighbours and destabilizing the regional military balance. Western experts paid particular attention to the fact that, for the first time, the new version of Russia’s military doctrine, issued in December 2014, had assigned to the Russian armed forces the task of protecting Russia’s national interests in the Arctic in peacetime. Moreover, Russia’s new maritime doctrine, issued in July of last year, identified the Arctic – along with the North Atlantic – as a priority area for the Russian navy. And yet there was no substantive shift, in any practical terms, in Russia’s view of the role of military power in the Arctic. As before, Moscow’s military strategies still have the following three major goals: first, to demonstrate and assure Russia’s sovereignty over the AZRF, including the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and continental shelf; second, to protect Russia’s economic interests in the High North; and third, to demonstrate that Russia retains its great power status and has world-class military capabilities. Many foreign analysts tend to forget, or completely misunderstand, that the extent of Russian strategic and conventional forces deployed in the Arctic, and with these the scale of the military modernization programmes, is a function of the fact that Russia inherited the nuclear strategic forces structure of the old Soviet Union. For this reason, the naval bases on the Kola Peninsula in the northwest of Russia are still home to two-thirds of Russia’s strategic nuclear submarines. This military potential is strictly for purposes of strategic deterrence on a global scale, rather than for ensuring Moscow’s military preponderance in the Arctic region. The largest part of the Northern Fleet’s surface vessels, including the cruiser ‘Peter the Great’ or the aircraft carrier ‘Admiral Kuznetsov,’ is also designated for the projection of Russia’s sea power beyond the Arctic military theatre. Bref, the strategic component of the Russian forces in the High North has little to do with geopolitical rivalry in the Arctic theatre. The strategic forces’ modernization programmes are limited in scope and aim to replace decommissioned submarines and surface vessels, rather than to increase these forces in terms of quantity and offensive potential. In fact, the total number of strategic submarines and large surface ships continues to decrease by comparison with the levels in the 1980s under the USSR. As for Russian conventional forces in the High North, their modernization programmes are also quite modest and aim to upgrade these forces, rather than

PHOTOGRAPH: THE CANADIAN PRESS / ARTYOM GEODAKYAN / TASS

in 2017). Work on the preservation of the way of life of Northern indigenous peoples should be advanced and deepened. And, to be sure, in the push to mitigate the impact of climate change in the Arctic, Arctic states should be actively promoting joint scientific research on the Arctic. The Arctic Council will continue to play a key role in all of these dynamics, and its capacity – financially and institutionally – should be strengthened. Confrontation on the delimitation of maritime spaces and on the definition of the limits of the

continental shelf in the Arctic should be avoided at all costs. To this end, confidence-building measures may include the sharing of data on the limits of continental shelf, joint research expeditions, and even joint applications on the division of the Arctic continental shelf to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. Let us note, with concern, that the Arctic region currently has no confidenceand security-building measures (CSBM) regime – a gap that should be filled with great urgency. For the foreseeable future, then, Moscow’s strategy in the region will be predictable and pragmatic, rather than aggressive or improvised. In contrast to the widespread stereotype of Russia around the world as a revisionist power or troublemaker in the Arctic, Moscow will continue to pursue a dual-track strategy in the High North: defending Russia’s legitimate economic and political interests, while remaining open to cooperation with foreign partners willing to contribute to exploiting Arctic natural resources, developing sea routes, and solving the numerous socio-economic and environmental problems of the region. To achieve this, Russia will use peaceful diplomatic, economic and cultural means, and act through international organizations and forums, rather than unilaterally. | GB

Polar explorers of the Russian North Pole-2015 drifting ice station pose for a group photo, August 2015.

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to provide them with additional offensive capabilities or to restore the huge military potential of the Soviet era. The purpose of these projects is twofold: first, to provide the Russian forces undergoing modernization with infrastructure that meets modern requirements; and second, to have this renovated and new infrastructure serve non-military policy objectives, including allowing Russia to implement international agreements on Arctic search and rescue (2011), and in respect of preparedness for fighting potential oil spills in the Arctic (2013). The new radar stations, airfields, and search and rescue centres along the Arctic Ocean’s coastline will be also helpful in terms of further development of the Northern Sea Route and cross-polar flights. Of course, many serious international experts do not see any particularly alarming trends in Russia’s military behaviour in the Arctic in the aftermath of the Ukraine crisis. The former commander of the US Coast Guard and current US Arctic Ambassador, Admiral Robert Papp, has said: “Everything we have seen them doing so far is lawful, considered and deliberative. So we’ll just continue monitoring it and not overreact to it.” Papp has noted that all countries have a responsibility to be able to provide search and rescue capabilities and navigation assistance in the area, and that Russia seems to be investing in just that. Military confrontation, then, is not on the agenda. Cooperation is the focus of Arctic politics today. At last year’s international Conference on Global Leadership in the Arctic (“Cooperation, Innovation, Engagement, and Resilience”) – also known as GLACIER – the Obama administration emphasized the importance of cooperation with Moscow on ‘soft security’ issues in the Arctic. As chair of the Arctic Council for the 2015-2017 period, Washington needs support from other Arctic nations in order to successfully implement its agenda on environmental issues, search and rescue, and the well-being of indigenous peoples. It has Moscow’s full support in this regard. As the recent UN Climate Conference in Paris showed, cooperation between Western countries and Russia is crucial for success in this field (see Definition at p. 60). Western capitals and Moscow alike jointly supported the new agreement limiting green-house gas emissions, and pledged to work hard on the ratification of this document by major polluters. What should a long-term cooperative agenda among Arctic nations include? First and foremost, it should include the lifting of economic sanctions against Russia, and a strategy for attracting investment and technology to Russia’s Arctic economy – including in the extractive and high-tech sectors. Moreover, all Arctic countries should work together to properly implement the recently approved Polar Code for the Northern Sea Route and, potentially, for the Northwest Passage (the code will enter into force

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Political Transformation and Canadian Futures

TÊTE À TÊTE

GB discusses the recent elections, energy, economics and Aboriginal people with Canada’s top political commentator ANDREW COYNE

GB: What happened in the last Canadian federal election? AC: The election confirmed that a sizeable portion of the population was fed up with the governing Conservatives – fed up with them mostly in respect of their governing style and their approach to politics. That can often transfer into a desire for change more broadly. But it is still to be determined how much people wanted a change in overall direction versus a change in specific policies versus just a change of faces. There is a danger for any new government of any stripe in over-reading its mandate. A government may think that it has been given a mandate for sweeping change. In a sense, this may be true for the Liberals, as they ran on a fairly substantive platform, and there were many changes proposed. And yet it is not clear to me that all of the people who voted for the Liberals voted for all of those changes, as opposed to just wanting to get rid of the existing government. We will see. GB: What were the achievements and failures of the last government?

GB: What is next for Canada’s Conservative Party, and how does this compare with the evolution of conservative formations in other countries?

Andrew Coyne is a leading Canadian political columnist with the National Post, and also a member of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s At Issue panel on The National.

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AC: Let me start with the failure, which was the broad absence of vision. Throughout much of the last century, the Conservative party lost elections to the Liberals. This was not healthy for either party. The besetting sin of the Liberals over the years has been their arrogance and sense of entitlement – born to rule and all that – never better symbolized than by the son of a former prime minister becoming party leader. The Conservatives’ besetting sin has always been a sense of insecurity and resentment. They start from the standpoint that “everyone is against us – the media, the bureaucrats, the judges, and so on.” If that is your starting point – and even if it is to some extent true – then a lot of other things are going to follow. In the case of the last government, this meant, first, that it could not really articulate a broad, ideological vision because its members had convinced themselves that no one would vote for them if they did. Second, this meant that the government felt almost obliged to take all kinds of democratic and ethical shortcuts simply to level the playing field – again, because its members perceived

that everything was against them. In my view, they became so partisan and so bitter and nasty as a substitute for actual substantive differences with the other parties. Having articulated few grand, overarching ideas or ideals in respect of what they wanted to do in power, they ended up not doing very much at all. They had an initial flourish with the so-called Accountability Act, when they brought in a number of reforms – some quite useful – coming off of the ethical scandals of the previous Liberal government. But they soon grew wary and retreated into a very closed and secretive style of governing – a very heavy-handed style of government, with few major accomplishments to its name. In short, they did not set out to do much, and they ended up not doing much. On the positive side, many of their accomplishments consisted of things that they did not do but that another government of a different stripe might well have done. That is fair enough, but it is not much of a basis for boasting. Probably the most substantive thing that they did was to negotiate and, in some cases, complete a wide range of trade agreements. If all of these agreements ever come to fruition, then they will prove to be their biggest lasting legacy. The trade agenda was remarkably ambitious: a free trade agreement with the EU, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the free trade agreements with Japan and South Korea and a host of other countries. On the fiscal policy side of things, they ran up enormous deficits in the aftermath of the financial crisis – some would say justifiably, but in my view not so much. Where I do give them credit is that they then spent the next several years marching us pretty smartly back into some semblance of balance, and left this new government in reasonably good fiscal shape. Some people might complain that the cupboard is bare, but that, frankly, is not true. Canada is in a relatively strong fiscal position – partly because of activities of governments prior to the Conservative government, like the Chrétien government, but you also have to give the Harper government some credit.

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We do not know what the future companies are going to be. What I know is that Canada is among the most prosperous countries on Earth. You imply that our prosperity is tied to having ‘great companies.’ I do not know whether that is true or not.

AC: The healthiest thing for all countries is contestable politics, where any given party feels both that it can win power and that it can lose it. Part of Stephen Harper’s ambition was to make the Conservatives permanent contenders for power in a way in which they have not been historically. I do not think that he necessarily succeeded, but history will tell over the long run. Now what the Conservatives have to do for themselves is to discover a broader sense of selfconfidence and overarching purpose and ambition. Those two things are very much linked. The Tories have to be in politics for a reason – presumably to do things that other parties will not or cannot do, or to stand for things for which other parties cannot or will not, and to tell the public what they will do when they get back into power. They need to start with that attitude. There is in Canada a genuine, remaining and enduring rationale for a small ‘c’ or large ‘C’ conservative party in the Western tradition. They need to go back to rediscovering those first principles. What are they here for? Well, they believe in a more limited vision of government – perhaps – than do the Liberals. They believe in the rights of the individual. Maybe they are more concerned about the rights of individuals as individuals rather than as members of groups. Indeed, there are some fairly interesting and important dividing lines that remain, but they have to be prepared to show up for these debates and to defend their side rather than constantly telling people: “We don’t really have an ideology. We’re just pragmatists.” GB: What are the particular strengths and weaknesses of the new Prime Minister (Trudeau), and those of the new government more broadly? AC: I mentioned that the Liberals’ besetting sin is arrogance and entitlement. Some would say that this is bred into the Prime Minister by virtue of his parentage and upbringing. On the positive side – and I mean this quite sincerely – he has a remarkable reservoir of self-assurance. In politics that is gold, because people can read insecurity and they can read whether you do not have what it takes. We have seen this self-assurance in some of his early decisions. If you are self-confident and this underpins your comportment and habits, then you are going to be more willing to be humble around others. Maybe it is all an act, but it is a nice act. To defer to others, to be willing to delegate authority, and to be willing to surround yourself with people who are apparently smarter than you – all of these are signs of self-assurance. At his best, the Prime Minister has a graciousness and an ability to make someone else feel important – rather than always having to bring everything back to himself. A lot of these things are essentially the flipside of Harper’s insecurity.

Even though Harper is objectively by far the more substantive person – smarter, more knowledgeable on issues – insecurity and lack of grace were always his character flaws. Of course, where Trudeau gets into trouble – and perhaps this is by virtue of coming from an intellectual father – is that every now and then he feels the need to reach for the profound. When he tries to come off as a deep thinker, even his best advocates would admit that he is not really an intellectual philosopher king. He is a guy with pretty good political judgement – not infallible, but pretty good, in the broad strokes. He obviously has a very strong personal touch. Where he and his team have already got themselves into trouble is that they are a little given to the lovely symbolic gesture and policy pronouncements, without necessarily having thought through all of the practical implications of implementation. GB: He has considerable energy as well, no? AC: Enormous energy and enormous personal warmth – yes. I remember seeing a video in the summer of last year of him at the gay pride parade in Toronto. This was a large gathering of people and Trudeau was bounding down the street – literally running back and forth, and from side to side on the street to hug people. Certainly we have discovered that this is the most huggy government that we have ever seen in our lives – for good or ill. I remember thinking at the time that this was going to be a different election, because you could not imagine either Stephen Harper or even Tom Mulcair – both very substantive people – having that kind of warmth and spontaneity and openness. In the end, clearly a large section of the public was looking for something in all of that symbolism. GB: What do you make of the government’s commitment to take in up to 50,000 Syrian refugees? How has the government handled it thus far? AC: Many people, including myself, would say that Canada was obliged, morally, to do something to help in this enormous humanitarian disaster – even if we can only provide a small sliver of the solution to the overall problem. Every little bit helps, and we are helping to set an example for other countries. It is in the DNA of Canadians – many, not all – and this is part of why we exist as a country, as a nation of immigrants and refugees, or descendants thereof. So this was the right thing to do on its merits. There was a need during the election campaign to say: “We are going to do more than the other parties.” The Liberals made promises that they did not necessarily think through in terms of the practical achievability of getting 25,000 refugees into Canada, at government expense, by the end of 2015. People told them

at the time that this was unrealistic, but there was credit to be won from the section of the public that was looking for this kind of gesture. In the grand scheme of history, is anyone going to care whether the government got 25,000 refugees into Canada by December 31st or instead by February 28th or whenever (within reason)? No, but we should not let the government off scot-free either. The undertaking helped the Liberals in the election – especially in the election within the election; that is, in the really important contest not between them and the Conservatives, but between them and the New Democratic Party (NDP). This was one of those issues that allowed them to say that “we are about real change, and the New Democrats are too cautious and too moderate.” The Liberals therefore deserve to be held to account for this undertaking. GB: You are on record as saying that Canada should have a population of about 100 million at some point – a theme covered by GB since 2010, and a theme of interest to 21CQ. Do you still subscribe to such a future?

PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF ANDREW COYNE

For the rest of the interview with Andrew Coyne,

People have a right to live where they wish to live. When you really get into the weeds of trying to analyze why the people who are already on a piece of land should have a right to prevent others from coming, it is actually hard to defend.

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AC: I do. I am not wedded to any particular number, but the significance of that number to me is that it was thrown around at the beginning of 20th century. The beginning of the 20th century was a time of enormous confidence and ambition in the country. You can see it in a lot of the writing at the time. Stephen Leacock, for example, was a huge proponent of large population growth and greater Canada ambition. So too was Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the prime minister of the day. There is, of course, a famous declaration made by Laurier in a speech that many school children learned when I was a kid – namely, that the 20th century would be the century of Canada; or words to that effect. People remember that. They forget the lines that came right afterward in that same speech, where Laurier said that, within the lives of some of you who are here today, this country will have 40 or 60 or 100 million people. I am paraphrasing. But people cheered. So that was very much in the air at the time. That sense of ambition and optimism and hope for the future of the country also came at a time of predictions of very high population relative to where they were. This was a country with a population of some five million at the start of the last century. The move to 100 million would be a significant leap. But the country was taking in, proportionately speaking, enormous numbers of people – that is, three or four hundred thousand yearly into a population of five million. Of course, that did not last. WW1 put an end to it. I think that political parties should have a raison d’être, an individual should have a raison d’être, and

so too should countries. For New World or settler countries like Canada, this population dynamic is part of what they are. If people are going to come and join a country, they are not going to do so only to be Canadian – whatever that meant or means. They think that a country stands for something in the world, or wishes to achieve something in the world. I have a quasi-libertarian view of immigration. To the extent feasible, people have a right to live where they wish to live during this short time that they have on Earth. When you really get into the weeds of trying to analyze why the people who are already on a piece of land or in a country should have a right to prevent others from coming, it is actually very hard to defend. You can certainly defend a social contract – that is, that we have to subscribe to certain rules and agree to obey the laws and all those things. However, if people say, “Yes, I buy that and I would like to sign on to that social contract,” is it then fair to say that we are not going to let them in by virtue of their birthplace? My views have moderated in the post-9/11 era of macro-terrorism – that is, where just a few people with the intent and the technology of mass death can inflict hitherto unforeseen types of carnage. Security evidently becomes that much more of an issue. This imposes certain new practicalities in respect of who and how many people you can admit into the country, or certainly how rapidly you can take them in. Beyond that, I do not think that there is any kind of natural limit to the number of people that we can have in Canada. I remember seeing one calculation to the effect that we could put 400 million people into only the warmest 10 percent of Canada. This would still leave us with a population density roughly equivalent to that of the Netherlands. We are not going to see that many people in Canada anytime soon, but at doable rates of intake, if sustained over a long period of time, by the middle of this century we could have 70 or 80 million people. Given the declining populations in some of our comparative countries and democracies, that could lift us into the top three or four among the major developed countries. As a final point on this matter, a population of 100 million people would change the way in which we perceive ourselves. Even today, we talk about ourselves as a small country. We are not a small country. At 36 million people, we are one of the larger democracies on Earth. We are just small compared to the US. Maybe if the gap were narrowed from roughly 10 to one, as it is now, to, say, four or five to one, we would think of ourselves in slightly larger terms and get over some of our insecurities and hang-ups. (continued)

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ILLUSTRATION: CHRISTIAN NORTHEAST

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AMERICAN STRATEGIC CULTURE NEXT ADMINISTRATION

John E. McLauglin was Deputy Director and Acting Director

he American government elected in 2016 will face a transforming world – one that will require strategic approaches that are markedly different from those of the last two US administrations. Every country has what might be called a ‘strategic culture’ – that is, the instincts at play and the means employed as the country defines and advances its interests in the world. This affects everything from how countries set priorities to how they fix the balance between diplomacy and the use of force. The strategic culture of the US over the last 16 years has reflected the unusual circumstances and characters of two very different – and in some ways very unusual – administrations. The first under President George W. Bush (2001 to 2009) had to deal with the most devastating attack that America has suffered since 1941. The administration responded aggressively and, while it succeeded in thwarting much of the terrorist threat of that time, it also generated enormous controversy – largely due to its instinct for preemptive action, and in particular its forceful removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and that operation’s violent and chaotic aftermath. The second administration under Barack Obama (2009 to today) had its own set of priorities, but was marked more heavily than most administrations by a reactive character as it determinedly sought to reverse many of the policies of its predecessor. While pursuing terrorists aggressively, JOHN E. McLAUGHLIN it has placed more weight on domestic priorities and, in the international arena, has been wary of the use of force, with a default instinct toward diplomacy and engagement when confronted with international problems. It was the fate of both of these administrations to operate at one of the hinge points of modern history – the moment when America’s superpower status began to experience serious challenge for the first time since the end of WW2. America emerged from that war realizing that, as the strongest survivor of the conflict – the largest single event in human history – it could not avoid global responsibilities. Between 1944 and 1950, it led the creation of most of the global and regional institutions that are today taken for granted – the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, and NATO – and all of this as it embarked on a four decade-long struggle with a Soviet adversary bent on global domination.

of the CIA from 2000 to 2004 and now teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

The US will remain indispensable to global problem-solving, provided an updated mindset, new institutions, and flexible alliances are in place BY

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Every country has what might be called a ‘strategic culture’ – that is, the instincts at play and the means employed as the country defines and advances its interests in the world.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 (see the Feature article by Fyodor Lukyanov at p. 8), the US entered a 17-year era of nearly unfettered influence – until the global financial crisis of 2008. Until that crisis, the US economic model was unchallenged, and few could effectively oppose what America chose to do in the international arena. But the financial crisis, because it affected the US as profoundly as many others, and stemmed partly from flawed US financial practices, jolted international confidence in the US model, dented America’s image of invulnerability, and conveyed a sense for many that American power might be slipping. No factor influences a nation’s strategic culture more than its power relative to others – and how that power is perceived. Against the backdrop just described, many observers argue that the US is losing influence because its global share of economic activity is declining (some calculate by more than 30 percent over the last decade); or because the US has overextended itself as a decade of war pushed it deeper into debt; or simply because the world is reverting to a more natural balance among powers after the historical abnormality of the last century’s two world wars. But power is a slippery concept. There is military power, economic power, the power that derives from fixed things like geography and natural resources, and power connected to things that countries can control to varying degrees – population, industrial capacity, and governing systems. And then there is the newest idea, ‘soft power’ – the term devised by

Harvard professor Joseph Nye to capture the influence that countries can exert by virtue of the appeal of their culture or values.

f course, America has been through ‘decline anxiety’ before: in the 1950s, when the USSR beat it into space with the Sputnik satellite; in the 1970s, after its loss in the Vietnam War; and in the 1980s, when it feared what it called “Japan Inc.,” as Japanese industry was besting it and buying up American icons like the Rockefeller Center. Standing against a pessimistic outlook for US power and influence, however, are a number of factors. First, the US has a strong record for renewal and adaptation. For example, the flexibility of the US regulatory system, technological breakthroughs, and the absence of a large, bureaucratically stifling national oil company combined to spawn the shaleoil boom, which, along with conservation, will make the US self-sufficient in oil by the end of the decade. This is likely to lower the cost of US manufacturing, stimulate exports, and cut the current account deficit – at just the moment when many in the world were wondering if the forward momentum of the US economy had finally stalled. Second, no country yet rivals the global cultural appeal of the US and its closest partners. Consider American cinema: it remains extraordinarily popular globally, with 70 percent of the major studios’ box office receipts now coming from international audiences (and with the Chinese and Russian markets holding special prominence). Third, other countries’ receptivity to US leadership is unmatched by the appeal of any other country. The current US administration would argue – not without justification – that it is leading in its own way and in the conditions that it faces. And yet the most frequent comment that I hear personally from international contacts is a desire not for less but rather for more US leadership – that is, a complaint that the US is not leading to the extent desired or needed. Whatever the truth of the matter, the broad perception is that more is desired by allies and by those who feel endangered by America’s adversaries. Fourth, it is still nearly impossible to solve major world problems without American involvement – although an important distinction is that the US cannot solve such problems alone. Fifth, demographics will play a role. Much of the developing world is burdened with overpopulation, high unemployment, and a youth bulge. China faces a looming ageing crisis. India suffers from a marked split between haves and have-nots (see the In Situ article by Ramaswamy Sudarshan at p. 6). The US,

are less able to exert influence over the others. This is not the kind of world in which the US has heretofore had to practice statecraft. The most recent modern analogue would be the interwar period from 1918 to 1941 – a time of rising powers and growing challenges to the contemporary order. But except for the last few years of that period, the US did not feel the burden of global leadership in anything approaching the way that it did after 1945. Emblematic of that time was an incident in my former field of intelligence: in 1929, Secretary of State Henry Stimson summarily removed funding for America’s first cryptological organization, famously remarking that “gentlemen do not read other gentlemen’s mail.” (Thinking of the recent surveillance controversies, this is proof again that Mark Twain was on to something when he said: “History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”) When global leadership did set on the US after WW2, the kind of power balance that it had to manage was the simpler bipolarity that it shared with the Soviet Union until the latter’s collapse in 1991 – after which the US fell into the aforementioned unitary ‘superpower moment.’

he bottom line, then, is that the world coming into view – a world of shifting power relationships among a larger constellation of countries, and sharply growing assertiveness outside US borders – is a new strategic context for the US. This will place a high premium on American alliance management skills, as Washington will seldom, if ever, be able to ‘go it alone’ in formulating international policies in a global arena in which most problems will span borders and involve the interests of multiple countries. Third, the US will have to live with and continue to refine techniques for dealing with the reality of what many call ‘asymmetric power’ – that is, the ability of small numbers of people to exert power dramatically in excess of their potential influence (measured in conventional terms). This is most vividly demonstrated by terrorists – from Al Qaeda, to ISIS, to the so-called ‘lone wolf’ assailants who have shown up with devastating results in so many countries. There is certainly nothing new about terrorism – its basic techniques and the power theory that it represents have been part of international life for centuries. What is new is the technology that now increases destructive power: the jet aircraft that struck New York City’s Twin Towers; bombs that defy metal detectors; biological weapons that are easy to make; information technology that enables the recruitment of extremists and training in techniques and weaponry; and the overall stealth in concealing and carrying out operations.

It is still nearly impossible to solve major world problems without American involvement – although an important distinction is that the US cannot solve such problems alone.

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on the other hand, is growing at a balanced rate, has a population that is refreshed by immigration – election pyrotechnics notwithstanding – and is still a meritocracy compared with much of the world. Sixth, America’s military power, while under budgetary pressure, still dwarfs the capabilities of other states. Defence and all of its associated expenses totalled about US$600 billion in 2015. Even with cuts of around $50 billion, America’s defence budget will still be more than that of the next seven countries combined, and about 40 percent of total global military expenditures. Having said all of this, let us agree that the challenges of today are substantially different than those that the US has faced before, and therefore require more complex calculations from US strategists. First, in the years ahead, American strategists will have to take note of much more serious competition than they have faced in the 25 years since the Soviet Union’s collapse. The relative power balance among nations is shifting, and while America seems likely to remain preeminent among nations, the margins of its lead are contracting. Much has been written about ‘China rising,’ but the key point is that China represents a competitor that is different from others that America has faced. Even if China’s economic model (cheap labour = cheap exports = strong growth) appears to be sputtering as President Xi tries to shift the economy from an export-driven one to one driven by domestic demand, we must concede that, unlike the USSR, China is no longer weighed down by a sclerotic command economy. Unlike Japan, it has a population four times that of the US, and can swiftly reallocate resources and labour. The Chinese have thought deeply about their position in the world, and that of the US as well. This came through when I asked a senior Chinese official a couple of years ago to name China’s number one national security concern. Answer: “internal development.” This told me that the Chinese see themselves quite realistically – a key first step to success in the vast transformation that they are attempting. China is just one among the five BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) that are pressing for more influence in organizations like the UN and the IMF. Of course, symbolizing the global diffusion of power is the declining role of the old G7 or G8 in favour of the G20, as well as the recent China-led creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Second, the US will need to work even harder to defend its interests and to build coalitions in the world that is emerging. This is because, as mentioned, the international system is trending toward what might be called a balance of power world – not in the classical conception of equilibrium among a set of relatively equal powers, but more in the sense of power diffusing among countries to the point where the most powerful

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Standing against a pessimistic outlook for US power and influence are a number of factors. First, the US has a strong record for renewal and adaptation.

A major impact of all of this for the US will be in the realm of defence preparedness. For the last decade and a half, the US has had to give priority to fighting counterinsurgencies and to the training, weaponry, and skills appropriate to that type of mission. These requirements will not abate, but with countries like China and Russia operating more assertively and a balance of power world coming into view, the US will also have to hedge against the more traditional threats that are potentially emerging. A further related complication comes from what defence specialists are now calling ‘hybrid warfare’ or ‘grey conflicts.’ It follows that the US will have to supplement conventional military techniques with new tools that are not yet fully developed in order to counter the kind of approaches that Russia has used in Crimea and southeastern Ukraine, or that China has favoured all the way back to the writings of Sun Tzu in the sixth century BC. This type of warfare eschews the frontal confrontations typically associated with conventional war in favour of a shifting mixture of ambiguously designated troops (Russia’s ‘little green men’ in Crimea), psychological warfare, information operations, covert action, deception, special operations, and often plain old lying. This is a hard combination to counter, and one that does not come naturally to open, democratic, pluralist societies like the US, the Commonwealth states, or the US’s European continental allies. But these countries will have to ‘get with the programme,’ as it were, and develop effective countervailing strategies in the coming years. Fourth, the US will have to work with others to establish a consensus on what constitute the norms underlying the global order in this new era – clearly a matter of some dispute. I have heard Russians and Chinese argue that the US itself, with its actions in places such as the Balkans, Iraq and Libya, has been disruptive of that order. Generally, though, the US has operated with some multinational consensus hammered out at the UN or in a regional organization like NATO. By contrast, Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 and its subsequent incursions in the Donbass were carried out unilaterally and without reference to bilateral and multilateral agreements that many see as forming the foundation of European security. These include the 1994 Russia-UK-US Budapest Memorandum on the non-use of force against the territory or independence of Ukraine after it gave up its nuclear weapons; the 1997 bilateral friendship treaty in which Russia and Ukraine agreed to respect each other’s borders; and a host of UN agreements against such violations. For its part, China in the South and East China Seas has operated unilaterally to challenge the existing international consensus on maritime and aviation freedoms. Under international law, states can claim

territorial waters only 12 nautical miles from shore. China flouts that rule by building artificial islands atop coral reefs some 500 miles from the Chinese mainland as part of a strategy to claim some 90 percent of the South China Sea – opposing the claims of at least five other nations, including the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam. China has resisted efforts by those nations to place the issue under international arbitration, although last October, the Philippines finally convinced the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague to take on the dispute. It is expected to deliver a ruling later this year.

eyond such age-old issues, new ones are arising – traceable to phenomena such as climate change. Melting Arctic waters, for example, have heightened controversy among Arctic rights claimants like Canada, Norway, Denmark, the US and Russia (see the Query article by Alexader Sergunin and Valery Konyshev at p. 14). The melting waters are opening up new possibilities for navigation and seabed resource exploration. This gives the US new incentive to finally ratify the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea – a prerequisite for formal claims in the area (see the Nez à Nez debate between David Biette and Jeremi Suri at p. 56). And then there is the challenge to the traditional state system by the advances in the Middle East of ISIS, which has for now erased century-old borders with no certainty as to what will replace them, and indeed as to whether the states most affected – Iraq and Syria – will survive. All of this is exacerbated by the Sunni-Shia conflict – driven by Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia and Shia-majority Iran – that cuts through all of the other conflicts in the region. Particularly in the case of maritime and air practice, the US will not just be defending some abstract principle. Maintaining freedom and security of navigation and flight amounts to defending what many call the ‘global commons’ – on which all nations depend. Until others are ready to pick up more of this burden, many countries will expect the US – particularly its global navy and air force – to continue ensuring these freedoms. Finally, the US must be prepared for the geopolitical turbulence that could come from changes in something that for decades has been the ‘X factor’ in international relations – the global supply of oil. The availability and price of oil has determined the policies of many countries and the character of others. But the world, after decades of shortages or uncertainties about supply, is now experiencing an oil glut. This, as mentioned, has come about due to a combination of factors, including increased US production due to ‘fracking’ technology, conserva-

tion, ‘green’ technologies, and the fact that, with oil prices now at their lowest point in more than a decade, most producers are pumping at record rates to capture market share. For all of these reasons, it is harder, if not impossible, for the big oil producers to push up prices by simply limiting supply as in the past. And these conditions seem likely to persist for the foreseeable future. The precise impact of the oil price collapse on politics is incalculable, but it is hard to imagine that it will not alter the policies, character and politics of countries like Russia, the Gulf states (principally Saudi Arabia), and Venezuela (where the opposition is already benefitting) – countries that depend almost entirely on oil revenues. The US, for its part, is largely insulated from direct impact because of its diversified economy and its emerging status as the world’s largest oil producer. But it will have to adjust to the indirect impacts and, above all, resist any temptation to believe that its energy self-sufficiency permits it to ignore the kind of turbulence that we are now seeing in oil-producing theatres like the Middle East (see the Feature article by Richard Rousseau at p. 44). None of its key allies – particularly in Europe – have the luxury of energy independence, and they will look to the US to lead in ensuring the stability of supply. Once again, then, it is the burden of the leader to protect the ‘global commons.’ To dodge this responsibility would be to forfeit leadership – although, clearly, in a world of rising powers the US should demand a greater degree of burden-sharing than has existed heretofore.

In the end, the things that are likely to determine America’s future strategic margins are not fixed elements like unfortunate geography or resource limitations – for the US remains richly endowed in these respects. Instead, the things that are likely to determine America’s destiny in the world are things that Americans can affect – the quality of America’s governance, the agility of its diplomacy, and the management of its economy. So when it comes to America’s future power and influence – its standing in the world and its status as a leader – the country’s greatest good fortune is simply that these really are in American hands. | GB

The US will have to work with others to establish a consensus on what constitute the norms underlying the global order in this new era – clearly a matter of some dispute.

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Bref, the next 10 years will present unique challenges for US strategists, who will have to deal with a greater level of complexity in all matters than at any time since the years immediately after WW2. The issues rushing toward America will range from those carrying instant danger, such as terrorism and cyber-attacks, to those with longer-range and more controversial implications, such as climate change. So what is to be done by the next US administration to deal with this world? First, work consciously to dispel any impression abroad that the US is reluctant to lead. Unfair as it may be to hold that view, it is ‘out there.’ Erasing it will involve leading others in decisions that incur risk, because none of today’s most pressing international problems has a clear-cut solution. All of the options have downsides. But the lesson of Syria is that failure to make choices amounts to a choice – one that ensures that future options are only more agonizing and complex. Second, recognize that the keys to success in a competitive world of rising powers will be coalition-building and alliance management. There will be more competition than in the past, as shown by China’s brainchild – the aforementioned 57-nation AIIB, an initiative from which the US at present abstains, but which most of

its traditional allies support. This is a rare post-WW2 example of a major, potentially transformational international initiative that was not the creation of the US. It shows that China is turning into a real competitor – and not just on military hardware or economic indices. Third, strive for balance in defence preparedness, ensuring that US forces are able to handle both counterinsurgency and conventional challenges with equal assurance. This will probably require increased defence spending, as others are catching up to the US in certain categories. At the same time, conduct a strategic review aimed at developing countermeasures for the increasingly prevalent reliance on ‘hybrid warfare’ techniques, mainly by conventional adversaries. Fourth, do whatever it takes to overcome the crippling domestic partisanship that suggests to the outside world governmental incompetence that is inconsistent with the US claim to global leadership. Emblematic of such failure is the 2011 budgetary sequestration law (mandating automatic cuts and arbitrary budget caps without regard to strategic needs). This law was passed because legislators could not agree on a budget. The perverse logic was that because the law was so obviously foolish, legislators would be forced to replace it with a sensible compromise. They could not. Only in the last few months have Congress and the Executive come together on some adjustments that provide modest relief for 2016. But in 2017 and 2018, the problem will be back on the table. Fifth, give serious thought to restructuring a national security decision-making process that is now creaking – having been put in place nearly 70 years ago, in very different circumstances. The result is a vastly overburdened White House and National Security Council. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates and others have noted this, calling for “new organizations with a 21st century mindset” to better integrate and apply all aspects of national power. Part of this must be a reinvigorated long-range strategic planning process – a feature that in recent years has been pushed aside by the demands of immediate problems, cramping the national capacity to look three or four moves ahead on the international chessboard.

Ghana’s Energy Paralysis

IN SITU

Short-term pressures make any near-term African transition to renewable energy highly improbable RAYMOND A. ATUGUBA reports from Accra

A Raymond A. Atuguba teaches at the School of Law, University of Ghana, and is Team Leader of the Law and Development Associates (LADA)

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in Accra.

frica is facing a deep energy crisis. From South Africa, across Central and East Africa, through Ghana and Nigeria, to the Horn of Africa, and even northward, industry and homes alike are often short of power. Ghana today has standing power requirements of about 5,000 megawatts. This includes some 2,500 megawatts of ‘suppressed demand’ – that is, people cutting down on power use in anticipation of shortages – as well as Ghanaian exports of power, dictated by national policy, to the country’s neighbours in the 14-country West African Power Pool. With total national generation capacity currently at close to 2,000 megawatts, power outages are frequent. Indeed, ‘dumsor,’ a Ghanaian term used to describe “persistent, irregular and unpredictable electric power outages,” has made it into Wikipedia. Given that Ghana, like other African states, signed up to the climate change commitments in Paris late last year (see Definition at p. 60), Accra is now obliged to develop plans for national implementation. Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama, has also become co-chair of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Advocacy Group – with renewable energy now written into the SDGs. As such, Ghana must at least pretend to take a renewable or green energy agenda seriously, even as its basic energy needs are not being met. And, to be sure, outside donor funding – from the IMF, the World Bank, the UNDP, and various bilateral country donors – may well be impeded if demonstrable national action is not taken in the service of renewable energy. Of course, what Ghanaian politicians and policymakers actually do on a daily basis, in the context of four-year electoral cycles, with young, connected and impatient populations, is grapple with the country’s most pressing ‘micro’ issues – to wit, employment, budget deficits, and, doubtless, power at any cost. Long-term planning on issues relating to climate change and global warming, drought, famine and food security, disease and death are a luxury. Even if a number of long-term plans exist purely on paper, neither the political culture nor the policy mechanisms exist in Ghana for implementation of such plans. The result is superficial acquiescence to the long-term concerns, and aggressive action on short-term pressures like increasing the megawatts. To African leaders, then, making African economies work is the focus, while making them work cleanly is a distant fancy – with everyone fully aware that the quick energy fixes through

diesel and coal displace the only sustainable type of energy (the renewable kind) and threaten to weaken the Ghanaian treasury if aid donors balk. Twenty years ago, in many African countries including Ghana, the World Bank initiated a process of privatizing energy generation, transmission and distribution. Parastatals that were monopolies over all parts of the energy cycle were broken up and turned into limited liability companies. Although formally owned by the state, their legal constitutions, contracting and borrowing powers all became market-oriented. Of course, in today’s Ghana, as in many parts of the world, the renewable and green energy movement is fast gaining momentum. The climate change work done under the aegis of the UN, alongside many other actors, has certainly revitalized this movement. The movement includes a strong non-profit and community element – a marked departure from the prior emphasis on power as a largely private sector concern. Ghana’s renewable energy law clearly recognizes these non-profit and community roles in developing renewable energy, stating: “Energy Commission shall […] create a platform for collaboration between government and the private sector and civil society for the promotion of renewable energy sources.” However, the manifest contradictions between the older market-oriented policy prescriptions of the World Bank and the more recent renewable energy focus of the UN and the green movement more generally have put Ghana into a proper bind. Ghanaian policy-makers can ill afford to ignore any international institution, lest Accra become isolated from the international community and also lose out on billions of dollars in development assistance that it desperately needs to fund its current deficits. So what does Ghana do? Answer: its lawmakers play on the differences in the various prescriptions and use creative legal drafting to ensure policy and operational paralysis in the renewable energy agenda in order to meet more pressing energy imperatives. Consider the transitional provisions of Ghana’s 2011 Renewable Energy Act. Article 53 of the transitional provisions reads: “Until such time that a Renewable Energy Authority is established, the Renewable Energy Directorate under the Ministry of Energy shall (a) oversee the implementation of renewable energy activities in the country; (b) execute renewable energy projects initiated by the State or in which the State has an interest; and (c) manage the assets in the renewable energy sector on behalf of the State.”

PHOTOGRAPH: THE CANADIAN PRESS / AP / CHRISTIAN THOMPSON

and Administrative Justice within six months of the coming into force of the constitution. And yet the Renewable Energy Act of Ghana specifies no timeline whatever for the establishment of the Authority. The result is predictable: five years since the Act came into force, there is still no Renewable Energy Authority in Ghana. Most recently, the new Ministry of Power (created in 2014), which now has authority

for renewable energy, indicated that the processes for establishing the Authority are “ongoing” or “in the pipeline” – Ghanaian euphemisms, as it were, for things that should not be expected anytime soon. In the meantime, Ghana’s energy deficits are pushing Accra to broker deals with China and Brazil for coal-fired power. Bref, real-life political pressures are trumping any green or renewable energy programme. Only the creation – indeed, the activation – of the Renewable Energy Authority that has been created in the Renewable Energy Act can move Ghana to credible action on clean, renewable energy. No amendments to the existing law are necessary. The Minister for Power can, administratively, simply create the Authority and transfer the powers now vested in the Renewable Energy Directorate in the Ministry of Energy to this Authority in his own ministry. (Note that Ghana’s last Minister of Power resigned – because of Ghana’s power misery – in late 2015. The acting Minister is John Abdulai Jinapor.) To be sure, the Authority will require heroic leadership – and leadership that is able to lever international donor assistance and participation – to get anything done in the context of a political culture that is still not willing. But when it is finally created, it should get on with the work of implementing the provisions of the renewable energy law – not as a subsidiary mandate among other mandates, as in the case of the current Directorate, but as a primary mandate. That way, while the short-term focus of Ghana on dirty energy will necessarily continue, the Authority will at least give the country a fighting chance to deliver clean energy in the foreseeable future. | GB

People protest against the power cuts in Accra, Ghana, May 2015.

Ghana’s lawmakers play on the differences in the policy prescriptions and use creative legal drafting to ensure operational paralysis in the renewable energy agenda.

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Embedded in these few lines is a major policy choice of the government – namely, an attempt to stifle renewable energy indefinitely. For one thing, the renewable energy law is not designed to be fully operational. The most critical agency for operationalizing the renewable energy law is the socalled Authority – a body vested with legal, regulatory, financial, administrative, operational and other powers to implement the law. However, by virtue of the said transitional provisions of the law, the Authority does not actually exist, and its functions are instead to be performed by “the Renewable Energy Directorate under the Ministry of Energy.” Of course, it was within the Ministry of Energy that the World Bank originally incubated its energy marketization agenda for Ghana. It follows that as long as this ministry is mandated to implement renewable energy, it will do so within a market model, which currently (and perhaps understandably) prioritizes ‘dirty’ over clean energy. Clearly, the stereotype about African politics and policy-making as being unsophisticated is far from accurate. During the deliberations by Parliament on the provisions of this law, opposition member Kofi Addah, himself a past minister of energy, called for the establishment of a proper Renewable Energy Authority. The call was ignored. The result was an Act of Parliament that does not resemble the vast majority of Ghanaian Acts of Parliament. An Act of Parliament usually begins with the establishment of an authority, board or other agency, proceeds to empower that body, and then charges it with operationalizing a specific mandate. Instead, the Renewable Energy Act of Ghana begins with a number of pious stipulations, without providing for a specific institution that enjoys the relevant powers to implement those provisions. The Act creates a number of mandates and obligations, and proceeds to divide these among a number of competing institutions, including the Energy Commission, the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission and, among others, the Standards Authority. It is certainly not out of the ordinary to legislatively require collaboration between different public agencies in order to advance a particular policy objective, but it is neither common nor particularly wise to do so in the absence of a specified body that is mandated to coordinate all of these efforts in the service of real outcomes. It seems, then, that the Act was actually designed to lay the groundwork for major challenges to practical implementation from the outset. The transitional provisions also guarantee that the renewable energy law will not be implemented anytime soon. In Ghana’s legislative style, matters that are intended to be operational at some definite point in the future are usually expressed as timebound. For example, the national constitution provides for the establishment of critical national institutions such as the Commission on Human Rights

ILLUSTRATION: EDUARDO RECIFE

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The European peace is logically prior to the Middle Eastern one, and it can only be built trilaterally BY IRVIN STUDIN

ussia’s move last fall to begin bombarding Syria in the service of the government of Bashar Al Assad signalled the merger of two of the three major conflict plates in global affairs today – that is, the merger of the Russia-West conflict with the multidimensional conflict resulting from the general collapse of the Middle East order. (The third conflict plate – still not triggered and still very manageable – is the return of China, strategically, economically and psychologically, to the centre of world affairs for the first time since the Opium Wars in the middle of the 19th century.) Alongside considerable track 1.5 work done by our new institute, 21CQ, around the world, in key capitals and at top levels of government, I outlined a possible ‘algorithm’ for resolution of the Russia-West conflict specifically over Ukraine in the Fall 2014 issue of GB (as well as in publications ranging from France’s Le Monde to Russia’s Vedomosti and the Indian Express in New Delhi). That algorithm involved, it is worth recalling, peacekeepers from India (or another neutral Asian country that would be respected by the Russians and Ukrainians alike) in the Donbass, special constitutional status for the Donbass region (in the context of general Ukrainian decentralization) coupled with an indissolubility clause in Ukraine’s revised constitution, formalization of Ukraine’s permanent nonmembership in NATO, and removal of sanctions on Russia not related to Crimea. The algorithm also involved the brokering of a trilateral framework between Brussels, Kiev and Moscow, to which I return later in this piece. Alas, the small window of opportunity for resolution of the Donbass war and the broader problem set within the Ukrainian theatre has now decisively passed. The merger of the Russia-West and Middle East conflicts has put the final nail in the coffin of any possibility of such a ‘local’ algorithm coming to pass. Of course, even before this merger took place last fall, the political and public psychologies in Russia and Ukraine had already hardened away from any such possibility, just as key Western capitals continued to frame the conflict too narrowly and ahistorically to be of any use in pushing Moscow and Kiev to a proper resolution to a tactical conflict before it could become dangerously strategic.

EUROPE 2.0 OR A MARCH TO WAR

Irvin Studin is Editor-in-Chief & Publisher of Global Brief.

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So why are we here, and what can be done now?

he psychological roots of the Russia-West conflict predate the 2014 Ukrainian revolution and also, to be sure, predate the advent to power of Vladimir Putin or his contemporaneous opposite numbers in other countries (see the Feature articles by Fyodor Lukyanov at p. 8 and by John E. McLaughlin at p. 22). Indeed, let me propose that the psychological roots of the conflict lie less in the “end of history” moment in 1991 (when the USSR collapsed) than in the year 1994. What happened in 1994? For Western strategists and intellectuals, that was the year of Rwanda – a massacre of biblical proportions that Western elites vowed would happen “never again,” especially given that, with the end of the Cold War, there was sufficient strategic leisure and fiscal wealth in leading democracies to allow them to participate in the global generalization of the good life. For the Russian strategic and political classes, however, 1994 was Chechnya. Rwanda did not make the top 10 list of important world events that year. Chechnya was about keeping together the territorially massive and ethnically diverse Russian Federation – a brand new state (barely three years old) – in the face of significant centrifugal forces that threatened to tear it apart just as Moscow was trying to fashion a new, post-Soviet legitimacy at the heart of Russian political life. The Rwandan genocide, followed by the Srebrenica massacre a year later, eventually led, through the interposition of the Canada-led International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, to the creation of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, which holds that state sovereignty becomes conditional or is even nullified to the extent that states cannot protect their populations against, or are otherwise parasitic on their populations through the commission of, mass atrocities or genocide. From Oxford to Harvard and the University of Toronto, in leading Western universities in North America and Western Europe, the number of doctorates produced on the strength of dissertations treating different dimensions of the R2P doctrine is today in the upper hundreds or low thousands. Huge numbers of

academic and policy careers have been devoted to the refinement of the doctrine. Question: how many PhDs on R2P have been produced in the leading universities of Russia or indeed much of the former Soviet space (including, of course, Ukraine)? Answer: close to zero. Russia and the West, therefore, are not only speaking completely different languages (Russian versus English), but about entirely different things. Where the West speaks about what it sees as obvious goods in terms of saving lives (who could disagree with this?) or, more maximally, spreading the good life (or democracy, or democratic alliances), the Russians are primarily exercised by the very fragility of their state, surrounding post-Soviet states, and the global security system more generally. Where the West, in seeking to stamp out evil and injustice, aims for perfection in international affairs and governance, the Russians will assert that the path to any such heaven on Earth travels directly through hell in the form of the destabilization of implicit equilibria in world affairs (equilibria that were already largely torpedoed via the collapse of the bipolar world order) and, more dangerously, war between great powers. Indeed, this explains to a large degree why Russian intellectual and political elites hardly took notice of what Western elites presumed was, in R2P, an altogether different, even if embryonically different, set of rules or moral norms in international affairs – that is, that interventions against sovereign states were warranted where large-scale loss of life was threatened or actually happening. For one thing, the outcome document of the 2005 World Summit, approved by the UN General Assembly, devotes only three of 178 articles to the R2P doctrine – namely articles 138, 139 and 140. Moreover, one of those articles explicitly states that any potential military intervention under R2P would, without exemption, require UN Security Council approval – which evidently includes a potential Russian veto. From the Russian perspective, then, even given this general international sanction of the R2P doctrine, nothing remarkable had happened in international affairs. If the Western mind sees a genocide and rightly asserts that this can never happen again, then the Russian retort today is as follows: we can try to prevent or stop it as long as such efforts do not result in a more general war (in which case many more people will die). In the context of the Syria crisis, then, this translates to: there is no ‘life-saving’ moral argument for removing Assad, whatever his crimes (and we speak here of manifestly terrible war crimes), because his removal would lead to even deeper anarchy and more deaths in Syria and the region. The Russian posture is not born of ideology. It is improvisation built on a far more acute sense of

life and death and the consequences of war and revolution than is felt in the West in general, and in North America in particular. It is, as such, not neo-imperial or maximalist, but rather minimalist and survivalist. But it is no less intelligent, and its proponents – lest there be any confusion in this regard – are not by any stretch less astute.

f perfect resolution of any of the merged Middle East and Russia-West conflicts taken separately is impossible in the foreseeable future, then the de minimis goal must remain the same as it is with respect to the China conflict plate – to wit, to avoid at all costs any direct clash between the great powers (between the US/NATO and Russia, between Russia and China, or between China and the US/NATO, or, God forbid, between all three of them). For there will, in the next year, doubtless be more episodes like the Turkey-Russia clash, in the Syrian theatre and beyond, and the prospect of bona fide war between Russia and the West – triggered accidentally or otherwise – is far from negligible in the coming year or two. The coming year will see not only increasing permutations of clashes between outside players in the Middle East theatre (notwithstanding the various Syrian ceasefire and transitional governance frameworks recently hashed out at the Security Council and also in Munich), but also deep systemic uncertainties in Ukraine proper as well as in Russia. None of this bodes well for a general resolution of these conflicts, particularly in the context of a West that, with some exceptions, remains both clumsy and intellectually non-porous in its posture on the conflicts, and a Russia that no longer believes in an exit from its various crises and has emphasized political consolidation as a default national posture from which to prepare for any eventuality. Let me propose the following ‘theses’ in a humble attempt to frame an approach to dealing with these simultaneous conflict theatres – avoiding, as is my wont, morality plays and preoccupations with political personas:

What is eminently reasonable, on the Gorbachev logic, is a long-term trilateral framework between Brussels, Moscow and Kiev to begin to address core interstitial issues ranging from national security to energy and microeconomic regulation of products and markets. Thesis 3: Ukraine cannot succeed, and may not survive, economically without Russian re-engagement. (No amount of Western compensation or interest can make up for Russia’s absence. Period. All Ukrainian elites know this well. So too do Russia’s elites.) For its part, Russia cannot succeed economically without European re-engagement. If the price of oil continues to drop (far from foreordained, of course, on various geopolitical scenarios relating to Middle East stability), then the cost of Russian military engagement in Syria, among many other financial pressures on the Russian state, will act in sharp contradiction with diminishing reserves in the national treasury, and may soon affect

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Thesis 1: There can be no improvement whatever (leave aside any general resolution) in the Middle East theatre, from Syria to Iraq, Libya and Yemen, without a re-stitching of the ties that bind in Europe. In other words, in order to make a dent in West Asia, the Russia-West conflict in Europe proper must be addressed, and deep trust must be rebuilt between Moscow, Washington and other key Western capitals. Bref, Russia-West reconciliation is logically prior to any potential diminishment in the chaos in the Middle East.

Thesis 2: Ukraine and Russia are, by virtue of the Ukrainian revolution and the Crimean annexation, two houses radicalized. They cannot, for the foreseeable future, resolve their differences bilaterally. And the Minsk 2.0 framework, with its Normandy Four format and trilateral contact group, while a significant advance in the reconciliation process, is too narrow a regime for the deeper Russia-West reconciliation posited in Thesis 1. In other words, Ukrainian-Russian reconciliation can only happen in the context of a larger European reconciliatory framework. As mentioned, I have called for a trilateral framework between Brussels, Moscow and Kiev. This trilateral framework, which we might call ‘Europe 2.0,’ should, for reasons explained in Thesis 4, ideally be brokered this year. The framework would build on and subsume the elements of Minsk 2.0 as well as the recent trilateral gas talks between the three capitals to also incorporate: national security, migration, travel (note the highly irrational bilateral air travel bans recently implemented between Kiev and Moscow), food and agriculture, and, among others, manufacturing and heavy industry. I elaborate on this Europe 2.0 framework – its genesis and its content – below.

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the stability of the state. Finally, of course, Europe will continue to suffer economically for the loss of the Russian market – a fact underappreciated in current commentaries on Europe’s economic torpor. More importantly, Russian collapse – including a collapse that could come in the context of eventual succession to the current leadership – or direct conflict between Russia and the West would likely deal a death blow to the EU-28 as we know it today. (Remember that the death of the EU means not only non-resolution of the issue of Russian soft integration with European structures, but also the unleashing of Germany’s historical security dilemmas at its major borders – the central reason for the original Coal and Steel Community.) Thesis 4: The trilateral framework must be brokered in 2016. Why? Ukraine could collapse economically this year. It is already approaching political paralysis. A third Maidan revolution, this year, is not to be excluded. A new American presidency in early 2017 – potentially one more dogmatic in its understanding of the conflict, or one requiring considerable re-education in order to get up to speed – could deprive Europe of the confidence (and unity) that it needs to proceed with such a framework. As for Russia, its internal economic stability will continue to suffer with the price of oil, but its political and psychological hardening away from Europe (a posture far less porous than it was in 2014, when Russia was more open than the West to resolution of the conflict) will continue – in part, also, in anticipation of the 2018 presidential elections. We also do not know what will be the prospects for boycotts of the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia. If there are boycotts, then these will begin to be signalled by different countries in the coming year or so. Such boycotts would only succeed in further pushing Russia psychologically away from Europe, and therefore killing any chances for outside stabilization of the disorder in the Middle East.

he year 2016 will also continue to see ISIS- or Al Qaeda-inspired, directed or affiliated attacks inside and outside of the Middle East. More states, from Lebanon to Saudi Arabia, will be tested in terms of their ability to survive the accelerating collapse of the region. (Any collapse or political or strategic destabilization of Saudi Arabia, of course, would quickly reverse the collapse in the price of oil. See the Feature article by Richard Rousseau at p. 44.) The question is whether this region can be dealt with – or whether its growing chaos can be boxed in, as it were – by a Europe that is operating with common purpose, or whether the unravelling of the Middle East will be mirrored by the growing unravelling of Europe’s stitches. Indeed, as I have written in previous issues of GB, in its most extreme form, a European unravelling that issues

in war between Russia and the West – the said great power war that should be avoided – could see the bombing of European and even North American cities.

Gorbachev’s Third Idea and Fixing the Present Conflict

There can be no improvement whatever (leave aside any general resolution) in the Middle East theatre, from Syria to Iraq, Libya and Yemen, without a re-stitching of the ties that bind in Europe. been planted by the improvised reactions of key countries to the present crisis. The quadrilateral Normandy format Minsk talks between Paris, Berlin, Kiev and Moscow to address the Donbass war and the trilateral gas talks between Brussels, Moscow and Kiev to address Ukrainian and European energy needs are, taken together, today’s equivalent of the six-country European Coal and Steel Community that created the embryo for the far larger and more comprehensive peace in Europe eventually engineered through what has become today’s 28-member EU. The goal now must be to buttress and multiply the tendons and ties that bind, even if the initial centrifugal forces among major players may seem overwhelming. Peace in Europe in our time – and with it, any prospect of peace in the Middle East – will depend on this pioneering work. | GB

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irst and foremost, in order to avoid further escalation and the very real possibility of accidental or deliberate Russian-Western clashes and the multiplication of contested theatres around the world – that is, beyond the former Soviet space and Syria – we must move decisively into a period of new military and civilian confidence-building measures between Moscow and Washington and other leading Western capitals. These should involve very regular and active information and opinion exchanges about military and political plans and capabilities at the highest levels and down through the respective systems, as well as new joint Russian-Western initiatives and exercises in areas of extant cooperation, such as the Arctic. Second, we must revisit the late Cold War period to understand that if perestroika and glasnost lost Gorbachev both the Soviet state and the larger contest with the West, then his other major, albeit less vaunted idea remains apposite for purposes of Russian relations with the West today: if ‘Europe 1.0’ was intended to deal with the German problem in the last century, then Gorbachev’s proposed ‘big Europe’ (let us, as mentioned, call this ‘Europe 2.0’) must be built to reckon with Russian integration or reintegration in this century. To this end, the idea of a reasonably common economic or strategic space – or a space of peace – between Birmingham in the west and Vladivostok in the east is compelling and would address the ‘interstitial’ problem that found Ukraine torn apart by the competing gravities of the EU and the Eurasian Economic Union. For Ukraine is what might be called an ‘interstitial problem’ in modern international affairs. Two regimes or two competing gravities – the EU to the west and the Eurasian Economic Union to the east – pull on a geographic space that is otherwise incapable of resisting (in the case of Ukraine, because of poor governance and weak institutions), resulting in chaos in the contested space and mutual isolation and warfare by other means (for now) between the two regimes. These same gravities, consciously and unconsciously, continue to this day to pull savagely on postrevolutionary Ukraine, which is now all the more weakened by the Donbass war, quasi-bankruptcy, and a vulnerable central government in Kiev.

The Arctic space is another such interstitial theatre that will experience increased contestation by major countries and regimes in the coming decades (see the Query article by Alexander Sergunin and Valery Konyshev at p. 14, and also the Nez à Nez debate between David Biette and Jeremi Suri at p. 56). What’s to be done? Answer: build strong but flexible tendons to bind the regimes across the contested interstitial space. The Gorbachev vision of a ‘big Europe’ or Europe 2.0, on this logic, was meant precisely for such interstitial problems and the broader challenge of soldering Moscow to a more predictable, less anxious geopolitical logic. No one today in Moscow or any European capital (or Washington) is seriously speaking about the absorption of Russia into the EU. This has never been on the table. And it is not being proposed in these pages. But what is eminently reasonable, on the Gorbachev logic, is a long-term trilateral framework between Brussels, Moscow and Kiev to begin to address core interstitial issues ranging from national security to energy and microeconomic regulation of products and markets. The good news is that the seeds of this trilateral framework and an eventual Europe 2.0 have already

La fin de l’espace Schengen?

QUERY

Il faudra rétablir des éléments de souveraineté nationale afin de préserver le projet européen BY MICHAEL BARUTCISKI

Michael Barutciski est rédacteur associé

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de Global Brief.

uite aux attentats de Paris et aux agressions de Cologne, l’Europe rencontre actuellement un tournant décisif dans la mise en œuvre du principe de libre circulation des personnes. Depuis sa signature en 1985, l’accord de Schengen représentait un des symboles les plus importants du projet européen, car il permettait aux voyageurs de traverser sans contrôle les frontières entre États membres. Les échanges transfrontaliers, y compris le commerce et le tourisme, ont été transformés par cette étape importante dans l’évolution post-nationale de l’Europe. Bien qu’admirable du point de vue humanitaire, l’ouverture des frontières au flux massif de demandeurs d’asile annoncée par l’Allemagne à la fin de l’été 2015 est imprudente tant que les problèmes européens concernant le contrôle aux frontières et la gestion des demandes d’asile n’étaient pas résolus. Et quelques mois plus tard, l’Allemagne a renversé sa position. De l’euphorie humanitaire de l’automne dernier, on est passé en ce début de 2016 aux dénonciations de la Lügenpresse. Les médias sont ainsi aujourd’hui accusés d’avoir menti en minimisant les problèmes concernant l’arrivée massive de demandeurs d’asile en 2015. L’ambiance peut rappeler les périodes sombres de l’histoire moderne de l’Europe, et les conséquences risquent d’être dramatiques sur plusieurs aspects du projet européen. Regroupant 22 des 28 membres de l’Union européenne, l’espace Schengen a sans doute contribué au prix Nobel de la paix remporté par celle-ci en 2012. Ce prix a été accordé notamment pour féliciter l’UE d’avoir rapproché les peuples et diminué les pressions nationalistes qui ont mené aux guerres des derniers siècles. En effet, les pays membres ont abandonné un élément clé de la souveraineté nationale en participant à la zone Schengen, où les contrôles aux frontières intérieures devenaient exceptionnels. Il est vrai que plusieurs gouvernements ont suspendu temporairement l’accord en rétablissant des contrôles lors de l’accueil d’événements internationaux ou de menaces terroristes imminentes. Cependant, selon les dernières modifications au code des frontières Schengen apportées il y a deux ans, “[l]a migration et le franchissement des frontières extérieures par un grand nombre de ressortissants de pays tiers ne devraient pas être considérés, en soi, comme une menace pour l’ordre

public ou la sécurité intérieure.” L’Allemagne a pourtant invoqué une telle exception dans sa réponse récente au flux massif de demandeurs d’asile. On pourrait dire qu’une boîte de Pandore a été ouverte et qu’il sera difficile pour l’UE de faire machine arrière. La gestion des mouvements migratoires est plus complexe que ne l’avaient cru les fondateurs du projet européen et une reconceptualisation émergera inévitablement au sein de l’UE. Depuis son entrée en vigueur en 1995, la convention d’application de Schengen a généralement éliminé les contrôles aux frontières intérieures, et instauré un régime de visa commun pour 26 États (quatre signataires ne sont pas membres de l’UE). L’accord de Schengen exige un niveau élevé de confiance entre les signataires, car la responsabilité de vérifier l’identité des ressortissants étrangers retombe sur le premier pays d’entrée dans la zone Schengen. Dès qu’elle est entrée dans cette zone, toute personne peut circuler librement à travers une bonne partie du continent européen. Si de nombreux pays européens étaient prêts à abandonner leur souveraineté nationale sur de tels sujets sensibles il y a un quart de siècle, la situation a changé ces dernières années, comme en témoigne la crise de la zone euro. La performance économique relativement faible, la montée des partis nationalistes, et surtout l’afflux massif des demandeurs d’asile ont incité plusieurs gouvernements et partis politiques à exiger la révision de Schengen. Certains proposent même l’abandon de l’accord.

fin de préserver l’intégrité du système, les frontières extérieures de la zone Schengen doivent être contrôlées et sécurisées. Dès que certains membres limitrophes comme la Grèce ou l’Italie ne pouvaient plus contrôler l’afflux de boat people à travers la Méditerranée, il devient clair que le système est déstabilisé. De plus, lorsque les autorités grecques et italiennes ont commencé à diriger les flux de demandeurs d’asile vers leurs voisins européens, on a constaté que le système ne fonctionnait plus. Si les contrôles migratoires dépendent d’une coopération multilatérale, la politique commune envers cette catégorie compliquée de migrants (i.e. les demandeurs d’asile) devient cruciale. Après tout, si l’UE a décidé d’ériger son projet continental sur une vision idéaliste des droits humains, comme

Au risque de paraître hypocrites, la Commission et l’Allemagne devront accepter dorénavant que Bruxelles ne contrôlera pas complètement la procédure qui détermine quand et comment les membres pourront rétablir les contrôles aux frontières.

PHOTOGRAPHIE: LA PRESSE CANADIENNE / AP / BORIS GRDANOSKI

par des filières clandestines pour atteindre leur Eldorado au nord de l’Europe (Allemagne, Suède, etc.). Compte tenu des contrôles frontaliers théoriquement absents entre pays membres de l’espace Schengen, la crise actuelle en Europe démontre comment il est difficile de gérer les mouvements migratoires en s’appuyant sur une vision idéaliste de la liberté de circulation. La Cour européenne des droits de l’homme est submergée par les problèmes d’asile depuis des années. Ces défauts de fonctionnement, conceptuels et structurels, étaient visibles dès l’adoption de la

Une réfugiée aide un enfant à mettre de nouvelles chaussures dans un centre de transit à Tabanovce, village du nord de la Macédoine situé sur la frontière serbe (février 2016).

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en témoigne l’appareil juridique imposant autour de la Cour européenne des droits de l’homme à Strasbourg, elle devait articuler une réponse adéquate à la possibilité que de nombreux migrants allaient se présenter aux frontières en invoquant la protection contre la persécution dans leur pays d’origine. La réponse aux complications qui accompagnent ces demandes se trouve dans le système Dublin, qui attribue les responsabilités pour le traitement des demandes d’asile au premier pays par lequel le demandeur est entré dans l’UE (dans la plupart des cas). Non seulement un tel système renvoie l’essentiel des obligations aux membres limitrophes comme la Grèce et l’Italie, mais il présume que la détermination du point d’entrée est facile, ce qui n’est pas toujours le cas avec des migrants prêts à passer

Convention de Dublin en 1990, et des tensions interétatiques similaires à celles d’aujourd’hui se sont manifestées tout au long des différentes crises de réfugiés depuis la fin de la Guerre froide. La différence avec la crise actuelle demeure néanmoins importante: les crises migratoires précédentes n’impliquaient pas un si grand nombre de migrants, venus principalement d’autres continents. Au lieu d’atténuer les problèmes potentiels de nature identitaire ou culturelle, l’élite politique de Bruxelles a restreint les éléments clés de la souveraineté nationale qui accordaient une porte de sortie en cas d’urgence. Avec les dernières révisions au code des frontières Schengen, les conditions dans lesquelles les membres pouvaient invoquer une exception sécuritaire pour rétablir les contrôles frontaliers ont été restreintes de manière excessive. Quand la France et le Danemark ont essayé il y a cinq ans de rétablir les contrôles aux frontières suite au Printemps arabe, la Commission a réagi vivement en critiquant ces deux membres. Les restrictions mentionnées ci-dessus ont alors été adoptées pour appuyer cette critique. Aujourd’hui la

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Cette retenue sera néanmoins difficile pour l’idéologie dominante à Bruxelles, selon laquelle le projet européen vise essentiellement à supprimer les nationalismes.

nouvelle position de l’Allemagne risque de mettre en lumière une certaine hypocrisie. Ayant créé une structure fondée sur une vision profondément libérale des migrations, il était prévisible que Bruxelles allait critiquer les pays dissidents lors des tentatives en 2015 d’introduire un partage du fardeau obligatoire. L’impression caricaturale laissée par l’Europe progressiste est que les «vieilles» démocraties occidentales voulaient aider les réfugiés tandis que les anciens pays communistes avaient peur de la diversité et s’intéressaient seulement aux fonds octroyés par l’UE. Comme en témoignent les événements du Nouvel An à Cologne, la réalité est plus compliquée. Lors de ma visite à Lampedusa pour GB il y a deux ans, l’Allemagne était parmi les nombreux pays riches de l’Europe qui refusaient de partager le fardeau avec l’Italie, laquelle se retrouvait en première ligne de l’afflux (voir mon article Feature dans le numéro d’hiver/printemps 2014 de GB). N’oublions pas que la politique allemande de «portes ouvertes» en vigueur pour une partie de 2015, présentée comme

humanitaire et courageuse, a changé vers la fin de l’année quand les pays voisins ont laissé un million de demandeurs d’asile traverser leur territoire pour atteindre l’Allemagne. Les agressions à Cologne ont contribué par la suite à transformer radicalement la position allemande, ce qui poussera l’approche européenne vers un durcissement sévère. Malheureusement les xénophobes ont trouvé le prétexte qu’ils cherchaient afin de réorienter la politique générale envers les étrangers.

ans un contexte démocratique où les populations européennes s’orientent vers des positions plus souverainistes, la solution se trouve dans un nouvel encadrement du rétablissement limité des contrôles aux frontières. Il est peu probable que la pratique commerciale entre Européens puisse tolérer l’abandon de Schengen ou le retour aux contrôles frontaliers d’une époque moins mondialisée. Cependant, la crise actuelle est grave et elle nécessitera des gestes concrets afin de ne pas aggraver les tensions qui contribuent à fragiliser l’UE. Il faudra notamment introduire de nouvelles révisions au code des frontières Schengen afin de renforcer la souveraineté nationale quand les membres sont menacés par des mouvements migratoires qu’ils n’arrivent pas à contrôler. Contrairement aux révisions adoptées il y a deux ans, ces nouvelles mesures devraient permettre explicitement le rétablissement unilatéral des contrôles aux frontières intérieures en cas d’afflux massif de migrants. L’évolution de la position allemande modifie la situation diplomatique concernant ce sujet délicat. Au risque de paraître hypocrites, la Commission et l’Allemagne devront accepter dorénavant que Bruxelles ne contrôlera pas complètement la procédure qui détermine quand et comment les membres pourront rétablir les contrôles aux frontières. De manière plus générale, au cours des prochaines années l’UE devra rassurer les populations à travers le continent qu’elles préservent des aspects de souveraineté nationale sur certaines questions sensibles. Cette retenue sera néanmoins difficile pour l’idéologie dominante à Bruxelles, selon laquelle le projet européen vise essentiellement à supprimer les nationalismes. Contrairement aux déclarations de certains leaders qui crient au loup, il ne s’agit pas de la fermeture des frontières ni de la fin de Schengen, mais simplement d’un ajustement afin d’accorder davantage de flexibilité aux gouvernements qui considèrent que leur sécurité nationale est menacée. La réintroduction de certains contrôles limités aux frontières représente un compromis raisonnable pour rassurer les populations, ainsi permettant le commerce et les échanges de ne pas être affectés dramatiquement par la crise de confiance qui règne en Europe. | GB

IN THE CABINET ROOM

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ILLUSTRATION: DUSAN PETRICIC

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TÊTE À TÊTE

Strategic Space-Time, from Tokyo to UNHQ GB speaks with one of the world’s gentleman-geokrats Interview with DAVID MALONE

GB: What are the major strategic priorities for Japan today? DM: There are a number of strategic priorities. First of all, the economy has been fairly flat, with minor variations for the last 25 years. In 2012, the incoming prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who is still prime minister today – a longevity that is not all that common in Japanese politics – articulated a plan that came to be known as Abenomics to try to reflate the economy. The results have been mixed: there are some good signs and some discouraging PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF DAVID MALONE

signs. Within Japan, if you went out on the street and asked people, they would say that by far the most important national issue is the economy. Beyond that, if you spoke to people who are particularly interested in international relations, the rapid shifts in global power and influence have been both exciting and also unsettling for Japan, as the country had for so long been used to being the clear number two in global economic weight. To now be number three after China or, in terms of purchasing power parity, even number four – behind China, the US and India – is something new to which the country will have to adjust. This adjustment or repositioning is not easy, because the population is gently shrinking and ageing. Japan has a comfort zone built on a very secure and well-organized domestic society. Its challenges likely call for more global engagement, and perhaps even greater flows of non-Japanese people into the country than those with which most Japanese are currently comfortable. The rise or return of China has, by global and historical standards, happened extremely fast and suddenly – especially since it has happened not through military conquest but rather through economic engineering. The speed and intensity of this Chinese economic emergence have taken Japan, like many others countries, including the US, somewhat by surprise. Of course, the Chinese, like the South Koreans, owe a great deal of their success to some of the approaches that Japan took a few decades ago. GB: What is the current state of the Japan-China bilateral relationship?

GB: What is the state of the evolution in Japanese thinking about the military instrument? DM: First of all, the strong attachment of the Japanese population is to peace, writ large, and also to

David Malone is Rector of the United Nations University in Tokyo, past president of the International Development Research Centre (Ottawa), and past president of the International Peace Academy/Institute (New York City).

In market-oriented democracies, politicians cannot make business happen. It is business that makes business happen. And Japanese businesses seem to find the wide world of India somewhat unnerving, scary, noisy, chaotic, and occasionally violent – all things that the Japanese do not particularly cultivate in Japan. GB: What is the current state of relations between Tokyo and New Delhi (see the In Situ article by Ramaswamy Sudarshan at p. 6)? DM: That relationship is a paradox. On the surface, it is going all guns blazing, in the positive sense of the expression. Prime Minister Abe and Prime Minister Modi have been political friends for many years. When Modi was elected, the relationship went into very high gear at the political level. On the other hand, the economic relationship is very disappointing. There are several Japanese success stories in India. Maruti Suzuki would be one of them (see the One Pager by Alan Middleton at p. 5). But overall, it has been very disappointing. About one percent of India’s trade is with Japan and vice versa, which is extraordinary when you think that these are among the largest economies in the world.

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DM: It is actually much improved at this point. There was a point where the leaderships were not speaking to each other, but that has come to an end. Multilateral diplomacy is extremely useful. The Chinese hosted the APEC summit in Beijing in 2014. Prime Minister Abe attended and it effectively forced an exchange between him and Xi Jingping. From that exchange flowed a much better sense of connection, and a number of agreements are being discussed once again. In the West, it may be fashionable to think of multilateral meetings as useless talk shops. In fact, when you live in an occasionally tense part of the world, nothing is less useless than talking. It is not talking that is useless.

an absolute ban, or to as absolute a ban as possible, on nuclear weapons – having been the only country to date to suffer a nuclear attack on its soil. This general posture remains very, very strong in Japan. Of course, you can have a strong military and peace at the same time. Japan actually does have a very sizeable, well-trained military, but it is dedicated to self-defence and a bit of peacekeeping for the UN. That is the way that most Japanese would like to keep it, even if there is also a realization that the world is a different place, and that Japan may need to use its military, at times, in the company of others to uphold the values that the Japanese hold dear. To be sure, this is new thinking for Japan, and it is uncomfortable for many. The Japanese have barely got used to the idea of UN peacekeeping, so the idea of other uses of the Japanese military can be disquieting. Other than Canada and perhaps Australia, Japan has the most cast-iron military alliance with the US. So its bedrock defence requirements are, in fact, met by its own forces, but only in conjunction with those of the US.

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What is interesting in the election for Ban Ki-moon’s successor is how many women are in the race. Most of them are not yet formally supported by their government, but the names of at least 10 or 11 very competent women are the corridor talk in New York today.

The relationship is expanding in areas like naval cooperation. It is expanding in terms of geostrategic dialogue. Once again, however, the economic relationship is hardly expanding at all, and that is where Modi and Abe have been trying to exercise a lot of leadership. Of course, in market-oriented democracies, politicians cannot make business happen. It is business that makes business happen. And Japanese businesses seem to find the wide world of India somewhat unnerving, scary, noisy, chaotic, and occasionally violent – all things that the Japanese do not particularly cultivate in Japan. The Indians, for their part, are being courted from all sides. Everyone, from China to Russia and the US, wants to do business with India. The guest of honour at the recent Republic Day parade in India was François Hollande. The French are very keen on the military procurement deal involving Rafale aircraft. And President Obama has been to India several times. GB: Would you agree that India’s economic and strategic emergence has been nowhere near as dynamic or impressive as that of China? DM: Absolutely. GB: What are the key sources of India’s emergence? DM: Ten years after Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in China, India, at the end of the Cold War, in the wake of a classical balance of payments crisis, introduced a degree of economic liberalization that, while not nearly as radical as anything that Deng Xiaoping had done, was enough to unleash growth rates that, some 10 years later, hovered anywhere between seven and nine percent. The growth rates are slightly lower now because of the global slowdown. They are just above seven percent. But that is still quite good when you are looking at the world from Europe. Another consideration is that India is a continentscaled country, and one that will soon have the world’s largest population – and a young population at that. Many people oversimplify India. There are still many challenges to doing business with India, but there is a lot of money to be made there – there is no doubt about that. If the government liberalizes further, Indian growth will accelerate happily in the years to come. It needs to do so because there are still hundreds of millions of ultra-poor people in India who deserve better. GB: What about strategic thinking in India? Is it not also significantly behind Chinese strategic thinking? DM: India’s geostrategic outlook is certainly one of global engagement at this point. Modi had been expected to be a very effective politician domestically,

and not particularly effective internationally. And yet if one is to caricature his prime ministership to date, one might say that he has been tremendously successful internationally and has yet to prove himself domestically. He has been engaging all over the world. He is a great traveller, like Abe in Japan. Both have a posture of generalized engagement. GB: What about Japanese-Russian relations since 2014 (see the Feature article by Fyodor Lukyanov at p. 8)? DM: Of course, 2014 was a difficult year for JapaneseRussian relations because Japan joined its Western partners, and in some cases allies, in condemning the Russian annexation of Crimea and in putting off some state visits in both directions. However, the reality is that both President Putin and Prime Minister Abe would like to build a more positive relationship. Both countries have longstanding territorial disputes stemming from WW2. There is a sense out of Moscow that the Russians are more open to discussing and settling these disputes than they have been in the past. That is music to Japanese ears, as these disputes have been an irritant in the bilateral relationship. In any event, these are countries that deal with each other a lot. Siberia hangs over all of East Asia, and North Korea is of concern, in different ways, to both Russia and Japan. So the overall relationship is on a bit of an upswing. President Putin should be coming to Japan soon with the expectation of serious discussions not just about the usual trade and investment issues, but also about the island disputes. GB: How are the UN system and international institutions absorbing the strategic expansion of Asia? DM: There are several ways of thinking about the multilateral system today. A very large component of the system is economic- or development-oriented – one way or another. Very little of it is actually geostrategic in nature or function. The geostrategic parts of it, including the UN Security Council, are surprised to find themselves once again experiencing great power rivalries after a period of great comity in the post-Cold War era. That is a bit unsettling. These rivalries come to the fore in crises like Crimea, Syria, and even Libya. Again, this is unnerving because, by and large, the great powers had been getting on quite well for 22 or 23 years. The new tension is therefore unwelcome, even though these great powers often unite – for instance, in trying to solve conflicts in Africa, where the Security Council continues to work mostly consensually. But when you think of the economic and development system of the multilateral world, it is, of course, stressed by change – and some of it excellent

change. The developing world has been advancing in Africa with quite robust growth rates (see the In Situ article by Raymond A. Atuguba at p. 28), in Asia with generally robust growth rates, and also in Latin America with a great deal of very interesting social development – although Latin American economic growth is less impressive (see Cabinet Room at p. 49). The crisis of 2008 is still reverberating. The US is recovering. In due course, it will pull Canada along – given all of Canada’s short-term economic problems, having, as usual, allowed itself to become over-reliant on commodities (see the Tête à Tête interview with Andrew Coyne at p. 18). But Europe is in a deep funk, and the bedrock of the multilateral development system has been European money. A great deal of the European money that used to flow through the World Bank, through the regional development banks, and through the UN in a variety of ways for development purposes is now being rechannelled to refugee resettlement. An admirable country like Denmark has today available for development purposes about a third of the money that it did three years ago. This is a clear snapshot of how Europe has had to reorganize its spending, and how much of it has been done to the detriment of development funding. GB: What do you think about the future of Security Council reform? What is the view from Japan today? What is the Indian position?

PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF DAVID MALONE

GB: What should be the qualities of the next UN Secretary General? What are the top three or four challenges or priorities for that person? DM: What is interesting in the election for Ban Ki-moon’s successor is how many women are in the race. Most of them are not yet formally supported by their government, but the names of at least 10 or 11 very competent women are the corridor talk in New York today. A very competent man, Antonio Guterres, just received the support of his government. Until recently, he was High Commissioner for Refugees and also a very successful politician in Portugal. But what was funny about this, in a way, was how surprising it was to hear about a man in the context of a competition that has been all about women thus far. There is a sense that, just as Canada’s new prime minister declared “Because it’s 2015” in respect of having a gender-balanced cabinet, it really is high time that the UN had more gender balance. There is no better way of demonstrating this than having a woman as Secretary General. If you think of the successful Secretaries General – leaving Ban Ki-moon aside, as he has not yet finished his term – the two most successful ones, in my judgement, were Dag Hammarskjold and Kofi Annan. And two people less like each other than Dag Hammarskjold and Kofi Annan I cannot imagine. So I do not think that there is a fixed set of qualities for a great Secretary General, but I do think that the UN today needs a Secretary General who has natural authority and huge communications abilities – as Kofi Annan had with publics around the world. It needs to be someone with a very serious grasp of international relations and the fast-evolving geostrategic and economic circumstances of our world. (continued) For the rest of the interview with David Malone,

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DM: About 12 years ago, four countries – Brazil, India, Germany and Japan – banded together to try to convince the UN membership to create permanent seats with vetoes for them. The world has changed a lot since then. Germany is clearly the strongest country within Europe, even though the UK and France sit on the Security Council. Merkel is so powerful that she does not need to sit on the Security Council. Brazil, for its part, is going through a rough patch at the moment, but will re-emerge as the strongest and largest country in Latin America. India, as mentioned, is ramping up its game very significantly. Japan, on the other hand, has continued, broadly, stagnating in economic terms, although playing a more kinetic role in its foreign policy. The membership of the UN in 2005 did not accept the aforementioned plan, which included a couple of permanent seats for Africa. The plan did not name the African countries because there was no consensus on this in Africa. If anything, though, there is even more resistance today among the wider UN membership to the overhauling of the membership of the Security Council and also to the veto. What might happen in the future is the creation of semi-permanent seats that countries like Japan and Brazil would occupy. They would have longer terms. For instance, countries could be immediately

re-elected, which is not the case today. But I am very skeptical that more vetoes will be created. And if permanent seats are created, I am quite certain that they will not have vetoes, which will evidently make them second-class permanent seats relative to the existing permanent five. So that is where we are at present. This has left the four aspirant countries frustrated. While the permanent five say that they are perfectly open to Security Council reform, not one of them has lifted a finger to make it happen.

visit the GB website at: www.globalbrief.ca

Les réajustements financiers et fiscaux qui s’en suivront risquent de révéler la nature et le fonctionnement réels des monarchies pétrolières. PAR RICHARD ROUSSEAU

LE QUATRIÈME CHOC PÉTROLIER ET LE DESTIN DES ÉTATS DU GOLFE

Richard Rousseau est professeur associé de science politique à l’American University of Ras Al Khaimah,

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États arabes unis.

a forte chute du cours du pétrole à partir de la deuxième moitié de 2014 fut conditionnée par plusieurs facteurs, mais principalement par la baisse brutale de la demande d’énergie en Chine et la hausse rapide des volumes de production de plus en plus dissociée de la demande mondiale. Après avoir atteint 115 USD le baril en juin 2014, le prix du baril de brut Brent se situait autour de 30 USD au mois de février 2016. Cette longue période de faiblesse relative du prix du pétrole a entraîné un léger changement de cap dans les États du Golfe persique, dont une part élevée de leurs revenus provient de leurs exportations d’hydrocarbures. Dans un premier temps, les gouvernements régionaux se sont empressés de rassurer leurs populations en diffusant le message que les programmes d’infrastructures et les bénéfices sociaux ne seraient pas affectés par la baisse des revenus pétroliers. Cependant, voyant que le prix allait rester à de bas niveaux sur une période plus longue qu’originellement anticipée, il est rapidement devenu clair pour les pays de la péninsule arabique que ces engagements seraient de plus en plus difficiles à respecter. Cette nouvelle donne signifie que les pays du Conseil de coopération du Golfe (CCG) doivent formuler rapidement des stratégies de développement à long terme qui sont claires et réalistes. Celles-ci doivent s’occuper des questions ayant trait aux subventions gouvernementales et à la dépendance aux exportations des hydrocarbures comme source quasi unique de revenus pour les États membres. Afin de maintenir ses dépenses, l’Arabie saoudite, par exemple, pige dans ses réserves de devises étrangères pour contrer l’effet de la chute du prix du pétrole sur le marché mondial, une politique insoutenable à moyen et à long terme. Même si les réserves de change du Royaume saoudien (environ 635 milliards USD) sont suffisantes pour permettre au gouvernement de passer au travers d’une longue période de prix faible, il n’en reste pas moins que de nouvelles sources alternatives de revenus doivent être explorées, et ce, pour deux raisons fondamentales. D’abord, l’Arabie saoudite puise actuellement dans ses réserves de change à un rythme sans précédent depuis les 50 dernières années. Ces réserves ont fondu de 88 milliards USD en 2015. Deuxièmement, Riyad a confirmé à plusieurs reprises son engagement à mettre en chantier de grands projets d’infrastructure. Ibrahim Al Assaf, ministre des Finances, a annoncé en mai 2015 que le gouvernement saoudien avait près de 2 600 projets sur les rails, dont le coût total est estimé à 50 milliards USD. Il a également souligné que le budget déposé le 1er janvier 2016 avait comme principal objectif de remettre la croissance économique entre les mains du secteur privé – à savoir l’immobilier,

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ILLUSTRATION: GARY ALPHONSO

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la construction, le tourisme et la finance. Voilà de nobles intentions qui permettront au Royaume de réduire sa dépendance à l’égard des hydrocarbures pour générer des emplois et de ses réserves de devises étrangères pour équilibrer son budget. Cependant, d’autres mesures devront être prises pour accroître les recettes publiques, stimuler la croissance économique et augmenter la participation du secteur privé. En juin 2015, le marché de la bourse des valeurs mobilières de Riyad (Tadawul) fut ouvert aux «investisseurs étrangers habilités», à savoir des banques, des maisons de courtage, des fonds d’investissement et des compagnies d’assurances, qui ont au moins 18,75 milliards de riyals (cinq milliards USD) d’actifs sous gestion. Les investisseurs étrangers pourront contrôler un maximum de cinq pour cent du capital d’une société. L’Arabie saoudite a même annoncé, début janvier 2016, qu’elle étudiait la possibilité de faire entrer en bourse le géant pétrolier Aramco, source principale de revenus du pays. Cette option, inimaginable il y a peu, s’explique par la baisse subite des rentrées en devises provoquée par la dégringolade des prix du pétrole. Riyad espère que ces mesures, certaines encore à l’état d’ébauche, vont entraîner un afflux de capitaux extérieurs, ces derniers suscitant à leur tour une stimulation de l’économie nationale. Les dirigeants saoudiens semblent finalement comprendre que de tels changements représentent des sources de revenus durables et une possibilité de croissance économique à long terme. Ce sont des sources plus efficaces que le recours ponctuel aux réserves de change pour colmater les déficits budgétaires et préserver les emplois. La situation budgétaire est plus pressante à Bahreïn et à Oman en raison de leurs ressources pétrolières plus limitées en comparaison avec les autres pays du Golfe. Dans la première moitié de 2015, les sociétés de notation financière Standard & Poor’s et Moody’s ont revu à la baisse leurs prévisions économiques concernant ces deux pays. La chute des prix du pétrole fut invoquée pour justifier cette décision. Afin d’appuyer des projets de développement dans ces deux pays et en réaction aux troubles sociaux qui ont balayé l’Égypte, la Libye, le Yémen

et la Syrie au début de 2011, le CCG a promis, en 2011, 10 milliards USD d’investissements en infrastructures à Bahreïn et Oman respectivement. Une partie importante de cet argent fut investie dans la construction de nouveaux logements dont les deux pays ont des besoins criants. Néanmoins, comme dans le cas de l’Arabie saoudite, de nouvelles sources de recettes internes doivent être créées. Après de récentes consultations avec Oman, le Fonds monétaire international (FMI) a publié un rapport exhortant le pays à contrôler la croissance des dépenses publiques et à diversifier ses sources de revenus non pétroliers. Le rapport souligne la nécessité d’alléger le fardeau pesant sur le principal créateur d’emplois dans le pays, à savoir le gouvernement. Comme dans tous les autres pays du Golfe, la sécurité d’emploi, un salaire élevé et des bénéfices sociaux avantageux sont des facteurs qui attirent inévitablement les Omanais vers les emplois du secteur public. Cette tendance fait peser une énorme pression sur le budget du gouvernement, qui se place dans la situation difficile d’embaucher un flux croissant de nouveaux diplômés. L’élaboration d’un plan à long terme est donc nécessaire afin d’encourager les jeunes Omanais à se tourner davantage vers des emplois comparables dans le secteur privé. À Bahreïn, la lenteur de la préparation d’un nouveau régime fiscal freine le progrès vers l’assainissement des finances publiques – réduction des déficits et de l’accumulation de la dette. Un fossé s’est creusé entre le ministère des Finances et le Conseil des représentants sur des questions cruciales concernant notamment la dette publique et les subventions gouvernementales. La situation est aggravée par le sentiment d’urgence suscité par les faibles prix du pétrole, étant donné que 88 pour cent des recettes étatiques proviennent de la vente du pétrole. L’engagement du gouvernement par rapport à la réalisation de grands projets, pris avant le début de la descente des prix du pétrole, se retrouve à nouveau dans le budget pour l’exercice biennal 2015-2016. Pour l’année 2015, près de 12 pour cent du budget fut consacré à ces projets. Parmi ceux-ci, le logement reste une priorité absolue pour 2016, et son financement proviendra du budget de l’État et du fonds autorisé par le CCG. Compte tenu de l’envergure de ces projets, certains postes de dépenses devront être réduits, voire même supprimés, pour atteindre l’équilibre fiscal. Voilà où la réforme des subventions entre en jeu. En avril 2015, Manama a pris la décision d’augmenter le prix de vente du gaz naturel à des fins commerciales de 0,25 pour chaque million de BTU (unités thermiques britanniques). Le plan gouvernemental vise à hausser de 0,25 USD pour chaque million de BTU les cours du gaz naturel jusqu’à ce qu’ils atteignent quatre USD en 2021.

sus de diversification qui est déjà en place. Cette diversification doit être élargie et doit inclure tous les secteurs commerciaux et industriels ayant le plus fort potentiel de croissance. Les sept émirats investissent massivement dans le tourisme et les autres secteurs tertiaires (services, import-export, transport aérien), alors que les émirats d’Abu Dhabi, de Dubaï et de Sharjah tentent d’attirer les banques privées internationales, ainsi que les étudiants étrangers en offrant une gamme variée de programmes d’études supérieures en collaboration avec New York University et l’Université de Paris IV Sorbonne (Abu Dhabi), Dubai Knowledge Village et American University of Sharjah. Cependant, les efforts déployés par Abu Dhabi pour élargir la base commerciale et industrielle du pays doivent être plus soutenus, car les nouvelles possibilités d’emplois pour les jeunes Émiratis en dépendent. Au Koweït, même si le prix d’équilibre fiscal est assez bas, se situant à 50 USD le baril, la croissance économique passe par des réformes majeures dans l’administration, des investissements dans les infrastructures et l’amélioration de l’environnement des affaires. Ce prix faible couvrant les dépenses publiques est révélateur d’une économie insuffisamment diversifiée et d’un niveau de dépenses publiques trop modéré. Durant les 16 dernières années, profitant de la hausse régulière des prix du pétrole, le Koweït avait pu afficher un surplus budgétaire. Toutefois, en août 2015 le Parlement koweïtien prévoyait un déficit budgétaire de 27 milliards USD en raison de la chute des prix du pétrole. Ces prévisions devront encore être révisées depuis que le baril de Brent est tombé sous la barre des 30 USD. Le budget de 2015-2016 prévoit également une baisse de près de 18 pour cent des dépenses publiques par rapport au budget précédent.

usqu’en 2015, les hydrocarbures contribuaient environ 90 pour cent des revenus de l’État koweïtien. Au dernier trimestre de 2015, ils avaient chuté à 42,8 pour cent, soit 38,8 milliards USD. Les coupures dans les dépenses publiques, qui n’affecteront pas les salaires des employés de l’État, les services publics et les projets de développement, auront en fait un impact plus prononcé que prévu en raison d’un processus bureaucratique long, lourd et complexe, ce qui augmentera nécessairement les coûts d’opérations. Par conséquent, l’objectif prioritaire de l’État koweïtien devrait être la définition d’une approche plus unifiée pour identifier les projets d’investissement les plus intéressants. Il conviendrait de mettre l’accent sur une délimitation claire et détaillée des rôles et des responsabilités des diverses entités gouvernementales afin d’assurer que les projets

Même si les réserves de change du Royaume saoudien (environ 635 milliards USD) sont suffisantes pour permettre au gouvernement de passer au travers d’une longue période de prix faible, il n’en reste pas moins que de nouvelles sources alternatives de revenus doivent être explorées.

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Cette politique fut majoritairement bien accueillie par les Bahreïnis. Par contre, la suppression progressive des subventions au secteur de la viande fut largement critiquée. Bahreïn a pour tâche délicate d’identifier les postes de son budget susceptibles d’être comprimés ou maintenus. Au Qatar, les dépenses à grande échelle sont nécessaires car le pays est engagé dans plusieurs mégaprojets, au nombre desquels la Coupe du monde de la FIFA de 2022. Deux projets de construction d’usine pétrochimique ont tout de même été mis en veilleuse à la fin de 2014. En décembre 2015, un rapport du ministère de la Planification et des Statistiques indiquait que la croissance économique était revue à la baisse pour l’année 2015, passant de 7,3 pour cent à 3,7 pour cent. Néanmoins, le même rapport prévoyait un excédent budgétaire de 1,7 pour cent du PIB, soit environ 3,7 milliards USD en baisse sur la prévision de juin 2015, qui se situaient à huit milliards USD. Les revenus tirés de la vente d’hydrocarbure seront nettement en baisse en 2016, dû évidemment à la spirale vers le bas des prix du pétrole et du gaz, si bien que le ministère s’attend à un déficit budgétaire de 4,8 pour cent du PIB. Cela n’empêchera pas le Qatar de poursuivre son ambitieux programme d’investissement pour la période 2014-2018, laquelle verra la somme de 182 milliards USD dépensée dans les secteurs non liés aux hydrocarbures. Selon le ministère des Finances, une part importante de ces dépenses ira aux secteurs de la santé, de l’éducation, des infrastructures et du transport, ainsi qu’aux projets liés à la Coupe du Monde. Les déclarations officielles du ministère assurent les Qataris et les investisseurs étrangers que si les prix du pétrole chutent en-dessous de 65 USD le baril, comme c’est le cas maintenant, le gouvernement utilisera ses réserves de change pour respecter son engagement à l’égard de la population en matière de santé, d’éducation et de développement économique. Toutefois, les dirigeants qataris doivent garder à l’esprit qu’une stratégie à long terme – c’està-dire plus de cinq ou 10 ans – est essentielle s’ils désirent vraiment élargir les secteurs non pétroliers. Même si les Émirats arabes unis (EAU) sont le pays qui a investi le plus dans ses infrastructures comme les routes et autoroutes, les hôpitaux, les écoles, les centres commerciaux et les complexes hôteliers de luxe, la dépendance du gouvernement aux hydrocarbures comme source de revenus demeure toujours trop élevée. Les recettes du pétrole et du gaz représentent deux tiers des recettes totales d’exportation. Ce ratio est insoutenable à long terme, surtout si la période actuelle de faibles prix du pétrole se prolonge sur plusieurs années, comme le prédisent plusieurs spécialistes. La solution, et les dirigeants des Émirats l’ont compris bien avant leurs voisins, est d’accélérer le proces-

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L’objectif prioritaire de l’État koweïtien devrait être la définition d’une approche plus unifiée pour identifier les projets d’investissement les plus intéressants.

se concrétisent dans les échéances prévues. Bref, depuis l’apparition de la «pétro-politique» et des «pétro-dollars», le monde arabe vit dans une stagnation sociale et politique. Pendant des décennies, trop de pays arabes ont choisi de concentrer leurs «énergies» dans l’extraction de l’«or noir» plutôt que sur l’amélioration des capacités créatives et intellectuelles et sur l’esprit d’entreprise des hommes et des femmes arabes. Dans cette optique, un rapport de l’Arab Thought Foundation en 2012 indiquait qu’un enfant arabe et occidental lit en moyenne six et 12 000 minutes par an respectivement, une différence énorme. Dans les pays arabes, seulement 53 journaux pour 1 000 citoyens étaient publiés quotidiennement pendant la même année, alors que dans le monde développé le ratio était de 285 journaux pour 1 000 citoyens. Le nombre de livres édités annuellement est rachitique. Un best-seller arabe est généralement publié à 5 000 exemplaires, tandis que des romans à succès, publiés partout dans le monde, peuvent être interdits. À chaque année, cinq fois plus de livres sont traduits en grec qu’en arabe. Les ouvrages sur la religion représentent un cinquième des ventes de livres dans le monde arabe. Dans le reste du monde, les livres traitant de religion ne comptent que pour cinq pour cent des ventes totales de livres. Des efforts sont mis en place afin de changer cette situation troublante. Par exemple, en septembre 2015 le vice-président et émir de Dubaï, Cheikh Mohammed ben Rachid Al Maktoum, a lancé la campagne portant le nom de «Arab Reading Challenge». Le président des Émirats arabes unis, Cheikh Khalifa Ben Zayed Al Nahyane, a lui aussi emboîté le pas en annonçant en décembre que l’année 2016 serait la «Year of Reading». Les pays du Golfe ont relativement peu de liens commerciaux entre eux, malgré une union douanière entrée en vigueur le 1er janvier 2003, mais dont l’application a été retardée par des questions liées aux recettes et au protectionnisme, et ils inventent ou font breveter rarement quoi que ce soit (voir l’article One Pager d’Alan Middleton à la page 5). Plutôt que de procéder à une évaluation réaliste de leurs déficits de développement ou de pousser leurs meilleurs talents vers l’acquisition de connaissances modernes et ainsi concurrencer l’Ouest sur son propre terrain, les pays du Golfe se sont coupés des sociétés progressistes et performantes, jouant le jeu de la «victimisation» en invoquant le conflit israélo-palestinien ou le passé colonial. Bien évidemment, il y a des exceptions. Le Qatar, le Bahreïn et les Émirats vivent depuis environ une décennie de véritables expériences de modernisation. Par contre, l’État le plus imposant géographiquement, l’Arabie saoudite, se caractérise par la régression sociale et économique, ainsi que le recours aux «théories du complot» pour éviter le changement. Les défis structurels s’accumulent

(choc démographique, libéralisation du marché intérieur, place des femmes sur le marché du travail), alors même que le Royaume est confronté aux conséquences budgétaires (réduction des réserves de changes et élimination des subventions aux fournisseurs d’eau, de gaz et d’électricité) de la baisse des cours de l’or noir. Occupant une position centrale dans le Golfe, l’Arabie saoudite est le siège de l’orthodoxie sunnite. Elle a pendant plus de deux siècles été dominée par la secte wahhabite, qui suit une interprétation extrêmement conservatrice du Coran. En conséquence, une plus grande influence chiite dans le Golfe, exacerbée par l’Iran, représentant de l’Islam chiite au Moyen-Orient, serait généralement considérée comme une menace à la fois pour les monarchies et pour les sunnites wahhabites de la région.

L’

inquiétude des autorités saoudiennes et des monarchies du Golfe s’est renforcée lorsque l’Iran a décidé d’apporter son soutien à l’opposition conduite par les chiites à Bahreïn en mars 2011. Toute forme de concessions politiques concrètes faites aux chiites à Bahreïn aurait été considérée comme une victoire des rebelles contre l’«ennemi sunnite», incarné par les gouvernements des monarchies du Golfe. Le déclin et la chute des régimes arabes sunnites, ennemis déclarés du régime chiite en Iran, assurerait une plus grande influence iranienne dans la région et représenteraient une autre victoire contre le «Grand Satan», les États-Unis. Washington, quant à elle, a toujours soutenu les régimes sunnites, notamment la monarchie saoudienne. Une éviction du gouvernement saoudien en faveur des mouvements chiites pourrait donner à l’Iran un allié indéfectible contre la présence américaine dans la région (voir l’article Feature de John E. McLaughlin à la page 22). En outre, selon le Guide suprême iranien Ali Khamenei, les soulèvements arabes en faveur de la démocratisation émanent d’une logique enracinée dans la révolution iranienne de 1979, événements considérés à Téhéran comme une renaissance islamique contre les dictateurs arabes soutenus par l’Occident. Ainsi, la véritable crainte des monarchies réside dans l’accroissement possible de l’influence iranienne dans la région, au niveau non seulement religieux, mais aussi économique et politique. L’acquisition de l’arme nucléaire par l’Iran préoccupe tout autant les monarchies, car cela perturberait assurément l’agencement géopolitique actuel au Moyen-Orient. C’est dans ce contexte qu’il faut comprendre les récentes tensions régionales suite à la décision saoudienne au début de l’année d’exécuter par décapitation Nimr Baqer Al Nimr, figure de la

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contestation contre le régime bahreïnien. En Syrie, la situation sur le terrain ressemble de plus en plus à une guerre par allié interposé entre l’Iran et l’Arabie saoudite d’un côté, et les États-Unis et la Russie de l’autre. Téhéran et Riyad cherchent à élargir leur influence au Moyen-Orient: ils se disputent en effet une sphère d’influence en Syrie, pays à majorité sunnite, et en Irak voisine où les chiites sont en plus grand nombre. Les Saoudiens et les Qataris sont depuis longtemps les défenseurs d’un règlement politique de la crise syrienne selon lequel Bachar Al Assad quitterait le pouvoir, ce qui est aussi réclamé par l’administration Obama. L’Iran soutient Assad, tandis que l’Arabie saoudite participe à la coalition internationale menée par son allié historique, les États-Unis. Le conflit syrien représente donc une cristallisation de leur rivalité. Les deux pays sont aussi engagés dans une autre guerre par procuration au Yémen, où des rebelles chiites sont soutenus par l’Iran. Le conflit s’enlise et les derniers événements éloignent la perspective d’un cessezle-feu. Les mollahs pourraient prolonger le conflit de façon à épuiser l’Arabie saoudite et ses alliés du Golfe, tous confrontés à l’effondrement des prix du pétrole. Contrairement aux organisations sociales actives en Iran, au Yémen et, dans une moindre mesure, en Arabie saoudite, celles des pays du Golfe n’ont pas politisé la foi islamique. Cependant, parce que les dirigeants des États membres du CCG sont relativement fermés à la critique de leurs systèmes politiques, et parce que la culture partagée par la vaste majorité des citoyens de la région est inspirée fortement par l’islam, toute forme de dissension politique est susceptible de s’exprimer en termes religieux. Ces conditions politiques et sociales constituent un réceptacle propice au vocabulaire et à l’imaginaire des extrémistes islamistes. Pour l’instant, les pouvoirs temporels et spirituels restent entre les mains des familles royales, mais une période de deux ou trois années de bas prix des hydrocarbures pourrait déclencher la critique sociale des régimes en place – Koweït et Bahreïn étant les plus vulnérables à cet égard. La baisse du prix du pétrole pourrait devenir un «détonateur» historique de réformes politiques. Elle pourrait également secouer le conservatisme et le statu quo dans la pensée et les habitudes de l’élite politique dominante. Un élargissement de la sphère politique pourrait aussi apparaître à la suite d’une prise de conscience populaire de l’incompétence des dirigeants de certains pays du Golfe. Une chose est certaine, la nouvelle donne sur les marchés mondiaux de l’énergie va provoquer des remous politiques dans la région. Les monarchies sont placées devant une situation inconfortable et malgré le fait qu’elles détiennent des fonds colossaux, la plupart ne sont pas bien outillées pour y faire face. Bref, le baril à 30 ou à 40 USD et les réajustements financiers et fiscaux qui s’en suivront risquent de révéler la nature et le fonctionnement réels de ces monarchies pétrolières. | GB

Why the means are more important than the ends, and how to transform the national strategic psychology BY IRVIN STUDIN

TEN THESES ON

CANADIAN

FOREIGN POLICY Irvin Studin is Editor-in-Chief & Publisher

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of Global Brief.

Thesis 1: The primary challenge for Canadian foreign policy in the early 21st century has little to do with specific policy positions or preferences, and everything to do with the psychology of the country’s strategic classes. Can Canada think for itself in international affairs? Can its most talented people develop a strategic imagination that reflects the specific challenges of the country and allows the state to advance its interests in the world? Most Canadian foreign policy to this day still works from a bulwark of assumptions that are in keeping with the colonial status of the country at its genesis in 1867. (Recall that the preamble to the Constitution Act, 1867 reads that Canada will “conduce to the welfare of the provinces and promote the interests of the British Empire.”) No revolution or territorial war in Canada has succeeded in forcing the national psychology out of this ‘colonial cage.’ And there are only two ways out of this colonial cage this century: great leadership that exerts great pressure on the strategic classes and machinery of the country in order to transform the national psychology from the colonial and tactical to the properly strategic; or, in the alternative, a strategic crisis – a war or some other set of catastrophic events – that requires the country and its leaders to raise their game in the name of national survival. Manifestly, the leadership path to a proper national strategic psychology is the most efficient of the two variants.

Thesis 2: Why would Canada want to get out of this colonial cage in its foreign policy thinking and behaviour? Answer: because this century will be far more difficult for Canada, strategically, than the first century and a half of its modern existence. For one, let me state clearly: there will be territorial war in North America this century. That Canada has been exempted from war on its territory since the brokering of the 1871 Treaty of Washington with the US is not predictive of the future, but rather betrays the great good strategic fortune of the country’s past. Every other continent, from Africa through to Europe, Asia and even Australia, saw terrible bloodshed on its territory in the last

PHOTOGRAPH: THE CANADIAN PRESS / MATTHEW USHERWOOD

attacks of various kinds in the coming decades. If the return of China to the centre of world affairs is today seen by Chinese elites as a natural reset of the global balance of power following the exceptional century and a half during which the Middle Kingdom became poor and marginalized, then Canadian elites ought to recognize that Confederation occurred just after China lost the two Opium Wars in the middle of the 19th century that would relegate it to a peripheral power. The entire strategic life of the Canadian state to date, then, has been lived with no experience whatever of Chinese centrality in international affairs. And yet the return to Chinese centrality and with it the lessening of

Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan scrums with media in Ottawa, January 2016.

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century. So too did Canada and North America in all centuries since the European landing at the start of the 17th century – except, of course, in the exceptional 20th century. What would bring war or, short of war, great strategic pressure to bear on Canada? Three vectors: first, the strategic decline of the US, primarily in relation to China; second, the melting of polar ice and the attendant opening up of one of Canada’s borders to the ‘other’ for the first time since the general peace was brokered with the Americans in 1871; and, third, the advent of military and other technologies that will make the North American ‘fireproof house’ penetrable to

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The entire strategic life of the Canadian state has been lived with no experience of Chinese centrality in international affairs. And yet the return to Chinese centrality and with it the lessening of American centrality will serve to apply a pressure on Canada to play its cards far more cunningly.

American centrality (both material and psychological) will serve to apply a pressure on Canada to play its cards far more cleverly and cunningly, as we discuss below. The Arctic pressure will come not necessarily from the fact that Canada will be contesting land or resources or waterways like the Northwest Passage – although these contests, too, will come, notwithstanding the present deference to a legal and diplomatic Pax Arctica – but rather that the Canadian imagination will suddenly need to stretch to the north of the country and continent and begin to reckon with significant ‘other’ players with which the country has little serious experience: notably Russia (see the Feature article by Fyodor Lukyanov at p. 8 and the Query article by Alexander Sergunin and Valery Konyshev at p. 14). Finally, from drones to cyber weapons and, to be sure, conventional nuclear arms, Canada and North America, if they are not already eminently targetable and reachable, will certainly be so over the next couple of decades – even to middle-sized powers. Of course, as I have written in these pages, in any scenario of war today between the US and either of Russia or China, major Canadian centres like Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa are within easy reach of conventional bombardment and even nuclear attacks.

Thesis 3: Canada has a four-point game this century. We may call this game ACRE, or America, China, Russia and Europe. This game requires strategic promiscuity from Canada’s political classes – to wit, the ability to form relationships with the key powers at each of Canada’s borders in the service of Canadian survival and advantage. If America is again at the southern border this century, then a rising China is at Canada’s western border (flights to Beijing from Vancouver are shorter than flights between Beijing and Brisbane – that is, Canada is more ‘in Asia’ than Australia), a melting Arctic puts Russia directly at Canada’s northern border, and the EU is evidently at the eastern border. What are Canada’s imperatives in the context of its ACRE game? Answer: use American assets and capabilities – intelligence, military, diplomatic and economic assets – for Canadian gain (i.e. the US is for Canada a means, not an end); develop a deep relationship with China for Canadian economic gain and to play an important role in ensuring that its return to the centre of international affairs is peaceable; work closely with Russia to bind it to a peaceful, transactional logic in the Arctic and to advance that country’s integration with European structures in a Europe 2.0 framework (see my Feature article at p. 30); and, to be sure, advance economic imperatives in the EU and, politically, keep the EU together.

Thesis 4: If Canada survives this century, then it will likely be the second most important country in the West, and among the most powerful countries on Earth. The average lifespan of a state over the last two centuries has been about 60 years (the Soviet Union, for instance, lasted 70 years), so survival for the entire balance of this century is not foreordained. Given the strategic pressures on the Canadian state described above, and given, in internal affairs, the extant possibility of Quebec secession referenda in the coming decades, Ottawa and other parts of the country will have to work hard (and raise their game) to assure that the country remains a going concern in the year 2100. By the year 2100, Canada could well have a population of up to 100 million people. GB has devoted many pages to arguing that the country should consciously aim for such a large population – an argument that has gained considerable momentum in the public discourse in Canada over the last five years – so we will not belabour the point here. But at 100 million people, Canada would likely be larger than every country in Europe, with the possible exception of Russia. Of course, at 100 million, Canada would not only have much larger military and diplomatic (and intelligence) assets – built on a significantly larger economic base – with which to advance its interests and increase its ability to compete in the context of the heightened strategic pressure described above, but its political and strategic classes may be, in the mental sense, entirely different types of Canadians. In other words, the Canadian representing or leading a country of 100 million people – consciously larger than every Western country in the world except the US – will very likely no longer be the same ‘Canadian’ who works in similar positions of responsibility today. The mentality will be very different. This therefore becomes, to a great extent, a third possible route for Canada to develop the requisite strategic psychology that will allow it to exit the aforementioned colonial cage and reckon with what promises to be a far more difficult century. To be sure, strong leadership that painstakingly seeks to develop this national psychology well before Canada reaches 100 million is, as mentioned, not only by far the most efficient path, but also the only one that can answer the following question: what happens if Canada faces catastrophic strategic pressures or even war in North America before it sustainably develops this national psychology? As we have argued before in these pages, the country would in this case either be lost – emerging perhaps in an unrecognizable form, with different borders and a different constitution – or, similarly, would become a strategic cripple, operating entirely on the explicit terms of more serious outside countries or groups of countries. The said ‘60-year rule,’ then,

would have come home to roost with a vengeance; that is, Canada might in that case have lasted unscathed for nearly two centuries – an exceptional run compared with the averages and odds – but it could not, without continued strategic luck or remarkable strategic leadership, outrun historical probabilities indefinitely.

Thesis 5:

necessary domestically, but it is an inefficient setup from which to do great foreign policy. While provinces like Quebec, Alberta and Newfoundland and Labrador could not exist happily within a non-federal Canadian constitutional framework, a number of constitutional levers that are critical to Canadian foreign policy success are not within the control of the government charged with defending national interests – to wit, Ottawa. This leaves Ottawa at a distinct strategic disadvantage in advancing various foreign policy objectives by comparison with the capitals of major unitary states (France, South Korea, Japan, China and Russia) and even federal states that – often because of constitutional jurisprudence through the courts – are more centralized in their foreign policy powers (the US, Australia and India). The most prominent example of such inefficiency in Canadian foreign policy due to federalism is the Labour Conventions framework for the implementation of complex international treaties into Canadian law. Labour Conventions was a 1937 decision of the Privy Council in London that determined that Ottawa could negotiate or sign any international treaty – like all other national capitals in the world – but could only implement into law those aspects of the treaty that fell within federal constitutional jurisdiction. This has meant that Canada has been far slower than not only unitary states but also the aforementioned federal states in implementing into national law, and also, by logical implication, in negotiating composite treaties involving policy areas like microeconomic regulation of various products and services – and even local environmental standards – because of the Labour Conventions strictures requiring provinces to implement (or not implement) those aspects of the treaties that fall within their jurisdiction. Of course, a more stark example of Canada’s federalism paradox in international affairs arises when Ottawa decides to, say, strategically pivot to Asia (or, as it did briefly in 2006, to Latin America). Even if Ottawa, through the royal prerogative, has full control over the target, degree and velocity of the national pivot, it does not have policy control over many of the aspects of national power that would determine the success or failure of the pivot. Consider, with the Asia pivot, a policy requirement for language competence in tongues like Mandarin, Hindi, Bahasa Indonesia and Korean (incidentally, the four tongues privileged by Canberra in Australia’s pro-Asian strategic pivot). However, it is the provinces in Canada that control the education function. This means that while Ottawa fancies a national pivot to Asia, Quebec may be interested in teaching its young people to speak Spanish, New Brunswick may privilege Russian, and Saskatchewan may emphasize Arabic. The pivot is declared as

This leaves Ottawa at a strategic disadvantage by comparison with the capitals of major unitary states (France, South Korea, Japan, China and Russia) and federal states that – often because of constitutional jurisprudence through the courts – are more centralized in their foreign policy powers.

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Canadian foreign policy today still punches with the wrist, as it were, and not with the entire national corpus. Consider a boxer by way of metaphor: he or she may punch with the fist (or wrist), but in the absence of a strong torso and coordinated projection of the power of the torso through the punching arm and fist, the resulting punch will be a nullity. And yet most of the current foreign policy debates in Canada – regardless of the government in power – are principally preoccupied with the punching wrist or fist (the outcome that can be seen with the naked eye), rather than with the development of the musculature and latent energy of the corpus or torso of the Canadian state and society that would make the punch consequential. I have written about this connection between corpus and punch in various foreign policy and general strategic scenarios in The Strategic Constitution – Understanding Canadian Power in the World (2014). Two key points are worth noting here. First, Canadian foreign policy and strategy must always look at Canada’s diplomatic and military instruments (the wrists, as it were) not in isolation but rather as sitting atop a larger infrastructure or bulwark of national strategic capability that consists of such ‘factors of power’ as population (size and quality), the economy, natural resources, and, among several others factors, transportation and communication infrastructure and capabilities. Development of the factors of power, on this logic, is necessary both for potency and, to outside observers, credibility in the diplomatic and military instruments of Canadian power. Second, Canada must develop a class of foreign policy decision-makers who instinctively are able to see the national foreign policy assets as a total system – that is, as systems thinkers – rather than behaving as pure advocates for particular policy positions. For while there is naturally a perfectly reasonable debate to be had in Canada on such policy positions – to bomb or not to bomb; to be an ally or to be an enemy; to trade or not to trade; to pivot to X as opposed to Y – such positions are often without lasting effect internationally in the absence of a supporting framework or corpus of national power to advance these positions, and indeed in the absence of a class of strategists in Canada who are capable of understanding and using all of the levers of national power to implement foreign policy preferences (and to be seen as such).

Thesis 6: Canadian federalism is beautiful and

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Canadian foreign policy still punches with the wrist, not with the entire national corpus. Consider a boxer: he or she may punch with the fist (or wrist), but in the absence of a strong torso and coordinated projection of the power of the torso through the punching arm and fist, the resulting punch will be a nullity.

policy, but is seen as incredible or even not serious by any outside power or observer (starting in key Asian capitals) who understands Canada’s federal makeup. What’s to be done? Absent revolutionary new decisions by the Canadian courts (highly unlikely), the only way to consolidate the national foreign policy system in the federal context in the service of major national strategic objectives that exercise provincial constitutional competence is through deep and sustained federal-provincial cooperation – with the federal spending power and various federal constitutional trump cards always at the ready. (I have written elsewhere that Canada should adopt Australia’s Council of Australian Governments regime in order to drive long-term federal-provincial cooperation on multi-jurisdictional issues, including international ones.)

Thesis 7: Canada needs a national languages" strategy. French-English bilingualism is absolutely necessary for national unity and must, to be sure, be deepened (levels of full bilingualism in Canada are unacceptably low), but bilingualism neither impresses nor is adequate for Canadian strategic excellence internationally. Many of the leading foreign policy countries outside of the Anglosphere – from China to Russia, through to Singapore and Israel, and evidently in most of the EU states – are led by strategic classes that can operate with facility in three or more tongues. Canada’s languages strategy should emphasize perfect English-French bilingualism among the next generations of Canadians, plus high proficiency in at least one other tongue – including, possibly, an Aboriginal tongue, as I have explained in past issues of GB. But for international effect, Canada’s four-point game would seem to commend to the languages strategy tongues like Mandarin, Russian, Spanish (the broader ‘A’ in the ACRE game), and perhaps even Arabic and Persian – given the terrible conflicts in today’s Middle East and Canada’s security interests therein. This languages strategy should be driven by Ottawa, but can only be implemented through the said federal-provincial cooperation, given the provinces’ lead on education.

Thesis 8: In the spirit of focussing on the means" in order to be able to advance any ends at all (the ends depending on the government of the day), Ottawa needs embassies and, with these, strong diplomatic relations, in virtually every single world capital. Without embassies, Canada cannot enjoy serious political, economic and, of course, intelligence relations in a given country. The relationship with

and analytics on any country in which Canada has no embassy are outsourced to other countries (in Canada’s case, to the US or the UK). Canada’s gaps in embassy coverage are glaring, and many of its international relationships superficial and analytics poor. Most of the former 15 republics of the former Soviet Union – from Belarus to Moldova, Azerbaijan and Tajikistan – are not covered by embassies. Embassy coverage in central and west Africa is weak. The same is true for the Pacific Islands. And strategically important countries like North Korea, but also now Syria and Libya, have no Canadian ambassadorial presence whatever.

Thesis 9:

Aboriginal people in Canada have become foreign policy players. By dint of the Constitution Act, 1982 and a body of jurisprudence that started in the 1970s, as well as because of growing political sophistication, Canadian indigenous people and nations are increasingly influential in national decision-making on key Canadian factors of power like natural resources (and also territory tout court). The policy thinking in Canada on this connection between the Aboriginal question and Canadian international strategy is still highly underdeveloped, but in praxis this connection may soon prove just as important in determining the efficiency and credibility of Canadian foreign policy as is federalism more broadly.

Thesis 10:

Diasporic Canadians and diasporic groups and movements in Canada may be politically important (Canada is, after all, a highly and happily multicultural country), but they should play a negligible role in the development of serious foreign policy. While diasporic Canadians, like many other Canadians, may bring specific talents to the development and implementation of foreign policy (e.g. linguistic knowledge, some aptitudes for intelligence, given their knowledge of local mindsets and culture, and perhaps some personal contacts in relevant countries), Canadian analytics should not be driven at all by diasporic preferences or prisms. Indeed, it is the fundamental absence of a serious national foreign policy psychology and culture that allows diasporic groups – regardless of the quality of their own analytics – to claim pride of place in Canadian foreign policy debates and positioning. In the end, if Canada is able to fashion for itself a proper strategic psychology that allows the country to parry the great pressures of this new century, then the result will speak for itself – a bona fide Canadian school of foreign policy, as befits one of the world’s oldest and most successful countries. | GB

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NEZ À NEZ Washington and Moscow Dance in the High North In the Arctic, the US and Russia are friends PROPOSITION:

DAVID BIETTE vs JEREMI SURI

David Biette is Director of the Polar Initiative and Senior Adviser to the Canada Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.

Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, and is also a professor in the Department of History and the Lyndon B.

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Johnson School of

Public Affairs.

David Biette (for): The US has long had a contentious relationship with Russia. Even going back to the days of the Russian Empire, the US never considered Russia a ‘friend’ as the US today views, say, Canada or the UK. We were allies of convenience during WW2 and sworn enemies during the Cold War. Following the collapse of the USSR in 1991 (see the Feature article by Fyodor Lukyanov at p. 8), the bilateral relationship warmed in that business relationships were developed and political relations were friendlier, if still cautious. The warmer relations chilled considerably under a nationalist Vladimir Putin, and became downright cold following Russia’s 2014 invasion and annexation of Crimea and its military support of separatists in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine. When the USSR disintegrated, the US entered into several agreements with the Russian government to cooperate in outer-space activities. In January 1998, officials from the US, Russia, Canada, Japan, and the European Space Agency signed agreements to cooperate on the design, development, operation and use of the International Space Station. That cooperation in space endures, and NASA continues to depend on Russia to get its own astronauts into space. So what about the Arctic? One should recall that nearly half of the Arctic coastline belongs to Russia, which has for hundreds of years explored and settled portions of its Arctic onshore and offshore territory. The US purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867 gave the US its first and only Arctic territory. While the US has become a superpower in the area of Arctic scientific research, it is slowly beginning to embrace the idea that it is indeed an Arctic nation. There are parallels in the Arctic with US-Russia space cooperation. Russia and the US joined other countries with Arctic territory to form the Arctic Council in 1996. While the Arctic Council works on a consensus basis on issues such as environmental protection, indigenous communities, search and rescue, and shipping, it notably does not get involved in military and security issues. So while

Russia and the US buzz each other’s ships, the two governments were able to sign the Arctic Search and Rescue Agreement with other Arctic Council member states in 2011 (and notably worked together in a search and rescue operation for a capsized South Korean fishing vessel in the Bering Sea in 2014). Russian and US coast guards work together regularly in the Bering Sea. In October 2015, American and Russian coast guard officials met in New London, Connecticut with their counterparts from the other Arctic states to form the Arctic Coast Guard Forum. Former US Coast Guard Commandant Robert Papp, now the State Department’s Special Representative for the Arctic, has had a long history of working with his Russian counterparts. In January 2015, Admiral Papp travelled to Europe to meet with Arctic officials – a visit that included meetings in Moscow to meet with government officials on the Arctic. Papp insists that the US and other nations need to continue to work with Russia on Arctic issues. Cooperation in these areas enables more delicate cooperation on issues such as flight protocols for overflights in Syria. US understanding of Russia has atrophied since the Cold War, and the expertise that the US had on a wealth of issues involving Russia (and the former USSR) has sunk to dangerously low levels. If only a few military analysts continue to study this challenging country, then US views of Russia will be seen only through a military lens. If all that you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. While calling the US and Russia ‘friends’ in the Arctic may stretch the definition of the word, the two countries certainly cooperate – and will continue to cooperate – on a number of important issues in that theatre. Jeremi Suri (against): Geography is not destiny, but it still matters enormously. With the melting of polar ice, the Arctic Ocean will quickly become an efficient transportation route between North America and Northeast Asia. The Arctic also provides access to lucrative resources under its waters – especially oil and gas. It is emerging as one of the world’s most coveted regions. That is what makes the Arctic a source of strategic rivalry. It is bordered by eight countries, each of which is drawn ever deeper into the region for its trade and treasure. The Arctic is easily accessible to all of its neighbours, but none is in a position to control it. The waters are too vast, too rough, and too diffuse. Most importantly, the Arctic is dynamic, changing its shape and depth as the ice melts. It attracts powerful states and it threatens them at the same time. It very uneasily connects those who live around it. As the two most powerful countries connected by the Arctic, the US and Russia will define a new era

PHOTOGRAPH: THE CANADIAN PRESS / ITAR-TASS / IGOR AGEYENKO

include open dialogue about the region, frank acknowledgement of divergent interests, and continuous work to reduce and control the most volatile points of conflict. Prescient diplomats will create shared trust about competitive national behaviour in the Arctic, despite continued distrust between the same countries in other regions. Predictability will breed stability, just as it allows competition to continue. What should the US and its allies do now? They should begin by nurturing more expertise on the region, sending more diplomats to explore its contours, and encouraging a deeper understanding of all of the regional players. In addition to military force projection, the US must increase its scientific and cultural investments in the region. This means laboratories, observation stations, and a stronger university presence along the edges of the Arctic. Making this formerly peripheral region central to current Western thinking will increase the capacity for managing peaceful competition. Regions that attract powerful states make competition hard to avoid, but they allow many possibilities for managing that competition. That is the role of statesmanship. Wishful thinking about friendship and worst-case thinking about war encourage dangerous measures of appeasement and provocation. Honest appraisal of differences allows for coexistence and even mutual gains. US-Russia strategic competition offers a stable hope for the new Arctic, but it will be a stability that requires energetic, intelligent and

Russia’s Arctic infantry rifle units during a military drill in the training area of the Far East Marshal K. Rokossovsky Military Command Academy, December 2013.

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of strategic competition in the region. Each country fears the consequence of allowing the other to leverage the ocean resources for building national strength and threatening others. Each country predicts future economic growth from trade primacy in the Arctic. Perhaps most surprising to non-specialist observers, each country has detailed scenarios for the other side’s attack across the ocean. The open water weakens land security by facilitating the movement of vast military resources. In this sense, the Arctic is a natural maelstrom, stimulating fears, clashes and retaliation. The distrust that Washington and Moscow bring to all facets of their relations will surely erupt in more recrimination and aggression in the Arctic. The emerging US-Russia rivalry will lead each side to pursue alliances with weaker Arctic states, gaining superiority against a common foe. As such, the ‘Arctic system’ will echo the alliance balancing and bandwagoning of the international system in general. None of these realistic observations about the more accessible ocean waters makes war inevitable or even likely. Competition produces stabilizing rules and norms. As in other regions and time periods, strategic rivalries can be managed effectively with adequate preparation and clear understanding. That is the appropriate work of high-level diplomacy between powerful countries – like the US and Russia – with competitive interests but a common commitment to live together. What should this diplomacy look like? It should

continuous diplomacy. Geography is not destiny, but geopolitics will define a competitive peace.

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US Admiral Papp insists that the US and other nations need to continue to work with Russia on Arctic issues. Cooperation in these areas enables more delicate cooperation on issues such as flight protocols for overflights in Syria.

DB: The longstanding US-Russia strategic rivalry has ebbed and flowed over the years. The rivalry has sometimes trended into dangerous territory, but not in Arctic relations. The media are constantly shouting about upcoming ‘battles’ for the Arctic, competition for and control of natural resources, and a looming ‘militarization’ of the Arctic, with little understanding of what is actually going on in the High North. Let us remind ourselves that half of the Arctic coastline is, and has been, within Russia for a long time. Russia’s direct access to open ocean is through its northern ports. Its Northern Fleet, including its submarines, operates from bases on the Barents and Norwegian Seas. The US has patrolled the Arctic Ocean by air and under the sea for decades. Talk of militarization of the Arctic ignores history, even as Russia’s military becomes increasingly competent after the crumbling of the Soviet military following the Cold War. NATO, however, did not crumble, and the distrust of Russia among NATO states has not abated; in fact, it has increased. Five of the eight Arctic countries (the US, Canada, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland) are original signatories to NATO. Long neutral Sweden may be considering joining NATO, and Finland, wary of recent Russian military activity, may be looking at the possibility as well. Russia has warned Sweden and Finland that should they ever join NATO, which Russia views as an existential threat, it would be – to put it extremely mildly – very angry. Russia’s northern boundary, once protected by ice, is increasingly vulnerable. Recent snap Russian military manoeuvres in the Arctic are of great concern, but the US military concedes that the Russian activity comes from a defensive mindset. NATO members themselves cannot agree on an Arctic military strategy. To be sure, climate change has caused melting of a considerable amount of ice that once inhibited maritime transport – military and other – along Arctic coasts, but this has not opened up the Arctic Ocean to smooth sailing. The ocean still freezes in the winter, necessitating icebreakers for any maritime activity. The US could certainly use a few more heavy icebreakers to supplement the two old and not always reliable ships that it has. Even Russia, with more than 40 for its 5,600-kilometre Northern Sea Route, claims that it needs more icebreakers. Most transportation in the Arctic will be commercial and of a seasonal nature. Russia acknowledges that its Northern Sea Route will at best be a summer alternative to the Suez Canal (see Cabinet Room at p. 39). Any kind of resource extraction in the Arctic – onshore or offshore – will need

infrastructure, which is extremely expensive and challenging to develop at the best of times. While there are potentially vast deposits of oil and gas, minerals, and other resources, they are viable to the extent that they are commercially exploitable. The low price of oil and other commodities is hindering much natural resource development in the Arctic (and at the same time severely hurting the Russian economy). The planning horizon for development is extraordinarily long; current oil fields in the High North were conceived some 40 to 50 years ago. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) essentially governs any claims of Arctic territory beyond the internationally recognized exclusive economic zones (EEZs). Russia’s claims to vast undersea territory follow UNCLOS to the letter. These claims will be reviewed by an international tribunal that will take years to adjudicate. Russia’s claims overlap with Canadian and Danish claims, all of which will be adjudicated under the aegis of UNCLOS (even if this same aegis does not guarantee happy outcomes for each claimant). While the US recognizes UNCLOS as a codification of customary international law, it has yet to ratify the treaty, and is at a disadvantage when it comes to making its own claims of undersea territory, among other things. The Arctic is most certainly not a ‘wild west’ chase for resources, nor are any Arctic neighbours planning to control the region. Vladimir Putin, and Russia under his rule, can be very unpredictable. We know that he wants to consolidate power at home and to assertively project strength abroad, which generally undermines trust all around. Yet at the same time, we know that Russia has very carefully cooperated in the Arctic. In respect of resources, Russia joined the Arctic coastal states to sign a declaration in July 2015 to prevent unregulated commercial fishing in the high seas portion (not in any nation’s territorial waters) of the Arctic Ocean. International rules also apply to commercial activity – not just among Arctic nations, but for other non-Arctic states, which foresee commercial possibilities, however distant in time. In spite of potential created by climate change and melting ice, challenges will remain, and we will not see a near-term race for resources, in spite of media hype to this effect. Notwithstanding rivalries elsewhere on the globe, then, the US, Russia, and their Arctic neighbours work in a cooperative framework on Arctic issues. We have seen that compromise and consensus are difficult but attainable in the Arctic. And all Arctic states agree that a rules-based international order is preferable to military confrontation. JS: Foreign policy is a constant struggle to avoid two extremes: self-fulfilling conflict born of excessive

the balance right to preserve stability and serve everyone’s long-term interests requires a frank recognition of potential conflict. The US and its allies must prepare for likely difficulties with Russia, and they must resist the kinds of forward attacks in the Arctic that have Russian troops occupying Crimea illegally today. The Western emphasis on law in the Arctic must have the backing of force in order to avoid war or surrender. DB: Those who work closely on Arctic issues tend to see cooperation as the rule for the region. After all, Arctic states – Russia and the US included – all abide by UNCLOS to the letter, even if the US has not ratified the agreement. As noted in my first two volleys, Arctic states – again, including Russia and the US – have recently cooperated to sign agreements on the International Maritime Organization’s Polar Code, search and rescue, fisheries in the Central Arctic Ocean, and the formation of the Arctic Coast Guard Forum. Unlike Antarctica, a continent that includes no sovereign states and whose status is governed by the Antarctic Treaty System, Arctic lands, waterways and resources all belong to existing sovereign states. There is no conflict as to which lands belong to which country. There is no territory up for grabs. Russia, with the largest stretch of territory in the Arctic, is unlikely to try to claim anyone else’s when it can barely take care of what it has. Norway and Russia settled a maritime border dispute in the Barents Sea in 2011, Canada and the US have yet to agree on a peacefully contested maritime border in the Beaufort Sea, and Canada and Denmark do not agree on the sovereignty of Hans Island – a tiny island between Ellesmere Island and Greenland. Aside from this, political authority and the control of land, internal waterways and resources are not contested. International law and convention have defined territorial seas and EEZs offshore. UNCLOS has set up a framework for claims to exploit the resources of the outer continental shelf. Extensive claims by Russia, which garnered considerable media attention, were, as mentioned, submitted according to the letter of the treaty, and will be assessed by a UN commission (even if the commission issues non-binding recommendations). The waters surrounding the North Pole and the Central Arctic Ocean, beyond EEZs, are considered international waters. Likewise, the seabed beyond EEZs and confirmed continental shelf claims are considered to be the “heritage of all mankind” and are administered by the UN International Seabed Authority. (continued) To read the rest of this debate, visit the GB website

Each country fears the consequence of allowing the other to leverage the ocean resources for building national strength and threatening others. Each country predicts future economic growth from trade primacy in the Arctic.

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fear and suspicion, and defeat born of weakness and wishful thinking. Effective policy navigates between these twin nightmares, and that is the hope that all experts on Arctic geopolitics bring to their analyses of the region today. The US and its allies seek to maintain access and stability in the Arctic as global warming encourages more competition over land, waterways and resources. Russia is not a natural adversary, but its interests in controlling and insulating parts of the region challenge American aims. This is the central geopolitical problem: how to manage American-Russian competition without triggering war or surrender. Stability and peace in the Arctic will require rules and compromise – rules for freedom of transport, and compromise over political authority. Close and consistent negotiations among state leaders can contribute to this process, and international organizations – especially the UN – have a major role to play as mediators. It is also possible that a new Arctic regional organization, on the model of ASEAN or the Organization of American States, might emerge to regularize deliberations. Treaties and laws will bring predictability and ensure protection for core state interests, on the model of similar treaties governing Antarctica. The history of the last century, however, reveals that cooperation will be limited. Powerful states will seek to maximize their control of resources in contested areas. Powerful states will also define their security through the acquisition of strength against potential peers. The big and the strong seek to widen their advantage or to catch up with those that might be ahead. At least in the present domestic configuration, Russian leaders will see the Arctic as a region where Moscow can close the gap between its diminishing capabilities and general American military superiority. Moscow will also fear – legitimately – that passivity in the Arctic invites American and Western expansion, leaving Russian interests out. As he has in Crimea and Georgia, President Vladimir Putin will argue that anything less than Russian preemption in the Arctic facilitates American aggression. In this geopolitical context, the US and its allies must prepare for strategic rivalry with Russia across the Arctic. The geopolitical sources of rivalry and distrust are too great to disappear entirely through friendly negotiations. Western diplomacy must be prepared to engage, manage and contain Russia simultaneously. Russia, for its part, should be allowed to obtain real benefits from the region, but it must receive clear incentives for cooperation and strong deterrents against belligerence. Effective diplomacy will mix carrots and sticks, overtures and muscle-flexing. Strategic rivalry does not mean war, just as compromise does not mean surrender. Getting

at: www.globalbrief.ca

THE DEFINITION “The chief consequence of the Paris climate deal…

like a boring slog of regulatory compliance. In truth, however, it is much more than that. It creates a real opportunity for states to work together, under a single framework, to mitigate climate change. Opportunities, though, are what people make of them. The work of reaching this agreement was monumental. The work of implementing it has only begun.” Lindsay Iversen is the Associate Director for Climate and Resources in the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic

…is that, for the first time, nearly all of

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As Winston Churchill might have said were he here, the UN negotiations are the worst climate process that we have, except for all the others. So it is important that it survived.

the world’s nations have committed to take steps to reduce their impact on the climate. For the UN climate process – normally so hamstrung by seemingly irreconcilable differences between developed and developing countries – this is a major achievement. But some of the wilder claims about the Paris deal – for instance, that it guarantees the imminent demise of fossil fuels or grants a reprieve to the world’s coral reefs – are overstated. It is a vital step forward but it is not, alas, a miracle. The Paris deal has already saved one endangered species: the UN climate regime itself. The failure of the Copenhagen summit in 2009 dangerously undercut public and political faith in the UN’s ability to deliver a global deal. Another acrimonious collapse could well have doomed the UN climate enterprise, dealing a serious blow to humanity’s bid to slow climate change. The UN process is the only vehicle in existence for motivating broad, multinational action on this issue. No other forum combines the moral authority of the drowning small island states, the global political visibility to create public pressure, and the participation of enough major emitters to create a meaningful deal. As Winston Churchill might have said were he here, the UN negotiations are the worst climate process that we have, except for all the others. So it is important that it survived. Institutions are one thing; results are another. All international agreements depend on implementation at the national level to achieve their aims, and the Paris deal is no exception. The coming years could see states fail to fulfill the pledges that they made to reduce or limit their carbon emissions. Thankfully, negotiators anticipated that possibility. The Paris framework establishes transparency rules so that international observers can determine whether countries are on track to meet their pledges, and hold them to public account if they are not. Moreover, the framework commits parties to regular reviews of their emissions reduction promises and a process through which they can be ‘ratcheted up’ over time. These rules will create the context within which countries will make climate and energy decisions for decades to come. All of this talk of ratchet mechanisms and transparency rules can make the Paris agreement sound

Studies at the US Council on Foreign Relations.

…will be a better world for the seven billion people on our planet. The reason for which Paris succeeded and Copenhagen failed is that the major developing countries – especially China and India – agreed to take on more than their fair share of responsibilities in dealing with global warming. Both Beijing and New Delhi agreed to new limits on their greenhouse gas emissions. This was a remarkably generous gesture on the part of China and India because, as I explained in The New Asian Hemisphere, climate change is not happening simply on account of the new ‘flows’ of greenhouse gases from these two huge countries. It is also the result of the ‘stock’ of greenhouse gases that Western industrialized countries have put into the atmosphere since the Western Industrial Revolution. In any equitable solution, then, the richer Western countries should pay an economic price for this ‘stock’ to match the economic price that China and India are paying to limit their new ‘flows.’ Alas, Western populations are reluctant to accept their fair share of responsibility in dealing with climate change. This is why the world should be grateful that the developing countries, despite this failure, have agreed to bear some of the global burden in limiting greenhouse gas emissions. This gives some hope that global warming may be restrained.” Kishore Mahbubani is Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. His latest book is The Great Convergence: Asia, the West and the Logic of One World.

…is clear Russian positioning on the question of climate change. In spite of continuous scientific, political and civil society discussion in Russia in respect of the generally weak scientific basis for explaining the problem of global climate change, President Putin has recognized the problem as a serious challenge for humanity, with clear consequences for the future of Russia. He confirmed this position in his remarks in Paris. Russia overpaid its obligations on the Kyoto Accord, having significantly reduced its greenhouse gas emissions since 1990. Of course, this happened largely as a result of the massive shrinking of the

national economy in the 1990s after the collapse of the USSR. By the year 2030, Russia envisages decreasing greenhouse gas emissions to 70 percent of the 1990 levels. This is not an unrealistic commitment given the projected slowdown in Russia’s economic growth.” Sergey Bobylev is Professor of Environmental Economics at Moscow State University.

…must be that, at last, all developed and

PHOTOGRAPH: THE CANADIAN PRESS / NEIL WHITE / REX SHUTTERSTOCK

Roger-Mark De Souza is the Director of Population, Environmental Security and Resilience at the Woodrow Wilson

Thousands of climate protestors gather near the Eiffel tower in Paris, December 2015.

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developing nations are required to take action to tackle global warming by limiting their greenhouse gas emissions. Governments are to hold the rise in average global temperatures to “well below” two degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels, and to subsequently work on limiting the increase to 1.5 degrees. The 1.5 degree target is a win for small islands and other low-lying countries, which say that their lands and livelihoods are at risk if the world warms by more than this target. The agreement requires action for the first time from developing nations, including large emitters such as China and India, to find ways to lower the trajectory of their emissions growth. The new climate agreement is a universal, legal agreement under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the international convention on climate change that came into force in 1994. More than 190 countries approved the Paris climate agreement, which will be open for signature in April 2016, and come into force in January 2020. The agreement made significant progress on the three main pillars of climate change policy (mitigation, adaptation, and loss

and damage) and, significantly, welcomed to the negotiation table key players that had been missing in action, such as China and Canada. Under the terms of the deal, every five years, each country will submit a new national climate action plan, which cannot be less ambitious than the previous plan. The five-year review will be accompanied by a reporting and transparency system. On the adaptation front, the agreement establishes a goal to enhance adaptive capacity, strengthen resilience, and reduce vulnerability to negative climate change impacts. Beyond adaptation, the agreement specifically makes reference to “loss and damage” due to climaterelated disasters – referring to either what could be repaired, such as critical infrastructure, or to what is lost forever due to climate change, such as ancestral lands submerged under rising seas. While a footnote in the agreement clearly states that loss and damage do not involve liability or compensation, the agreement makes permanent the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage, established two years ago in order to find ways to address these issues. Despite the accomplishments of COP 21, financing for climate change remains a challenge. With the Paris agreement, there is a commitment by the wealthier nations to provide US$100 billion per year toward climate adaptation in support of poorer nations. But it is not yet certain how firm this commitment is, and how quickly the money will flow.”

Center in Washington, DC.

STRATEGIC FUTURES “In 2020, Canadian foreign policy will be… …considerably more sociable – more

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Activist aspirations and expectations will continue to be undermined by inadequate commitments of intellectual, bureaucratic and material resources, as well as by the chronic difficulty of sustaining a depth of interest in a manageable set of key priorities.

broadly engaged and engaging, less choosy and judgemental in the non-governmental, bilateral and multilateral company that it keeps. It will be more complete, with greater emphasis on the complementarities between different forms of international engagement and a less relentless emphasis on the twin anchors of security and prosperity. It will, in other words, rediscover the attractions of ‘soft power’ – whether or not it chooses to use this language. More concretely, it will have renewed the Canadian proclivity to work with and within the various agencies of the UN system and other manifestations of inclusive multilateralism; to support UN peacekeeping (albeit with limited and specialized resources); to support cultural diplomacy and educational exchanges; and, perhaps most conspicuously, to engage in ‘green diplomacy.’ Yet underlying these changes in tone and activity will be powerful continuities, reinforced by Canada’s increasing sense of vulnerability within a troubled global economy and community. As the new government’s resistance to transparency on the sale of light armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia indicates, it will struggle to balance commercial and human rights imperatives, characteristically tipping toward the former. It will pursue bilateral and multilateral trade liberalization with zeal comparable to that of its predecessors. Especially in the shadow of a prolonged commodities bust, it will resist calls for more robust requirements for transparency and accountability by Canadian extractive companies operating in remote regions of the developing world. And it will struggle to set and meet its admittedly elevated aspirations toward meaningful action on climate change. Moreover, if the previous Conservative government had a tendency to use foreign policy to posture for selective international and domestic audiences – thereby signalling its disinterest in the difficult work of global problem-solving – Canada’s new foreign policy will be vulnerable to a different (yet familiar) type of posturing. Activist aspirations and expectations will continue to be undermined by inadequate commitments of intellectual, bureaucratic and material resources, as well as by the chronic difficulty of sustaining a depth of interest in a manageable set of key priorities. The

development, military and diplomatic capacities required to buttress an activist foreign policy will not be renewed with sufficient speed or volume to significantly narrow the gap between expectations and performance – particularly while the domestic economy remains anaemic. And, while much of the world has eagerly welcomed Canada ‘back’ to the diverse domains of international relations, it will take time and effort to rebuild the trust, knowledge and relationships on which previous Canadian diplomatic successes have rested. Taken together, changes to the practice of Canadian foreign policy will fall short of the promise generated in the heady early days of the new government. Yet this persistent – at times yawning – gap between expectation and performance still represents a meaningful advance on a foreign policy that is immune to aspiration, and therefore to the pressures of accountability that come with it.” David Black is Lester B. Pearson Professor of International Development Studies in the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

…responding to many challenges to Canadian security, including great power tension, threats to the Arctic, the intersection of weapons of mass destruction and radicalism, and failed states and terrorism. The prospect of great power war will increase. Russia’s actions in Crimea and southeastern Ukraine are compounded by increased air patrols close to NATO territory, military doctrine identifying NATO as a threat, and new military capabilities for scenarios against the West. China, for its part, is increasingly assertive, threatening and harassing its neighbours in the South China Sea and building artificial islands – thereby challenging America’s regional dominance with a naval force buildup, and aggressively pursuing cyber capabilities. Great power interests are intersecting in the melting Arctic. To control the Northern Sea Route, Russia is establishing a network of Arctic naval bases and permanently basing ground forces there. Its new naval doctrine, buttressed by new ships and submarines, proclaims the region to be a top priority (see the Query article by Alexander Sergunin and Valery Konyshev at p. 14). China’s leadership sees the Arctic as a critical time-saving shipping route to Europe – key to the economic growth that it needs to maintain its hold on power. It is seeking an Arctic shipping hub, has one Polar Class icebreaker regularly traversing the Arctic, and is building a second. Radicalism and weapons of mass destruction pose a potential existential threat. Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country with an unstable government facing dangerous unrest, is developing tactical nuclear weapons that could fall into the hands of extremists. Failed states continue to provide the space for international

terrorism to take hold. While it will likely be defeated by 2020, ISIS will leave in its wake ongoing sectarian violence not unlike the Balkan wars of the 1990s. These percolating and boiling-over threats to Canada and its allies will be fully manifest by 2020. Militarily, Canada will undertake measures to help contain the Russian threat to Eastern Europe, such as the deployment of fighter aircraft and a small number of ground forces to demonstrate solidarity. Its modernized class of frigates will sail with the US navy in the Pacific. The first of its Arctic Offshore Patrol Ships will deploy to the north, a satellite surveillance project will be a priority, and search and rescue aircraft will be ‘fast-tracked’ to address increased northern activity. An international peacekeeping force, to which Canada would contribute communications, intelligence and perhaps a battalion group, will deploy to the Syria/Iraq region to patrol buffer zones between sectarian groups. Diplomatically, Canada will, among other things, be engaged with Russia bilaterally and multilaterally through NATO; work bilaterally with China and the US and will seek entry to the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting-Plus; engage ever more closely with America to address Arctic threats, putting aside differences over the Northwest Passage; promote the security of nuclear weapons in Pakistan through diplomacy as well as electronic and human intelligence; and assist in bringing about Dayton-like accords in the Middle East as a means of beginning the process of building regional stability.”

à mettre de l’avant deux approches prétendument opposées: pour la gauche, une vision idéalisée – mais invraisemblable – d’un Canada jouant un rôle de médiateur et de vecteur de paix, contre, à droite, la vision d’un Canada mettant de l’avant une politique basée sur des principes nobles – même si, en pratique, l’application de ces principes ne peut qu’être sélective et partielle.

Elinor Sloan is Professor of International Relations at Carleton University, Ottawa, where she teaches defence and security studies. Her most recent book is Modern Military Strategy.

…au Moyen-Orient sera, dans ses grandes

ILLUSTRATION: BLAIR KELLY

En réalité, les actions du Canada dans la région demeureront dictées non pas par nos idéaux ou nos valeurs, mais d’abord et avant tout par deux variables: la perception qu’Ottawa aura des attentes de nos alliés – principalement les États-Unis – ainsi que par les événements dans la région. En effet, les actions du Canada seront encore, comme aujourd’hui, réactives, et non pas guidées par un cadre stratégique cohérent. Malgré ses promesses et sa bonne volonté, le Canada continuera à investir relativement peu de ressources tangibles – diplomatiques, militaires et commerciales – dans la région, et donc ne parviendra pas à augmenter son influence qui, aujourd’hui, est très limitée». Thomas Juneau est professeur adjoint à l’École supérieure d’affaires publiques et internationales, Université d’Ottawa. Il est l’auteur de Squandered Opportunity: Neoclassical Realism and Iranian Foreign Policy.

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lignes, très semblable à ce que nous voyons aujourd’hui, et très semblable à ce que nous avons vu au cours des dernières années. Il y aura certainement de légères modifications: la rhétorique entourant les actions du Canada, notamment, évoluera au fil des événements dans la région et au pays. Les grandes orientations, néanmoins, varieront peu. Le Canada maintiendra des relations cordiales avec la majorité des pays de la région. Ces relations seront positives, mais limitées: les échanges commerciaux demeureront marginaux pour le Canada – et pour les pays de la région – alors que les visites de haut niveau demeureront rares. Le gouvernement affirmera, comme il le fait depuis des années, que la diversification et l’intensification de ses relations commerciales dans la région représente une priorité importante. Ottawa ne réussira pas, par contre, à réaliser cet objectif de manière soutenue. Tout comme aujourd’hui, le débat public entourant la politique du Canada au Moyen-Orient sera largement déconnecté des événements dans la région, dans la mesure où partis politiques et médias continueront

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EPIGRAM

Partial Transcript of the Berlin Conference (1884-1885) BY GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE

Kingdom of Belgium (kb): Empress Victoria needn’t swallow every morsel of the Congo, but leave a slice for our Emperor Leopold. French Republic (fr): He sees rubber as black gold, but mustn’t work Congolese into coffins. kb: Unquestionably! Slavery fathers sins.

George Elliott Clarke is Canada’s

Kingdom of Portugal (kp): Europeans should be Christians, not merely Caucasians.

us: The answer is more and more free-trade zones, thus ending land-grabs, pillages, unruly borders, ethnic-cleansed villages…. uk: What Hypocrisy! Admit that you make all South America, outside Brazil (late of Portugal), your de facto colonies. Uncle Sam’s a cancer! gf: Colonies provide illicit Capital transfer to empires; Plunder makes Europe ‘triumphant.’ fr: This Hurt requires disinfectant!

United Kingdom (uk): Well-born whites!

gf: But a treaty can’t be journalistic flimflam.

United States (us): Well-qualified whites!

kp: Respect Ek Chuah, the ‘God of Trade.’

uk: Oxford-taught blue-bloods must rule Africa. We’re unconquerable.

gb: You parrot the mantra of Uncle Sam.

Parliamentary Poet Laureate.

kb: Save for at Isandlwana…. uk: That Zulu ‘Victory’ was a miracle wrought by Hubris – an error, tactical. us: In any event, there was a slaughter. uk: I hear no matter warranting laughter. Recall: We torched your White House to smithereens. us: And we whupped your ass at New Orleans…. kp: We scent the stink of History. kb: What does Belgium want? No mystery: Nothing too swollen; nothing we can’t digest.

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us: One piece of wedding cake? Next: The rest?

us: Properly-coloured maps must now be made. kb: We want to ship rubber, rum, sugar, diamonds, ornaments, copper pots, sugar…. fr: And bust female savages’ hymens. us: The problem with John Bull is the troublesome rotundity of his belly, a bloating that never sags. kb: And the spider’s branching legs, straddling the globe. us: Threatening all with bulging crevices of graves, an atlas of abyss upon abyss. uk: You know that well, America! Cadavers piled up – blue and grey ca-ca; the fallen, heaped uniforms, ungainly.

German Federation (gf): The dogs of War are nervous! Shakespeare’s bulldogs bark, howl, at every mouse.

gf: Nothing’s as unbudging as a cemetery.

uk: Her Majesty has no corpse tendencies.

kb: Diamonds render Congo dirt a confection.

gf: If Peace is not agreed, we seed maggots, flies, and the English Channel becomes a decayed sea.

gf: Forego this unforeseen Anatomy before it becomes an autopsy.

us: Divvy up copper, diamonds, the rubber tree. Put away gunboats and barbed wire.

All of us have a need for a necessary swelling: The point is to distribute equally the ‘beer monopoly,’ so to speak. Excuse the metaphor. We want no mystique.

fr: A real peace treaty must require Dissipation of Irregularities: No more poaching each other’s colonies like dogs scrapping over bones.

fr: Colonialism is a glorified Infection.

Split Africa smartly, and no party needs arms, but only hands to work factories and farms…. [Peterborough (Ontario) 27 novembre mmxv]