On July 1st, we celebrated Canada’s birth as an independent nation. I was lucky enough that day to be in the audience at the Blyth Festival for the opening of Vimy, a Canadian play exploring the very war that gave Canada its sense of nationhood. This outstanding play tells the story of four wounded soldiers and their nurse, all Canadians, in an army hospital after the capture of Vimy Ridge. While the play never asks explicitly why World War I was fought, the stories of the characters force you to ask why such suffering had to happen.
Any Canadian history class will teach you that Canadians fought in World War I because we were loyal members of the British Empire, and that the war culminated in Canada’s recognition as an independent country. Were you in the U.S., you may be taught that World War I was fought, as President Woodrow Wilson claimed, to make the world safe for democracy.
But what democracy? The brutality of World War I merely paved the way for the deaths of 100 million from Communism, the rise of Hitler, and the atrocities of the Holocaust. In the Great War more than 10 mil- lion soldiers died and 21 million more were wounded. Not included in those figures are the soldiers who returned home with bodies intact, but who, like Vimy’s Lt. Laurie MacLean, still brought back “all the mess what’s inside of me now… stuck there, for- ever.”
As I watched the human tragedies in Vimy unfold, I was reminded of a recent speech by U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, in which he claimed that unless Europe played a more active role, the NATO alliance could collapse.
We should be so lucky.
NATO — like the alliance system that dragged us into World War I — is a danger- ous anachronism that pulls Canada into con- flicts that we might otherwise avoid.
In World War I, Serbia was linked to Russia, which in turn had alliances with France and Britain, which was allied with Japan; while Austria was allied with Italy and Ger- many, which was allied with the Ottomans. Had it not been for the web of alliances that linked Europe, it is very possible that what became World War I could have amounted to little more than a series of skirmishes on the Austro-Serbian border.
NATO was established after World War II to ensure the safety of Western Europe from Soviet expansion. The USSR knew that aggression on the continent would lead to all-out war with America. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the elimination of the Soviet threat. Since then, NATO has been in convulsions trying to justify its continued existence.
From Bosnia to Kosovo to Afghanistan and now Libya, we must ask if Canada would not be better off outside the organization.
Does it not seem obvious that interventions such as in Libya would be better jus- tified if they were UN missions rather than NATO ones? Surely wars fought to enforce the laws of the international community should be sanctioned and led by the govern- ing body of that community rather than what was meant as a transatlantic defense pact.
More importantly, does NATO ensure the safety of Canada by preventing our citizens from fighting in unnecessary wars as they did at Vimy? No. Rather, NATO has brought us close to unnecessary war even in the recent past.
In 2008, the former Soviet state of Georgia was told it would receive a direct path to NATO membership. Soon after, Russia inter- vened militarily in the Georgian republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia to stop what would later be revealed to be persecution of the local ethnic communities by the Georgian government. Had Georgia become a NATO member prior to this conflict, Canada could have found itself at war with Russia, fighting against a power that was intervening in a humanitarian crisis.
More recently, Israel raided a Turkish aid vessel en route to Gaza. Had Turkey, a member of NATO, claimed the actions to be an act of war, NATO’s mutual defence agreement would have required Canada and the rest of NATO to go to war with Israel. To claim that we would not have is to show the glaring farce of NATO, which is that its members have closer internation- al allies among nations with whom they have no formal alliance, than they do with many NATO members.
Were Canada outside NATO, like Austra- lia and New Zealand, it could remain neutral regarding conflicts it had no direct stake in, ensuring our nation — and our servicemen and women — would not get dragged into conflicts merely because of diplomatic technicalities. However, Canada would retain the ability, were the next Hitler to rise, to take part in a war that it was crucial to join. Such a course would ensure that the government’s first duty was the protection of Canadians, not foreign regimes.
