Abstract
This issue of the journal contains five major scholarly essays, one “Lessons of History” essay, two very timely policy briefs, and seven critical book reviews.
Matthew Wiseman kicks off the scholarly essays with a revealing unfolding of the establishment, after World War II, of a scientific intelligence bureau in Canada which was placed within the Defence Research Board of Canada and helped to augment the overall Canadian intelligence structure. This essay draws on the archival work of individuals like Donald Goodspeed, Jonathan Turner, Kurt Jensen, Alan Burnes, and Dan Middlemiss, all of whom were observational pioneers of Canada’s efforts to improve the country’s postwar military preparedness to deal with the emergence of new biological, chemical, and atomic weapons that could be used by the Soviet Union against Canada and its allies during the Cold War. The importance of this scholarly work is the author’s presentation of information taken from recently made available government and military documents that reveal how the Canadian government utilized top Canadian scientists and engineers in developing an independent threat assessment capability within the Canadian Defence Department during a time of great risks to the security of the West stemming from military technological changes occurring behind the Iron Curtain during the early days of the Cold War.
Wiseman’s narrative sets the stage for the essay by Wilner, Beach-Vaive, Carbonneau, Hopkins, and Leblanc which examines how foreign governments that are in geopolitical competition with Canada and its allies try to exploit the inherently open nature of Canadian research institutions in order to gain access to cutting-edge research and intellectual property. “Research at risk: Global challenges, allied perspectives, and Canadian solutions,” essentially reveals the fact that the high-profile instances of data theft and foreign espionage on research institutes are becoming so commonplace that “research security (RS)” —a distinct sub-study of national security—is being drawn on to provide measures aimed at protecting the inputs, processes, and products of scientific research, inquiry, and discovery so that Canada and its allies can thwart attempts by foreign governments to steal military technological secrets. However, as the authors point out, RS has to undergo significant adjustment as dual-use technology and societal shifts towards digitization, nano-technology and robotics, and even the recent COVID-19 pandemic, are challenging the way RS has traditionally been conducted. The authors recommend that the Canadian government should provide direct cybersecurity support to universities and research institutions to better augment RS. Given the nature of the technological and scientific changes, there is a need for continual network penetration operations, similar to that which is used in the UK, to raise awareness among at-risk actors.
The next essay deals with a different type of “at-risk” problematique. Reza Hasmath, in “Future responses to managing Muslim ethnic minorities in China: Lessons learned from global approaches to improving inter-ethnic relations,” explains deftly how an at-risk community in China’s north, viz., the Uyghur population—the largest group of the ten predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities located in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR)—has suffered from a rather heavy-handed approach by the Chinese state in dealing with potential and actualized ethnic minority unrest in this region. China has used repressive methods, such as “re-education camps,” and a sophisticated, but expensive, mass surveillance system to counter the defiance of this Ethnic Muslim population—much to the chagrin of the international community. Hasmath argues that, since it is unlikely that the ham-fisted tactics of the Communist Party of China will end the unrest in the XUAR, perhaps it is time for China to employ less repressive policies that can range from short-term, medium-term, to longer-term strategies. The author concludes that the first two strategies will likely be less effective than the third strategy, which would require that the Chinese state targets main root causes of Uyghur unrest rather than treat Uyghur identity claims as a threat necessitating such extensive and repressive control.
Jean-Nicolas Bordeleau and Michael Fejes, in their essay “Do fears of normative commitments influence nominations to senior NATO military positions?” examine an issue in Canada involving the Trudeau government’s decision not to submit the name of General Jonathan Vance, the former Canadian Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) for consideration as NATO’s next Chair of the Military Committee (CMC). Their analysis was concerned with whether or not normative considerations affect these types of decisions made by the Canadian government. After General Vance resigned from his position in the Canadian military, there was initially some speculation that he did so because of the Trudeau government’s decision not to put forward his name for the top NATO post. We now know that the reason for Vance’s abrupt resignation may have had more to do with the allegations of his inappropriate behaviour with a subordinate officer—something which he later acknowledged. But the authors made the case that, regardless of the speculation as to Vance’s motive for resigning, the quantitative examination of the normative behaviour of states in the nomination of qualified individuals to the position of the CMC was something of value for scholars of Canadian foreign and defence policy. Readers can decide for themselves whether or not the broader enquiry into how and why decisions made by the Canadian government regarding an important post in a military alliance is pertinent. But the authors of this essay make the case that it is at least useful to understand whether or not normative factors do affect these types of government decisions.
The final paper in the scholarly essay section of this issue is by Jacob Benjamin, who explains the evolution of Canada’s framing of its cross-Pacific relations, from “Asia-Pacific” to “Indo-Pacific.” According to the author, the Asia-Pacific framing was relatively non-confrontational, semi-detached, and economic-centric, whereas the Indo-Pacific framing is more strategic, and diplomatically more hands-on, in the sense that it has enabled Canada finally to assert itself on traditional security issues with respect to this relationship. The latter is seen as a new philosophical framing that has allowed the Trudeau Liberals (following in the footsteps of Brussels, London, Tokyo, Paris, and Washington) to denounce China’s actions in the South China Sea, to make some hard power contributions toward containing North Korea (through air and sea power), and to enhance Canadian defence relations with key players in Asian security—namely Japan and Taiwan. But the key question about whether the new Canadian policy with respect to cross-Pacific relations will be detrimental to Canada’s relations with China is left wide open and ought to be the subject of future research in this area.
The Lessons of History section of this issue raises an interesting question about the reliability of the United States as an ally. Asa McKercher makes a comparison between the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, and the subsequent collapse of the Western-backed Afghan government in August 2021, and a similar situation in April 1975 with the fall of the regime in South Vietnam. McKercher uses a series of Canadian diplomatic reports that were produced in the wake of events in South Vietnam to provide at least a tentative answer to the question above. Realizing that the situation in 1975 is much different from the situation today should give the reader some pause in jumping to the conclusion that the reliability of the US as an ally is linked necessarily to its global hegemonic status.
The two policy briefs address an issue of relevance to today’s troubling escalation in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Frederic Pearson and Erika Simpson are concerned with the need to de-escalate dangerous nuclear weapons and force deployment in Europe, and Sumantra Maitra’s brief is concerned with missing the opportunity for a grand bargain in the security architecture between NATO and Russia.
This issue concludes with seven book reviews, most of them dealing with war, such as Yves Tremblay’s critical assessment of Tim Cook’s The Fight for History: 75 Years of Forgetting, Remembering and Remaking Canada’s Second World War, and Jessi Gilchrist’s examination of Vanda Wilcox’s major work on The Italian Empire and the Great War. But others focus on IPE themes, such as Sean Byrnes’ review of Eric Helleiner’s novel account and exceptional survey of The Neomercantalists: A Global History, which acquaints readers with a diverse range of intellectual traditions from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia, that generally tend to be neglected in the traditional international relations field; and Joshua McEvoy’s appraisal of Peter Newell’s Power Shift: The Global Political Economy of Energy Transitions and its focus on the acceleration of transitions to a low-carbon economy. Capping off the diversification of themes, it is worth mentioning Mark Haichin’s evaluation of Mark Bell’s account of Nuclear Reactions: How Nuclear-Armed States Behave, a book that ought to be of relevance today in light of Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric of escalating to limited nuclear war should NATO become further involved in the Russia-Ukraine conflict; Alexander Kirss’s lucid report on Michael Brenes’s book, For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy, which attributes the outlandish US military budget to shifting domestic political coalitions that favour the military industrial complex over racialized minority groups in that country; and Heather Smith’s look at the edited volume by Jill Campbell-Miller, Greg Donaghy, and Stacey Barker, titled Breaking Barriers, Shaping Worlds: Canadian Women and the Search for Global Order, a novel examination of the role Canadian women from various walks of life have played in shaping the narrative in the search for global order.
We hope that you, the reader, will be stimulated by the variety and expanding themes which this issue of International Journal brings to you, and that the content of this issue will stir up conversations and debates around the evolving nature of international relations during the period of flux and uncertainty in which we find ourselves.