Afghanistan and the Revolution in Canadian Foreign Policy
| Published date | 01 September 2008 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200806300309 |
| Date | 01 September 2008 |
| Author | Alexander Moens |
| Subject Matter | Canada-Germany RelationEssays in Honour of Robert Spencer |
Alexander Moens
Afghanistan and
the revolution in
Canadian foreign
policy
| International Journal | Summer 2008 | 569 |
After the end of the Cold War, Canada continued to participate in UN peace-
keeping missions and NATO operations, but there was no overall strategic
sense about priorities. While defence dollars shrank by more than 20 percent
in the 1990s, the 1994 white paper on defence made few hard choices or
trade-offs. Even so, there was no follow-up in terms of new equipment to
match strategy.
The drift was halted with the arrival of Lloyd Axworthy as the new for-
eign minister in 1996. Canada began to develop a new foreign policy based
on a soft power variant called human security that emphasizes networking
and coalition-building among civil society groups. Human security replaces
Alexander Moens is a fellow of the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute, a senior
fellow at the Fraser Institute, and a professor of political science at Simon Fraser University.
He has published widely on US foreign policy, NATO, and European security. He would
like to thank Lewis Mackenzie, Jack Granatstein, Alain Pellerin, Brian MacDonald, Paul
Manson, David G. Haglund, and Carl Hodge for their comments on earlier drafts.
1 Government of Canada, “Canada’s international policy statement: A role of pride and
influence in the world,” Ottawa, 2005.
the concept of national interest with the perspective of assisting individuals
and groups at conflict inside failing states. While the idea of human security
came from the world of social and economic development, Axworthy took it
into the international security realm. Canada played a pivotal role in rallying
the global network of nongovernmental organizations and willing govern-
ments to sign a new treaty on banning the production, sale, and use of anti-
personnel landmines. Canada also played a key role in the negotiations that
led to the International Criminal Court in 1998. Talks on banning small arms
exports and protecting war-affected children were also initiated.
Human security influenced Canadian defence policy—as it did in like-
minded allies such as the Netherlands—by developing the 3D approach in
which diplomacy, development, and defence form a single team to help the
population in failed states such as in Bosnia, Haiti, and Afghanistan. Cana-
dian forces, in turn, borrowed the so-called three-block operational approach
developed by the US Marine Corps whereby soldiers are trained to move
quickly from peace enforcement to stabilization to humanitarian assistance
and civil reconstruction operations.
The attacks of 9/11 generated the biggest change in American security
policy since the onset of containment in the early 1950s. By defining the new
priority as an international war on terror, the US pushed hard against the
working consensus among western countries that failed states could best be
fixed with a mixture of human security and development policies. The Ax-
worthy agenda gradually moved to the background in Canada’s foreign policy
with Axworthy’s retirement from politics.
Canada’s commitment to “light” UN peacekeeping missions also began
to dry up . Only 60 Canadian personnel were deployed in UN missions in
2006. In its place has come a robust commitment to creating security con-
ditions in Afghanistan. The switch away from human security to more tra-
ditional military operations began in the last year of the Liberal government
led by Paul Martin. In 2004, for the first time ever, Canada issued a
national
rather than an international security policy. It put the protection of Canadians
and Canadian territory as an unambiguous priority. The international policy
statement issued in 2005, still mentions the “responsibility to protect,” but
the defence section emphasizes stronger Canadian defence, more coopera-
tion with the United States, and renewal of expeditionary capabilities.1The
| 570 | International Journal | Summer 2008 |
| Alexander Moens |
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