Canada in the Great Power Game, by Gwynne Dyer

Abstract

Gwynne Dyer Canada in the Power Toronto: Random House Canada, 2014. 423 pp., $34.95 (cloth) ISBN: 978-0-307-36168-4For the past three decades Gwynne Dyer has been an incisive and often contrarian writer on international security affairs. Canada and the Power continues this tradition. It reads like a series of lectures delivered to a general audience interested in the evolution of the international system, and Canada's place in it, through the great conflicts of the twentieth century. The result is informative and accessible, if somewhat incomplete.Dyer mixes history-chronologically tracing Canada's participation in wars and the often tense periods of peace in between-with an analysis of political decision making and the public's evolving opinion of Canada's overseas engagements. Interspersed with this are quotations from the soldiers, diplomats, and statespeople who participated in and shaped Canada's transition from colonial dependence to what could be described as pseudo-independence from the whims and priorities of larger nations. Between the main chapters Dyer takes the reader on several counterfactual journeys, or excursions, in which he permits himself to ask and answer what might have happened had Canada not gone to war in 1914.Dyer's examination of the wars of the first half of the twentieth century reveals that Canada played the great game of nations because a healthy plurality of voters and the political class wished it so. The author seems uncomfortable with this, emphasizing the political headaches it caused for successive prime ministers who struggled to reconcile their own (and English Canada's) affinity for Britain with the cause of national unity. They were aware of the emergence of national interests that might be distinct from those of the imperial overlord but, recognizing that the times were critical, knew that Canada could not stand aloof-even at the price of stoking nationalism in Quebec or the resentment of prairie farmers. But just what the Great Power Game is (or was) is only vaguely defined, leaving the reader to wonder what motivates great-power behaviour, and how smaller states such as Canada could play the game to their own advantage.Dyer's suggestion that the First World War had no moral content (175) will strike some readers as contentious, but it deserves a fair hearing as we mark the centenary of that conflagration. His tale of how Canadian policymakers passed up opportunities to change the rules of the great game for the better will feel like a bucket of cold water. Whereas Canadians are apt to think of themselves as longtime supporters of collective security (i.e., the common duty of all nations to oppose, and if necessary reverse, naked aggression), Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King was clearly no fan of the League of Nations. Like his American contemporaries he did not appreciate the globalizing nature of security in the wake of the War.The game continued after 1945 as the great powers forged a more durable peace through the United Nations, of which Dyer writes approvingly, if not critically. He is at his provocative best when he tackles the excesses of the nuclear arms race and the fateful decision to acquire the BOMARC nuclear-tipped missile at a time when the manned bomber was being eclipsed by the threat of intercontinental ballistic missiles. …