Grappling with Peace

Abstract

I do not really think that we will get closer to by multiplying the number of technicians working in laboratories on scientific lines. We have to grapple with the untidy problems of the real world rather than retreat into an atmosphere where it is all too easy to construct solutions.John W Holmes, 1961'There is a view in some parts of the Canadian foreign policy establishment - mirrored more broadly in the populace as a whole - that international brokerage politics, with professional Canadian diplomats punching above our weight as a middle power in the world, is the most important instrument by which global might be sustained and secured.While such a perspective stems from the best of intentions, peace is not uniquely the product of diplomatic consensus, the engineering of treaties, or the intervention of honest brokers and well-intentioned or trusted intermediaries with inspired wordsmithing - the theoretical solutions to which John Holmes referred. On the contrary: comes only when combatants, actual or potential, believe that will bring more general benefits than war, insurgency, or terrorism.The hard reality is that the so-called golden age of Canadian diplomacy that we commonly associate with Lester B. Pearson was only possible because Canada had been part of an alliance that stopped the Axis powers, albeit with devastating if unavoidable destruction of Japanese and German military and civilian targets, after a war initiated by fascists that claimed 60 million lives worldwide. And in that conflict, Canadians played more than our fair military role, on the land, in the air, on the high seas. In the process, we lost, on a per capita basis, a tremendous amount of blood and treasure.But this commitment did earn us a place at the tables where the instruments of like the United Nations, NATO, and the international declaration of human rights were negotiated. Canadian diplomats of Pearson's generation, John Holmes included, performed above and beyond in so many forums to bring great credit to Canada and meaningful benefit to the world. But those points of constructive leverage were available to Canada because they were earned. They were earned by members of the Canadian armed forces at Hong Kong, Dieppe, Juno, Montecassino; on the transatlantic convoy routes and in the resupply of Russia at Murmansk; and by those on the home front producing munitions, ships, aircraft, and other materiel for the war effort. They were earned on the battlefields of Korea. And they were earned because the courtly and decent Louis St. Laurent, Pearson's prime minister through the early 1950s, not only maintained a huge Canadian military presence in Germany with other allies against the Soviet threat, but did so with jet fighters in the Royal Canadian Air Force armed with nuclear weapons long before the debate over the Bomarc missile that plagued the Conservative government of John Diefenbaker, first elected in 1957.Importantly, Pearson's superb initiative during the Suez crisis in 1956, one to which John Holmes was a significant contributor, was driven as much by our pivotal position as a self-reliant and deployment-capable NATO partner, trusted by allies like the US, Britain, and France, and understood by the Israelis to be both safe and trustworthy, as it was by a Canadian desire for peace. For Canada, the stakes were high. The western alliance was deeply fractured. With Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviet Union threatening to bomb London, there was a serious escalation of the thermonuclear threat. Israel, whose birth and very borders had been designed by Canadians like General E.LM. Burns, was facing Gamal Abdel Nasser, an Egyptian leader who was both a keen Soviet client and, in the context of dictatorships ofthat era, a popular Arab leader throughout the Middle East.But Pearson's initiative was underwritten by both real capacity and widespread trust. …