I recently had the great pleasure of listening to an expert panel speak on the state of the Canadian Armed Forces within the context of the world geopolitical situation. It was both enlightening and a bit depressing, but exactly the sort of discussion that needs to occur. Canadians MUST be better informed in order to make the correct decisions.

The panel was privileged to have an internationally respected historian and sinologist, Dr James Boutilier. He was asked to set the stage with an opening address, and Jim did so brilliantly. As one speaker said: Jim somehow manages to inspire while making you contemplate suicide! Humour aside, Jim’s opening remarks need to be read widely and so I asked if he would allow me to publish them here. I have never had a “guest post” and am honoured to begin with what I described to my erudite friend as his version of Pericles’ speech to the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War. Here it is in its entirety.

The Vortex: A World in Peril

The 20^th Century only lasted for 77 years. It began in Europe with the failed attempt to create a Greater Yugoslavia. It ended in June 1991 when Yugoslavia began to come apart. Six months later, to the day, the vast and loathsome Soviet empire imploded. Was the century even worth it? Tens of millions died in China’s artificial famine, in the bizarre social experiments of Pol Pot, and in global wars. To what end? Arguably, for nothing.

The 20^th Century was an exponential century. Our capacity to kill rose exponentially from Lee-Enfield rifles to hydrogen bombs. Our capacity to travel rose with equal rapidity. Phileas Fogg’s eighty day journey around the world shrank to little more than a day. In 1900 the American book publishing industry published just over 9,000 new books. By 2000 that figure had risen to 2.3 million! But the truly staggering increase came in the demographic realm. The world population was 1.5 billion in 1900 and 6.5 billion in 2000. It had taken since time immemorial for the global population to reach one billion in the 1880s and, thereafter, it began to rise like that 20^th Century icon, the rocket. Broadly speaking the century was characterized by gigantism and speed; everything seemed bigger and faster.

A profound sea change occurred towards the end of the century. Technology turned inwards. The focus was on microscopic genes, on the exquisite architecture of electronic chips that were so small that they confounded the eye, and on a miasma of tiny clues which, collectively, delivered a frightening message; for the first time in human history man had succeeded in fundamentally reshaping the planet’s environment. This was an act of profound hubris, conceit, and lethality. Not only was the world warming, but biodiversity was declining, and pollution was mounting. The outlook was existential.

Air travel, the internet, and global shipping began to tie the world together as never before. Analysts spoke in fulsome terms about the benefits of globalization. Surely, greater social and economic integration and interaction was a global good. Globalization, in fact, became a new theology; a holy writ that held out the promise of greater and greater prosperity. Simultaneously, there was a unipolar moment when there was only one super power — the United States. The 1990s were the American decade. The Soviet Union was penniless and prostrate; and China was little more than a curiosity, a global pariah after the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Indeed, Tank Man, the solitary figure who had stood before the T-59 tanks in the square, was an enduring metaphor of 20th Century man! The enduring metaphor of the 21st century will probably be a digital Frankenstein, Artificial Intelligence, unleashed.

And then came 9/11. The unipolar decade was over. The excruciating audaciousness of the attacks on the World Trade Centre towers and the Pentagon galvanized American society and sent it off on an enormously costly and futile parabola; wars in Afghanistan and Iraq which proved to be fatal distractions. While the US war machine laboured mightily in the Middle East, Putin’s corrupt and revanchist oligarchy rose from the dead and China ceased to be a peer competitor and became an unqualified threat!

The global mood began to change. Gentility died and values which western societies had long extolled, like honesty, became negotiable. Self-serving politics, bereft of moral compasses, became the norm under the populist banner. The communications revolution continued to run its course; a veritable cornucopia of knowledge and a poison chalice of lies, distortions and deceits. Harnessing this phenomenon was vitally important. If you did, you could control the narrative. The Chinese, for example, tried to erase history from their narrative. Tiananmen was little more than a fantasy. Ukraine, if you believed Putin’s narrative, was, and always had been, a part of Russia!

Curiously, we have ended up with three powerful states, headed by monomaniacs who act like mafiosi dons. Each one, in his own way, is a triumphalist. But each one is profoundly insecure. They all lie uneasily in their beds haunted by enemies from within and without. Xi claims that the United States is a power in terminal decline. That is his reassuring narrative; one which he retails to what we now call the Global South.

Canada is adrift. Naive, self-satisfied, parochial, and entitled; its citizenry living on a legacy from the past. It is that capacity to derive reassurance from our national narrative that appears to have blinded us to the inadequacy of our current performance. The steady diminution of our stature seems to have been only faintly perceived and that failing has endangered us in a host of ways; economically, militarily, and diplomatically. We have become worse than weak. We have become irrelevant; spectators bemused by an increasingly challenging and dangerous world.

Our greatest source of strength — the United States — is now a liability. President Trump, who is dedicated to making America great again, is hard at work weakening the Republic, threatening its alliances, and undermining its reputation. Furthermore, he has identified Canada as a laggard; a free-loader worthy of punishment. His threat to impose punitive tariffs is a mixture of realpolitik, petty vindictiveness, and mean-spirited ignorance. Canada, it seems, is doomed to suffer, in no small part because it has long confused excuses with achievements.

Our innate desire to please and to advance commonsensical solutions is no longer sufficient in a world where rule of law and respect for order are constantly under siege. We are, in fact, in a state of war although we haven’t realized that fact. Our dichotomous world view — that if we are not at war, we must be at peace–has failed us abjectly. We are being assaulted from all sides–foreign interference, cyber warfare, disregard for international law, sabotage, espionage, and so forth. But we have lacked the awareness, the leadership and the vision to respond authoritatively.

Geostrategically, we have been dealt a losing hand. While it could be said that we are lucky to be surrounded by oceans and flanked by the world’s most powerful nation, we are a part of, and responsible for, the defence of our True North. That is a colossal region; distant, lethal, and criminally devoid of defences. Furthermore, almost every other theatre of war that we can contemplate is thousands of miles from our shores. Our arsenals are empty, our supply train is nearly non-existent, our troops are few, and our weapons, more likely than not, unready.