Defence Minister Bill Blair and HFX President Peter Van Praagh at the 2023 Halifax Security Forum/HFX

By Peter Van Praagh

October 23, 2024

Earlier this month and for the first time ever, HFX released two contrasting agendas for its annual Halifax International Security Forum. The first agenda, Darkness Defeated: New Eras Arrive casts the future of global security in a hopeful and confident light. The second agenda, 2025: Dark Eras Arrive dismantles hope, and describes a cruel world made safe for misery and doom. The reasoning behind our unprecedented release of two contrasting agendas befitting two possible paths forward for the world is well worth unpacking as a prelude to this year’s Forum.

Since its first meeting in 2009, Halifax International Security Forum has taken great care to curate meaningful late-November conversations that look back at the year that was, learn from its events and project forward in an earnest attempt to prepare the community of democracies for the year ahead. We take this responsibility very seriously because we are asking serious people to travel long distances, sometimes halfway around the world, to Nova Scotia, when the weather is less than gorgeous. Getting the agenda exactly right each year has helped earn the Forum its reputation as one of the most important annual meetings anywhere in the world.

The 15th anniversary Forum in November 2023 was an opportunity to look back at unfinished business from the past decade and a half and ahead to meet what we considered to be the most pressing global security issue in the world, victory in Ukraine.  Barely a month before we were scheduled to convene, Hamas unleashed its grotesque October 7 attack in southern Israel. As the world’s attention shifted away from Ukraine and toward the new war in Gaza, the Forum placed the world’s spotlight back on Ukraine.  Identifying the Hamas attack not as a stand-alone event, but as a new front of a global confrontation against democracy and civilization, the Forum introduced the world to the CRINKs—a new acronym for China, Russia, Iran and North Korea—and the countries behind the effort to undermine the global order.

HFX declared that the world’s democracies must come together to stop this multi-front attack and the best and most immediate way forward was forcing Vladimir Putin to withdraw from Ukraine. Within that framing, each of the eight plenary panels – whether about Israel’s security, East Asia, food security, climate change or tech – included the phrase, Victory in Ukraine. At the very time that the global public was turning away from Ukraine, the 2023 Halifax agenda made the singular point that every global issue was connected to the concerted effort to support its unambiguous victory.

Writing the November 2023 agenda, as challenging as it might have been, was nothing compared to the challenges of writing the agenda for the November 2024 Halifax International Security Forum. Indeed, we identified November 2024 as a hinge of history, a specific moment in time when decisions made will have an exceptionally momentous influence on the future. Getting the agenda right was fundamental to our continued credibility. However, there was (and continues to be) an event on the calendar between the date that the international community expected the release of our agenda and the late November Forum: the US presidential election.

It was only at this stage, when we had two contrasting agendas and no reliable crystal ball to predict who was going to win the US presidential election, did we consider publishing both.

For the first time since the Second World War, and, more pertinently, the first time since the Halifax International Security Forum began convening, the two main candidates for US president offered starkly contrasting visions for America’s role in the world. And since the American role in global security and foreign policy is massively more significant than that of any other single country, it appeared at first glance that we had two choices for preparing the 2024 Forum agenda. In the first instance, we could simply wait and release the agenda after the results of the US election were known. This was not ideal because the defence ministers, legislators and general officers who travel to Halifax to present their ideas to the world expected an agenda on time. Moreover, since some observers predict that the world won’t know the actual winner of the election for days or even weeks after 5 November, we also couldn’t know for sure when we would publish the agenda.

In the second instance, we considered releasing an agenda that would make sense regardless of who wins the election. This thread-the-needle exercise demanded that we ignore the significant differences that each presidential candidate would bring to the world.  The result was a product that was mind-numbingly dull. However, the natural next step, predicting the outcome of the US presidential election resulted in drafts that were far from dull, but of course risked being both completely irrelevant should our prediction fail and the other side win.

It was only at this stage, when we had two contrasting agendas and no reliable crystal ball to predict who was going to win the US presidential election, did we consider publishing both. But first came the market tests: we asked American friends of the Forum who we knew for certain were Trump or Harris supporters what they thought of the two starkly different agendas. Perhaps predictably—but not to us—both sides gave the agendas positive feedback because they presumed that their candidate would be the one delivering the positive version of the future, and that their candidate’s opponent would be delivering the negative. In other words, the 2024 Halifax agenda conundrum became a Rorschach test for US partisans. Trump supporters and Harris supporters both thought Darkness Defeated: New Eras Arrive would be the chosen Halifax agenda should their candidate prevail.

In the end, HFX concluded that the future of world events will not be wholly decided by voters in the Philadelphia suburbs. The decision of whether to follow Ukraine’s example of fighting for what is right or the dark path laid out by the CRINKs will linger past the 5 November US presidential election results.

The people who attend Halifax International Security Forum each year are a brave bunch who are committed to freedom and the responsibilities that come with it. Regardless of who wins the US presidential election, the world will keep spinning and it will be up to individuals, institutions and governments committed to democracy to ensure that darkness will be defeated and that we won’t wait too long for new eras of peace and prosperity to arrive.

Peter Van Praagh is President of HFX.

The 2024 Halifax International Security Forum Contrasting Agendas:

New Eras Arrive

Darkness Defeated: New Eras Arrive

Era of Unity: Victory in Ukraine

Era of Action: Sinking CRINK Inc

Era of Adventure: Protecting Our Arctic from Russia and China

Era of Opportunity: Immigrants Excel

Era of Integrity: AI Applications Evolve

Era of Innovation:  Tomorrow’s Technologies Rebuilding Ukraine’s Grid

Era of Optimism: The American Century Resumes.

Dark Eras Arrive

2025: Dark Eras Arrive

Era of Division: Ukraine Fights; We Might

Era of Distance: CRINK Inc Advances

Era of Doubt: Russia and China Into Our Arctic

Era of Dread: Immigrants Extinguished

Era of Denial: AI Unleashed

Era of Danger: Ignoring Energy Opportunities

Era of Defeat: Democracies Retreat . . .