Colin Robertson

April 10, 2022

The global cold war between autocracy and democracy has suddenly turned hot. Unless we stop him, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine will be the first in a series of such hot wars. Canada and its fellow democracies must now quickly deliver to Ukraine the weapons that can prevent that cascade.

As many, including President Joe Biden, have pointed out, the democracies and the liberal world order created by them are being undermined by China and Russia. Now, Putin has moved the confrontation into conflict. Indifference by most NATO governments, including Canada’s, to the defence commitments set by NATO in 2014 likely convinced Putin that NATO was an alliance with feet of straw.

Putin’s objective, spelled out over the years, is to restore the sphere of influence that defined the Soviet Union. For Putin, dissolution of the Soviet Union was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century. His immediate goal is consolidating his hold over the puppet “peoples’ republics” of Luhansk and Donetsk by May 9 – Victory Day – when Russians celebrate the end of the Great Patriotic War (1941-45).

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland got it right when she told the House of Commons in her budget speech on April 7 that “Putin and his henchmen are war criminals. The world’s democracies—including our own—can be safe only once the Russian tyrant and his armies are entirely vanquished.”

Russia is applying all-out warfare, including disinformation and cyberattacks. Russian atrocities were graphically displayed before the UN Security Council by President Volodymyr Zelenskyi. NATO needs to respond with strategic decision-making on two levels: first the conflict in Ukraine and second, what may be a long confrontation with authoritarianism.

The Ukraine conflict requires a variety of decisions. NATO leaders, who represent the security of democracies in Europe, set forth their political aims at their Brussels summit (March 24) reaffirming their “unwavering support for the independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of Ukraine” while resolving “to counter Russia’s attempts to destroy the foundations of international security and stability.”

Canada and its fellow NATO partners must set aside their misplaced morality about providing offensive or defensive, lethal or non-lethal weapons. When you are defending your home, you need whatever it takes.

The military decisions to support that political aim require immediate delivery of arms and supplies to the Ukrainian forces. In the coming days, Ukraine must hold and recover its lost land. When it comes to the inevitable ceasefire, negotiations will depend on field position.

Canada and its fellow NATO partners must set aside their misplaced morality about providing offensive or defensive, lethal or non-lethal weapons. When you are defending your home, you need whatever it takes. NATO needs to re-examine all options: Can we break the Russian naval blockade of Ukrainian ports to get supplies into the hands of the defenders? What about re-evaluating the risks of a no-fly-zone?

To keep NATO at bay, Putin threatens to use weapons of mass destruction (WMD) so he can cement his conquest. This is blackmail. The G7 and NATO cannot let Putin’s threats deter them from supplying Ukraine with whatever arms and support that it needs to drive out the invader.

Other rogue actors are watching closely. If Putin cows the G7 and NATO, then we can expect China’s Xi Jinping to move on Taiwan. We can also expect a possible expansion in nuclear proliferation as others — starting with Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Syria — seek to acquire their own nukes.

Ukraine must rue the day it gave up its post-Soviet nuclear arsenal — then the world’s third largest — in return for a guarantee of its sovereignty, encoded in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 signed by Russia, United Kingdom and the United States and now violated egregiously by Russia.

That the US must shoulder the bulk of the military burden is a sad reflection of how many in the Alliance, including Canada, let our forces wither. The G7 and NATO also need a strategy for the peace negotiations. Will a ceasefire be backed with peacekeepers? We know what value Russian guarantees are worth. Russia or China will likely veto any UN supervision, so under whose auspices will peace operations take place?

Then there is the question of Ukrainian neutrality, something that Zelenskyi says he’d consider with security guarantees. In 2008, Ukraine applied for NATO membership but wariness by France and Germany and a change in Ukraine’s own political leadership in 2010 put this on ice. In the preface to his prescient 2017 thriller, War with Russia, General (retired) Sir Richard Shirreff wrote that: “Ukraine is just too far away to defend if attacked by Russia.” “Posturing by the West,” warned Shirreff, who had served as deputy commander of NATO, “only fed a deep-seated Russian paranoia about a perceived NATO strategy of ever-increasing containment.”

With Ukraine now the greatest prize in Putin’s intended conquests, NATO leaders will be pressed to reconsider their ambivalence about Ukrainian membership. Most military analysts predict the conflict, which began in February 2014 when Russia invaded the Donbas and annexed Crimea, could go on for years, so this is a decision that can wait. For their part, the European Union is putting Ukraine on the track for membership.

Meanwhile, we need to think about reconstruction. Given the strong people-to-people ties with Ukraine – Canada was the first western nation to recognize the newly independent Ukraine in 1991 – this is a task we should volunteer to take on. Ukraine will require a Marshall-like plan to rebuild its cities, ports, highways and electrical grids. Its nuclear power plants clearly need attention.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has already opened the door to litigation that should include reparations assessed against Russia. There should also be a standing reservation for Putin and his henchmen at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for their ever-increasing war crimes.

The bigger question for the liberal democracies is how to manage what is now an open confrontation with autocracy. At the international level, even though cooperation, confrontation and conflict are inextricably linked, as General (retired) Sir Rupert Smith argues in his brilliant Utility of Force, confrontations do not have to involve conflict although actions in one will influence the other.

Confrontations, argues Smith, can be competitive but cooperative. Think of the shared challenge of climate change and what we are trying to achieve through the Paris Agreement and Glasgow Pact. It can be adversarial, like the contest around artificial intelligence or quantum computing, where the goal is to come first and thus gain competitive advantage. It can be violent, but within agreed rules such as the Geneva Conventions, with enforcement through the ICJ and ICC.

For now, the rules-based system that gave us relative peace, lifting billions out of poverty (with China the biggest beneficiary) is under seige. The democracies’ reliance on the United Nations Charter and multilateral norms means nothing to the authoritarians except as tools to obfuscate, dupe and manipulate to their own advantage.

As President Zelenskyi tartly noted, given current geopolitical rifts, the guaranteed veto for the permanent members of the UN Security Council renders it no longer fit for purpose. The consensus-based multilateral system – the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Trade Organization (WTO) – needs reform. In an age of democracy vs. autocracy, guaranteed vetoes and decisions requiring unanimity make for a series of deadlocks.

Years of turning the other cheek and naively hoping for a change of behavior has only encouraged covert chicanery by a Russia and China determined to undermine democracy globally.

Given the mutual decoupling that has begun between the democracies and authoritarians, those nations respecting human rights and enforcing high standards on labour and the environment, need to create new associations of the like-minded. The Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) is an example.

In an age of disinformation, the democracies also need to do a better job of telling our story and then actively defending liberty and human rights.

The autocrats have a natural advantage in that they control information in their own countries and have mastered disinformation techniques abroad. The democracies need to get back in the game using, for example, their intelligence capacity as the USA and United Kingdom did with effect to discredit Putin’s ‘Big Lie’ about the impending invasion.

For Canada, the increase in Budget 2022 for security and the defence of our North does not come close to catch-up. We remain in the rear of the Alliance when it comes to meeting the NATO commitment of 2 percent spending on defence by 2024. A review of Strong, Secure and Engaged — Canada’s defence policy as of 2017 — is overdue, but it’s not enough. We need a comprehensive strategy that looks at the threats to our global position, squares with NATO’s forthcoming Strategic Concept, and integrates national security, diplomacy and development.

Years of turning the other cheek and naively hoping for a change of behavior has only encouraged covert chicanery by a Russia and China determined to undermine democracy globally. That the democracies represent a “minority” of the global population was underlined in the February 4 statement signed by Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin signaling a new era of Sino-Russian relations.

Outside the G7, EU and NATO, only a handful of nations – Australia, New Zealand, Bahamas, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Switzerland – have actually sanctioned Russia. Parse the votes at the UN General Assembly condemning the Russian invasion and then suspending Russian membership in the UN Human Rights Council and you find nations representing the bulk of global population either abstained or voted against the motions. In terms of economic heft, sanctions have been imposed by countries representing more than 60 percent of the global economy.

Like it or not, we are engaged in a new war. Ukraine only reinforces the requirement that the democracies be better prepared for what is going to be a continuing confrontation on issues ranging from security to trade to human rights. When the security guardrails collapse, we can expect conflict through proxies in regions like the Middle East and Africa.

The old Roman maxim “if you want peace, prepare for war” still applies. If diplomacy ends wars, deterrence and winning the battles that set the stage for peace settlements, require armed force. Deterrence means spending more on defence.

What is needed immediately is timely, forceful and collective action by Canada and fellow democracies to get arms to Ukrainians so that they can take back their country.

Contributing writer Colin Robertson, Fellow and Senior Advisor at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute in Ottawa, is a former senior Canadian foreign service officer who has served in Washington, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and New York.