Conor here: While Axworthy tries to lay the blame at the feet of the authoritarian governments, it’s hard to see any progress being made until the US regains some semblance of sanity—if that happens. The bipartisan elite desire in The Blob to dismantle certain nuclear states tends to make that difficult, as does launching wars on non-nuclear states, which only increases desires for the bomb. Even if Axworthy’s cause diagnosis is off, his warning about the current situation is worth listening to.
Lloyd Axworthy is a Canadian statesman, academic, and former Liberal cabinet minister who served as Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1995 to 2000 under Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. During his 27-year political career — six years in the Manitoba legislature and 21 in federal Parliament — he became internationally known for advancing the concept of “human security,” most notably through his leadership in creating the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel landmines. Cross posted from theanalysis.news.
Barry Stevens
Hi, welcome to theAnalysis. I’m Barry Stevens. In a moment, I’m going to be joined by Lloyd Axworthy, the former Foreign Minister of Canada, and by the Globe and Mail’s Doug Saunders. In a two-part conversation, we’re going to be talking first about the collapse of nuclear arms control and nuclear proliferation. In the second part, the United States’ attack on the International Criminal Court.
Now, you can catch us on theAnalysis.news website, where there’s a donate button if you feel willing and able to donate, and of course on YouTube and on various audio platforms such as Spotify and Apple. We’ll see you in a moment.
I’m Barry Stevens. I’m a documentary writer and filmmaker. Joining me is Doug Saunders, a longtime award-winning journalist, been to numerous countries, and perhaps, for my money, the most interesting columnist in the Globe and Mail. He’s written very originally about 21st century cities and human migration, many things.
We’re here to talk with Lloyd Axworthy, whose career spans nearly half a century in public life. As Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, he led the 1997 Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel landmines, presided over the UN Security Council a couple of times, and championed the idea of human security, which is significant for us today, I think, and played a major role in the creation of the International Criminal Court. Since then he’s been a university president, and chaired the World Refugee and Migration Council. He recently published a memoir, and, super interesting to me, served as international co-president of the World Federalist Movement.
Lloyd Axworthy
I did, yes.
Barry Stevens
Fair to say he’s been a very significant critic of Canada’s foreign policy and the state of international institutions. So today we’re going to talk about, I hope, nukes and the ICC a little bit if we can, if we have time.
Lloyd Axworthy
Sure.
Barry Stevens
Just to set up the nuclear thing, the last nuclear arms control treaty between Russia and the U.S.A expired earlier this year. The U.S.A is spending a lot of money modernizing its nuclear weapons, and Russia is building novel weapons to evade the so-called Golden Dome that President Trump thinks will protect the United States, which I have no doubt Canada will be involved in.
Nuclear threats have been made by President Putin and the U.S. president over Iran, and most recently, as you were writing about, Lloyd, Washington has struck a civil nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, which I think includes enrichment rights, while using military force against Iran’s nuclear program. So, the nuclear age has always been dangerous, but Lloyd, are we in a particularly dangerous time right now?
Lloyd Axworthy
I think it was dangerous because the efforts of 40, 50 years of building some guardrails, some constraints, some standards, some protective devices like red phones have all been eliminated. I think Canada, as I’ve said before, has what I always thought was a particular legacy, going back to ’45, ’46, where Canada made the decision, which nobody pays much attention to, but we had every single necessary element to become a nuclear weapons state, and we decided not to. The Saint-Laurent government— and I’ve gone back to check Hansard, and there was some sort of a preliminary debate, but it was unanimous in the House. Canada decided to become a non-nuclear state. To me, that set up a legacy which has been followed ever since up until now.
I think we’ve, for reasons that we don’t— the depth of it, the commitment, and even the machinery— Global Affairs Canada no longer has what for a time was one of the best nuclear development diplomatic centers in GAC. That’s all kind of been shut down. No discussions. They don’t go to the meetings. We bypass the whole discussion on the treaty against banning nuclear weapons. We’re not engaged in the efforts, as I wrote about, in terms of the proliferation of sharing our issues. In fact, I still have a really kind of a serious itch that in the arrangements or agreements we’re making with Saudi Arabia, we might just be including uranium and know-how into that package. We never know because the Carney government isn’t very forthcoming in what its deals are.
I think we’re now at a stage where you’re basically saying, not just a proliferation of potential sites, but as you’ve described, brand new delivery systems and bombs that can be— and increasingly, if you look at the language of the United States, Russia, and China, it’s in the language of saying, “Well, we’re kind of reaching a stage where nuclear weapons are no longer the kind of sober mushroom hanging over the world. We can do things in a much more targeted, calculated way,” which just isn’t true. There’s just no point to it. So it’s one of those pillars of international conflict management that has fallen by the wayside.
Doug Saunders
There’s a—
Barry Stevens
Sorry, go ahead, Doug, please.
Doug Saunders
I just think this is a strange historical moment for this to be occurring, for the institutional infrastructure of nonproliferation to be fading. Because on one hand, we have the language of nuclear deterrence entering the vocabularies of a number of countries again. On the other hand, the last couple of years have really shown the world and countries that might be seeking them how ineffective and pointless the concept of deterrence is, at least against neighboring countries. Because in the last couple of years, we’ve seen Ukraine, a non-nuclear state, occupy a province of Russia, an oblast of Russia, a famously nuclear state, for more than a year, knowing full well that Russia would not and could not retaliate because using nuclear weapons against a geographically adjoining country would effectively be attacking your own population.
We’ve also seen India and Pakistan go to war against each other.
Lloyd Axworthy
Right.
Doug Saunders
India destroyed a significant amount of Pakistan’s air force and so on in a conventional war, again, knowing full well that nuclear deterrent is useless against a geographically adjoining state. You can argue about whether it has any use anywhere else. So the lesson coming out of this period should be that there’s not a lot of value in the considerable expense and risk of developing a nuclear arsenal. Yet there’s nobody saying that now because, as you say, the institutions that should be doing that have been neutered.
Lloyd Axworthy
Right. Yes, I mean, it’s become a kind of commedia dell’arte. You just go through the routines, you use the language, you hold meetings, and nothing happens. In fact, in the meantime, you’ve got North Korea, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia; I mean, they’re all beginning to nibble at the corners of this because, I guess, in terms of the great power language, the fact that Trump has blown the American mystique of being the all-powerful arbiter, people are kind of losing trust in anything they can do. So they’re saying we have to do it ourselves.
I mean, Europe is a good example where you’ve now got serious discussions in European countries about whether they have to have their own nuclear weapons. I go back to one old sort of— I had an international law professor way back in graduate school named Richard Falk, and he said, “The basic axiom is if you keep producing weapons, one of these days you’re going to use them.”
Barry Stevens
Yeah, and in fact, of course, despite deterrence, as you say, not being very effective, people can even fight wars while they have nuclear weapons without using them. Nevertheless, they are on a hair trigger in the sense that the United States has a vast arsenal of land-based missiles which will be targeted. Therefore, if there’s information coming in that they appear to be targeted, the president, of course, has five or 10 minutes. This president has five or 10 minutes to decide whether to use them or lose them, and then we’re adding artificial intelligence into this mix.
Lloyd Axworthy
Into the mix. That’s the big one. I mean, Barry, just to make that comment, I mean, we’re seeing daily, if not twice daily, the President of the United States is basically off his rocker in so many ways. At what point does his frustration, his anger, his inability to win primary nominations in Colorado force him to say, “I’m going to do something dramatic to show exactly what I mean.” You just don’t know how thin of an edge it is between the control system there, because right now there isn’t any rule that he doesn’t think he can break.
Barry Stevens
Yeah, there was a guy I spoke to who was a former State Department fellow called Tom Countryman who talked about the ecology, not just the treaties but the ecology, meaning the network of people who know each other, who know communication, and that does appear to have withered too. Would you say, like, in your time, you would perhaps have more collegial or conversant relationships with Soviets than exist now?
Lloyd Axworthy
Yes, that’s right. In fact, just a small history tidbit, but the Russian foreign minister at the time, Igor Ivanov, he and I were probably the two strongest sort of anti-nuclears at the time. We really bonded in a sense because he was pretty quickly dismissed when Putin came in. There are a lot of Russians who remember that.
I’m just writing a piece I’m sure nobody will read, but I’m probably the last of a generation of Canadians that actually grew up during World War II and can remember what it was all about. We’re forgetting all that, and with it, the whole nuclear threat, because people were scared silly. Hiroshima, it’ll just change the mindset of two or three generations, but it has no impact anymore.
Barry Stevens
Yeah, I’ve actually often thought that the leaders right up to George H.W. Bush in the United States were in the war, or even Putin now, of course, lost his brother, and so he still perhaps recalls it, although not much. But no other leader really has that actual physical personal memory. But, you know, we talk about it all collapsing, but there is this Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Doug Saunders
Yes.
Barry Stevens
I just looked it up; I think 100 countries— that’s more than half the countries in the world— have signed it. Canada has remained not enthusiastic. Is there any role for those middle powers who might have some influence, and should they? Is this a good thing, this treaty? Should they push it?
Lloyd Axworthy
Well, I always go that anything you can build that has the motive or the objective of putting some constraint, some rail guard on the use of weapons and war needs to be encouraged. The treaty itself, I mean, you know, as you said earlier, we did a landmine treaty without great powers being involved. I’m sorry, the exception: France and Great Britain joined in, but the Americans were disdainful. The Russians, no way. China, a very small group; they were along with Cuba and sort of Nicaragua and a few others.
The reality is, I think— here’s a lesson that I think I learned from my time— is that setting norms— I know that sounds like a very United Church kind of expression— but setting norms has an important influence on determining the use of power in the world. The more you can put some norms out there, extol them, add to them, use them, and getting the information out, it’s all a part of building a sort of bulwark against the ambitions of the military brass who think it’s all okay and politicians who no longer have restraints and particularly those crazies in Silicon Valley who think that maybe it’s a good thing, the world will destroy itself at some point.
Doug Saunders
That may be the best hope, right? That non-proliferation can become a politically valuable thing to be promoting. Because the wrong sort of people are— I think there needs to be, like you say, a making of this back into a norm. That people would want to vote for somebody who’s talking about non-proliferation. I think there are a few too many countries where proliferation has become a marketable political idea for some parties.
Lloyd Axworthy
Yes.
Doug Saunders
I think that’s just— because nobody’s saying it clearly enough.
Lloyd Axworthy
Doug, I’d be interested because you cover it pretty broadly on the international front. Is this a product of the shift into increasingly more right-wing governments whose basic ambition is to, as they like to say, destroy the liberal international democratic systems? Or is there something more to it than that right now?
Doug Saunders
Well, the underlying question there is the big question of the day, which is this wave of illiberal Democrat authoritarians, as they like to say, is it a product of masses of people having lost their minds? Or is it a matter of strongman leaders and extremist parties having manipulated party systems, the electoral systems, and so on, to gain control against the will of majorities?
The one source of optimism is that almost nowhere do the people who have these ideas, including the ideas of nuclear proliferation, have majority support. And the few places where they have, such as Hungary for 15 years and Brazil for a number of years, people have managed to overcome them democratically. Trump has never had a majority, you know, and if you look at who the actual strong believers in his ideology are, that’s an even smaller group. I think it’s when they step over the line into ideas such as arming ourselves up with a nuclear arsenal and therefore becoming a target for reprisals from nuclear arsenals, that’s when publics start to switch. So that’s why I think what you’re saying is important, is because recognizing that it’s a moral wrong and it’s a line that we don’t want to cross is something that can distinguish principled governments and leaders from the other kind.
Barry Stevens
But isn’t it true that a lot of countries, nuclear weapons are almost apolitical in the sense that, for instance, the Labor governments of Britain back in the ’40s very much wanted a nuclear weapon. Right now, France is negotiating to extend its nuclear umbrella across Europe, which they seem quite enthusiastic about. In South Korea, I think two-thirds of South Koreans or more actually want their government to have a nuclear weapon. The reason’s obvious because they fear that the United States won’t protect them anymore. The idea that nuclear weapons will is probably not true, but nevertheless, that’s what’s happening.
Lloyd Axworthy
Well, I think, Barry, you put your finger on that very important point, is that the people— we’ve increasingly lost fear of nuclear weapons, or the sense of awesome destruction that can result. Increasingly, the language is that these are strategic weapons that can be carefully targeted. We have a generation of people. In my sort of ideal here on the shores of Lake Winnipeg, where I’ve got three brothers and a bunch of friends, and we’ve had lots of talks about how today’s generation doesn’t read, doesn’t watch major media, TikTok, Instagram, and the nuclear issue is not part of their lexicon. It’s just not there.
I have a son who teaches civics at the junior high and high school level. He said when he raises Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people say, “What are you talking about?” Is it some kind of new kind of confection from Japan? There is a real information distillation going on, I think, on the issue. When you get countries like Canada that no longer talk about or are interested in it, you weaken it even more. Governments used to provide a fairly strong kind of messaging about it, and they don’t anymore.
Doug Saunders
You know, Barry, I think in that messaging that you mentioned in Europe, and I think this is true in some circles in Canada as well, you sort of have a meshing of two misunderstandings or things that we’ve forgotten, as Lloyd said. One of which, of course, is the moral pointlessness and danger of nuclear weapons, but also is a complete misunderstanding of NATO. The belief that more European countries would need a nuclear arsenal is based on a complete misunderstanding and thinking of NATO as having been a U.S. umbrella protecting countries, when, of course, the history of NATO shows that its main function for countries other than the United States was to be a collective defense alliance. As a collective, it meant that not every member has to have all the things that all the members do. It was a cost reduction method. We can each have our strengths. So even if you do think that some form of symbolic nuclear deterrence is necessary for your country, the fact that two European countries already have that should surely be enough. I think any talk in Germany and so on about developing their own nuclear arsenal— which, by the way, I don’t think is going to go anywhere in that country for a number of reasons that should be all too obvious. But I think it’s, it’s a misunderstanding of the concept of collective defense that’s so important to us right now.
Barry Stevens
It’s ironic. Just to comment, the Manhattan Project was started with a large number of Jewish scientists involved in case the Germans were developing nuclear weapons.
Lloyd Axworthy
The Germans.
Barry Stevens
So it’s kind of ironic that they should be interested in it now.
That was the first part of our conversation with Lloyd Axworthy and Doug Saunders. Please keep an eye out for the second part, in which we’re going to discuss the United States’ attack on the International Criminal Court. So of course you can watch this on theAnalysis.news or on YouTube and various other platforms. And if you enjoy it, please don’t forget to like and subscribe. We’ll see you next time.
