The Written Word
for February 25, 2001

The Missile Defence Initiative, MID, ought to give all of us considerable pause for thought.

Let’s go back to the bad old days when the United States and its allies on one side aimed thousands of nuclear missiles at the old Soviet Union who returned the compliment. This led to mutually assured destruction with the apt acronym MAD. And it also led to an arms race that was out of control. No one could be quite sure how many of various kinds of missiles the other had so the number on both sides proliferated.

There was, however, a degree of safety in MAD. No one wanted to pull the trigger because that would bring an automatic deadly response. And MAD depended upon this – if one side could fire away with no worry about being destroyed in return then it would dominate the world. When Ronald Reagan came up with Star Wars which would have created a shield behind which the Americans could hide it threw the whole notion of MAD into a cocked hat. It was this singular development that bankrupted the Soviet Union and hastened, if it didn’t actually cause, the fall of the Iron Curtain. Star Wars went on the back burner as the threat of nuclear attack receded and the world breathed a tiny bit easier.

Now comes Bush the younger with a new mini Star Wars called Missile Defence Initiative for the stated purpose of protecting the United States and its allies from attacks from rogue states such as Iraq and North Korea. Sounds just fine on the surface and makes great politics in the United States.

Now before going on, one must examine the psychology of the Americans. They take the position that because they are good people who would never harm anyone else, that their motives should be above suspicion. They, after all, are the good guys … the white hats.

The Russians and the Chinese don’t look at it quite that way. They see an America invulnerable to nuclear attack as a menace on the world stage. They see a United States then able to do as it pleased in the Middle East and in the Straits of Formosa for example.

But the Americans say – our new Star Wars is a very junior edition to the Reagan one – we’re only protecting ourselves against these bad little countries with tin pot dictatorships that have developed weapons of mass destruction. We have no intention of expanding the Missile Defence Initiative to include Russia and China. The Russians and Chinese retort but you will have gone a long way towards a full Star Wars Defence and it will be relatively easy to expand your system so as to include us. If you proceed even on what you state to be a limited basis, we must build up our arms and find a way we can penetrate your new defences. For it is only our ability to retaliate that permits us to have our own foreign policy.

Russia and China are quite right if you look at this situation through their eyes. Why should they trust the Americans? At the height of the cold war the US had missile bases all right next door that were aimed at the heart of China and Russia.

There was a time when the United States was isolationist. That was the message of George Washington in his Farewell Address. With the exception of Teddy Roosevelt, the United States, behind it’s self made shield of the Monroe Doctrine which forbade European involvement in the Americas, was uninterested in world affairs. After World War I the US Senate rejected Woodrow Wilson’s efforts to bring the US into world affairs and it wasn’t really until after the Second World War under Harry Truman that America came out of its shell in a big way … first with the Marshall Plan which gave huge aid to battered Europe and the Truman Plan that stopped Soviet expansionism in Europe. Once in, however, the United States quickly became the biggest player in the international game. Perhaps its final rite of passage came with the 1948 Berlin airlift followed two years later by the Korean War. All of this only to demonstrate that to the rest of the world, America is seen as having huge self claimed interests all over the globe, many of which interests clash with those of other powers. Benign though the United States paints its motives, through the eyes of others her moves look pretty aggressive.

What does this all mean?

Simple. When the United States says that its Missile Defence Initiative is only aimed at a couple of rogue states, Russia and China can’t afford to believe them. And lest we think that Russia is a bankrupt state that is a loser on the world stage we should think again. It’s making a comeback and in the very near future, as historical things are reckoned, will be a major player again.

President Bush, with his Missile Defence Initiative – if it can be made to work, which is a big "if" – could by making the United States temporarily invulnerable to nuclear attack re-start the arms race bringing us 1972 all over again with the dangers far exceeding that frightening time and increasing exponentially.

Canada, which can only hope to persuade, must use all its powers of persuasion to steer Washington away from this potentially disastrous policy.