There are three factors at work here.

First of all, I agree with you. I think there's an overall process in Canada, at both the political level and the country level, to be retreating to isolationism. This is something I wrote in an article in Policy Options. We see a trend that we are, in fact, as a nation, pulling away from our willingness to engage in the international arena.

There are two factors that are driving this. First of all, there is a mythology that geography protects us. There's a mythology that what happens in terms of Ukraine, Georgia or Chechnya doesn't concern us or that what will happen in Taiwan—you can place me in the category that believes that the Chinese will use military intervention to reclaim what they see as part of “the century of humiliation”, and we will see military conflict there—somehow doesn't touch upon us. We've allowed ourselves to believe that, and I think it's been encouraged by certain political leaders that somehow we're so far away that it won't really affect us.

The second factor—and the one I find the most chilling—gets to the question about an arms race that was raised before. The debate as to whether or not we are entering into an arms race actually ended in 2002 when the Chinese and the Russians made a series of military procurement decisions that are, in my estimation, moving us away from the system of nuclear deterrence into one of nuclear-war fighting. It's not just the Russians who have invested.

This is an issue. Let's face it. Canada does not want to talk about nuclear weapons. It does not want to talk about the prospect that, in fact, we seem to be entering an era in which it's not only about deterring nuclear war but also, in fact, about engaging in that type of conflict. I mean, as Herman Kahn said, how do you think of the unthinkable?

Because it is such an overwhelming issue as we try to address.... The other issue that professors Massie and Kimball raised is, of course, the existential threat that climate change poses to us. How do we, both as a society and as political leadership, say, “Okay, we have to think about climate change and the fact that we're now in an era, on the basis of what we see of intent and capability, of nuclear-war fighting”? I dare say that it's such a challenging issue that the Canadian withdrawal into this pretense that geography protects us is the reason we don't think about it, and because we don't think about it, we don't act.

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