KCIS: The Year Ahead

Until the covid-19 pandemic struck, the annual conference run by KCIS was one of Canada’s foremost conferences on international security. Four organizations partnered on this conference:

• the Centre for International and Defence Policy at Queen’s University in Kingston,

• the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania,

• the Canadian Army Doctrine and Training Centre at the Canadian Forces Base Kingston,

• and the NATO Defense College in Rome.

 Every year since 2006, KCIS selected a timely theme in international security to explore, bringing together a range of practitioners, policy-makers, academics, and students to examine the issue and the policy implications for the United States, Canada, and our transatlantic allies.

Our topics have been wide-ranging. Some topics had a regional or geographical focus, such as the 2009 conference on hemispheric security, or the 2011 conference on the Arctic as an international security issue.

Some conferences focused on the armed forces themselves, as our conferences on ethical warriors in 2013, or developing the super soldier in 2017.

Some have focused on the changing nature of war and the use of force, as the 2008 conference on war without borders, the 2014 conference on CBRNe — chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive events — or the 2016 conference on how militaries adapt to hybrid warfare and the so-called grey zone in international conflict.

In the past two years, however, KCIS conferences focused on two “big picture” topics — the nature of international politics more broadly cast, and the impact on international security from an American, Canadian, and Western European perspective.

In 2018, we looked at the return of deterrence in global politics. Deterrence as a strategic concept was, of course, a central component of international security during the Cold War era. The threats of mutual destruction that both superpowers were able to level at each other — and their allies — was critical for shaping the broad patterns of their relations with one another, as each side was deterred by the vast destructive power of the nuclear weapons possessed by the “other” side.

But the end of the Cold War from 1989 to 1991 saw a radical transformation in global politics — and the role that deterrence played. As the Soviet Union was transformed into the Russian Federation, the strategic role of nuclear weapons was also transformed.

For the next fifteen years, the nuclear weapons arsenals of the great powers did not lose any of their hugely destructive capabilities, but they lost their centrality in shaping global politics. The KCIS conference in 2018 examined how deterrence was making a come-back in the evolving global politics of the 2020s.

In 2019, the KCIS partners decided to extend the analysis of the implications of some of the key changes in global politics. KCIS 2019 looked at the changing international order and the implications for the security environment that we are facing in the 2020s.

What were those changes? The global system underwent a profound transformation, beginning as the century. Three interrelated factors drove this transformation:

First, after President Vladimir Putin assumed the leadership of the Russian Federation, we saw a significant shift in Russian foreign policy.

In the decade after the end of the Cold War, Russia under President Boris Yeltsin was increasingly regarded as a non-adversarial power and indeed as an emerging partner of the West — best exemplified by the invitation to Moscow to join the G7 in 1997. The first G8 meeting in Birmingham in 1998 was, in retrospect, the high point, for relations between Russia and the West slowly slid downhill in the decade after that first G8 summit. During that decade, Western leaders ignored some of the enduring realities about great-power politics, and expanded NATO eastward, provoking push-back from Moscow, most obviously during the NATO use of force in Kosovo in 1999.

That push-back hardened with the rise of Vladimir Putin in 2000. Putin’s vision for Russia in world affairs — and his moves to shore up his own political position within Russia — increasingly brought his government into conflict with a succession of American presidents in Washington. Over more than a decade, Moscow and the West grew further apart, openly breaking in 2014 when the Russians seized Crimea from Ukraine and the West expelled the Russian Federation from the G8.

While Russia under Putin might not have been as powerful as either the United States or China, the Russian Federation still had its nuclear weapons, and Putin and his government pursued a revanchist policy in global affairs, rejecting American and Western global leadership, and trying hard to undermine American dominance and hegemony.

The second factor that transformed global politics in the last twenty years was the rise of China. For many years the Chinese government had pursued a strategy first laid out by Deng Xiaoping in 1990. As paramount leader, Deng had opened China to the world in the 1980s, and in 1990 he laid out what has come to be known as his “24 character strategy” — so called because the entire strategy could be encapsulated in just 24 Chinese characters. One key part of this strategy called for China’s leaders to increase China’s wealth, but to do so very quietly. Deng’s strategy said that China should “keep a low profile,” “bide our time and build up our capabilities.”

Deng’s successors as paramount leader of China followed his advice: Jiang Zemin, who served in the key leadership positions from 1989 to 2004, and Hu Jintao, who was in office from 2004 until 2012.

But when Xi Jinping was made the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in November 2012, and assumed the presidency of China in March 2013, Chinese policy changed. Under Xi, China became much more assertive globally, pressing Chinese interests unapologetically.

Under Xi, Chinese foreign and defence policy adopted a new style. China pushed its expansive maritime claims in the South China Sea aggressively, often by building military bases on rocky outcroppings. A more aggressive tone was adopted towards Taiwan. And Xi moved to consolidate Beijing’s control of Hong Kong by dismantling the “one-country, two systems” arrangement that China and Britain had agreed on for the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.

Chinese diplomacy with other countries took on a very hard edge. It was called “wolf warrior” diplomacy, named after a 2015 Chinese war film about an elite unit within the People’s Liberation Army, the Wolf Warriors, who do battle with a group of mercenaries led by an ex-US Navy SEAL to defend China’s interests. Indeed, China’s wolf warrior diplomacy is purposely undiplomatic, criticizing any country or anyone who does not do what China wants.

China has also seized foreign nationals as diplomatic hostages: Americans, Australians, Swedes, Canadians, Taiwanese have found themselves caught in China’s hostage diplomacy.

China’s wolf warrior diplomacy has underscored the degree to which the government in Beijing has been happy to assert China’s new position as a great power, challenging the dominance of the United States, and no longer concerned about keeping a low profile or biding their time.

The third major transformative factor — and the most important — has been the evolution of American foreign policy in the last decade.

While Donald J. Trump was only in office for one term, the disruption that he caused to American foreign policy was profound. He brought to the White House a very different worldview than that of any of his post-Second World War predecessors.

Unlike every president between 1945 and 2016, Trump had little time for the alliance system that undergirded America’s global leadership. On the contrary: Trump saw America’s alliances as little more than grubby protection rackets that should be used for short-term economic advantage. He spent his four years in office criticizing and dissing America’s allies and delighted in alienating America’s friends across both the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Unlike his predecessors, Trump had little time for multilateral institutions or global governance as a means of addressing global problems. Instead, he insisted on pulling the United States out of international institutions. On his first working day a president, he pulled the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free trade deal that the Obama administration had taken the lead in forming. Later in 2017, he pulled the US out of the Paris climate accord. He purposely hamstrung the World Trade Organization. And he withdrew the US from the World Health Organization in the middle of the covid-19 pandemic.

Unlike his predecessors, Trump’s understanding of international economics derived from the mercantilists of the 16th and 17th centuries rather than the theories of Adam Smith and other modern economists. He did not believe in comparative advantage or the mixed-sum benefits of international trade. As a result, he spent four years engaged in a series of trade wars with America’s trading partners.

Most importantly, Trump did not believe in American leadership in global politics. His presidency was spent actively abandoning any idea that the United States was going to take a leadership role.

The changes in American foreign policy under Trump, accompanied by the changes in the foreign policies of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, had a major impact on the liberal international order that had flourished under American leadership since the end of the Cold War.

The 2019 conference focused on the implications of the transformation of the international order. Scholars and practitioners looked at a range of topics, including the drivers of the changes we were seeing, and how those transformations were playing out in the Indo-Pacific, in the North Atlantic, and in the Americas.

One of the common themes struck at the conference was that the evolving international order was transitioning away from one that was marked by US hegemony and leadership to the kind of multipolar configuration we saw in world politics in the decades — if not centuries — before the Second World War — in other words, when a number of great powers competed with each other politically, economically and militarily.

In this evolving global order, China’s rise as an economic — and therefore a military — power is challenging the United States, particularly in Asia. The United States is also being challenged, though in a very different way, by the Russian Federation, which remains what some have called a “spoiler state,” not powerful enough to mount a major challenge to American primacy, but powerful enough to make mischief and keep the international security environment unpredictable.

The challenges from China and Russia have been compounded by the chaotic approach to international relations during Trump’s four years in power. Trump liked to brag to his rallies that since he became president, the US was no longer laughed at and was finally respected in the world. In fact, America’s standing in international politics suffered hugely during his presidency. Trump was actually laughed at openly when he addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2018, an indignity that took him by surprise, and one that would have been unthinkable for previous presidents. And far from being widely respected, by 2020, the dominant sentiment that others have towards the United States seems to be pity as it floundered during the covid-19 pandemic, suffering 20 per cent of the world’s deaths from the disease with only 4 percent of the world’s population.

While the collapse of American global leadership will likely be arrested by the election of Joe Biden, the dynamic of great power competition that was accelerated during the Trump presidency is likely to have profound effects into the 2020s.

That is why the Kingston Consortium on International Security is concentrating its focus in 2021 on the return of great power competition and its impact on Canada, the United States, and the North Atlantic community.

What lies ahead this year is a series of virtual events and posts designed to explore different aspects of great power competition in the 2020s.

We will be looking at a Canadian perspective on the return of great-power competition in a multipolar context. Canada’s foreign policy over the last seventy-five years has always operated in the context of the bipolar competition between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, or the so-called “unipolar moment” of the years after the end of the Cold War, when the United States was the sole dominant power. The multipolarity of the 2020s promises to be challenging for Canada.

We will be looking at the multilateral organizations and how they are adapting to the return of great-power competition. We will be looking not only at the United Nations, but NATO in a North Atlantic context, and regional organizations in Asia and Africa.

We will have a number of specialized segments. We will be looking at the role of special operations force in an era of great power competition, and how hybrid war and the so-called grey zone can have an impact on the great powers.

Another specialized segment will focus on the Arctic as a sphere of great power competition. While the Arctic is of central importance to Canada, which formally claims Arctic waters as Canadian waters, the reality is that the United States, the Russian Federation, and China all have interests in the Arctic. While China is not an Arctic country in the same way that Russia, the US, Canada, and a number of European countries are Arctic countries, Beijing has a very particular interest in maritime navigation in the Arctic waters, and mineral exploitation in the north.

 The KCIS partners are looking forward to being able to resume in-person conferences in due course. But in the meantime, we remain committed to exploring new and important trends in international security.

Kim Richard Nossal is a professor emeritus in the Centre for International and Defence Policy, Queen’s University.

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