It’s certainly worrisome, as we’re discovering, that U.S. President Donald Trump has so much sway over our economy.
What’s even more worrisome, but rarely mentioned, is that this volatile, vengeful, vindictive, reckless and deeply unpredictable man also has control over the world’s most powerful nuclear arsenal.
Of course, Canadians don’t get to determine who sits in the Oval Office. But we do have some options how to respond.
And while the debate rages on in Canada about how best to resist Trump’s grip on our economy, we’ve quietly signed on to fully co-operate with his ultimately more threatening military agenda.
Our elbows aren’t just not up, they’re in lockstep with his.
At the urging of Trump, Prime Minister Mark Carney has agreed to radically raise our military spending over the next decade, jacking it all the way up from 1.4 per cent to five per cent of our GDP.
Furthermore, Carney has also signalled Canada’s intention to join Trump’s “Golden Dome” — thereby discarding decades of sensible Canadian refusal to become part of the long-smouldering Republican “Star Wars” fantasy of world nuclear domination.
This move is a striking departure for Canada, and it has received far too little attention.
For decades, Canadian governments, both Liberal and Conservative (under Brian Mulroney), wisely declined to participate in earlier versions of the Golden Dome under former U.S. presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Canada’s refusal was largely on the grounds that these so-called “missile defence” systems are not just defensive. In fact, they undermine arms treaties and encourage arms races.
Indeed, Canada’s apparent willingness to embrace the Golden Dome would amount to a repudiation of our long tradition of supporting arms control and specifically our role in trying to prevent the use of weapons in space.
This danger was underlined last week by Douglas Roche, a former Canadian ambassador for disarmament, when he lamented in a speech in Ottawa that the Carney government “has joined the Western pretence that a Golden Dome missile defence system will save us.”
Roche, a retired Canadian senator, considers it “deeply disturbing” that the Carney government seems willing to embrace the Golden Dome, which threatens to “provoke the development of a new offensive nuclear arms system.”
Roche calls nuclear weapons “instruments of pure evil.”
In an earlier column, I argued that Carney’s decision to appease Trump by dramatically raising our military spending means there will be little revenue left for other priorities.
Even worse, Carney’s willingness to join Trump’s Golden Dome misadventure will leave us less safe, by adding fuel to the already-overheated arms race.
The Golden Dome — a trillion-dollar project likely to enrich Peter Thiel and other U.S. tech billionaires — is central to the revival of the nuclear arms race, reversing the significant disarmament progress made in earlier decades.
The Golden Dome is based on the far-fetched idea that a land mass the size of North America can be shielded from incoming missiles through a technology often likened to a speeding bullet hitting another speeding bullet from thousands of miles away. It can work in a test but is regarded as less reliable in warfare.
However, by providing the illusion of protection, the Golden Dome could encourage political leaders to consider using nuclear weapons, not just defensively, but in “first strike” situations, to pre-emptively knock out opponents. In other words, it risks encouraging nuclear aggression.
In an article last month in Scientific American, astrophysicist Ramin Skibba suggested that the Golden Dome would lead to a “more overt weaponization of space” and concluded that its main feature may be “the perilous acceleration of arms races and the enrichment of profit-seeking defence and space-tech contractors for what is, at best, only the illusion of safety.”
Hardly sounds like something Canada should be part of, particularly when the lethal nuclear arsenal connected to it will be under the control of someone we know, from firsthand experience, to be volatile, vengeful, vindictive, reckless and deeply unpredictable.
This article was originally published in the Toronto Star.
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