H-Diplo ARTICLE REVIEW 957 18 June 2020

Luc-André Brunet. “Unhelpful Fixer? Canada, the Euromissile Crisis, and Pierre Trudeau’s Peace Initiative, 1983–1984.” The International History Review 41:6 (2019): 1145-1167. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2018.1472623.

https://hdiplo.org/to/AR957 Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Cindy Ewing | Production Editor: George Fujii

Review by Greg Donaghy, University of Toronto

here are very few episodes in Canada’s diplomatic history—and none so unsuccessful—that that have attracted the scholarly ink reserved for Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s controversial peace initiative at the height of the second T Cold War in the fall of 1983.1 The latest entry is Luc-André Brunet’s award-winning article, “Unhelpful Fixer? Canada, the Euromissile Crisis, and Pierre Trudeau’s Peace Initiative, 1983-1984.” Superbly researched in seven national archives, carefully argued, and presented with verve and spirit, “Unhelpful Fixer” will quite probably remain the last word on the subject for some time to come.

For Brunet, the story starts in the summer of 1983, when Trudeau, already fifteen years in power, cast about for a dramatic foreign policy initiative that would restore his cratering poll numbers. Horrified by Moscow’s decision to shoot-down an errant Korean airliner over Soviet airspace on 1 September 1983, Trudeau leapt into action. Sidelining the foreign and defence policy establishment, he assembled a Task Force of mid-level officials, and asked it to cobble together a series of arms control and disarmament measures to “change the trend line” (1148) in East-West relations and reduce the brittle tensions between the United States and the USSR.

Trudeau’s initiative unfolded on two tracks. The first targeted NATO’s top leaders: French President François Mitterrand, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and United States President Ronald Reagan. The Canadian prime minister needed their support to achieve any of his initiative’s arms control and disarmament goals. These included a conference of the five nuclear powers on limiting strategic armaments, a renewed Western negotiating position in Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) talks in Vienna, and attendance by heads of government at the next meeting of the Conference for Disarmament in Europe (CDE) as well as a handful of more technical arms control measures. A second secret track aimed at smaller NATO allies, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium, sought to launch a review of NATO’s strategy of flexible response and first use. Trudeau unveiled his initiative on 27 October 1983 at a peace conference in Guelph, Ontario.

Brunet follows the prime minister as he skipped across Europe, and then onto the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Delhi, to China to meet with Chairman Deng Xiaoping, and finally back to Washington for talks with Reagan. At every turn, Brunet cheerfully notes, Trudeau was greeted with deep scepticism. Making good use of diplomatic archives

1 See especially, Robert Bothwell and J.L. Granatstein, Pirouette. Pierre Trudeau and Canadian Foreign Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); Greg Donaghy, ‘The “Ghost of Peace”: Pierre Trudeau’s Search for Peace, 1982–84’, Peace Research, 39 (2007), 38-57; Brett Thompson, ‘Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s peace initiative 25 years on’, International Journal, (Autumn 2009), 1117– 37; Susan Colbourn, ‘“Cruising toward Nuclear Danger”: Canadian Anti-Nuclear Activism, Pierre Trudeau’s Peace Mission, and the Transatlantic Partnership’, Cold War History, (February 2018), 19–36.

in Europe and the United States, Brunet mines critical European and American briefing notes that questioned the wisdom and feasibility of Trudeau’s ideas, many of which were already tired and picked over by the time Trudeau had appropriated them. More importantly, at least in Brunet’s view, these jaded sources counselled caution on the grounds that Trudeau was simply peddling schemes to goose his poll numbers and cling to power. Page | 2 In the end, the concrete results were slim. NATO foreign ministers agreed to attend the CDE—a political level high enough for Trudeau to claim a win—and NATO agreed to examine the state of MBFR negotiations, but neither development actually owed much to the Canadian initiative. Trudeau, Brunet suggests, may have had more impact elsewhere, giving an inadvertent boost to Belgian Foreign Minister Leo Tindemans’s parallel initiative to spark an internal review of NATO strategy.

Brunet’s conclusions are harsh and tough-minded. Trudeau’s initiative was “derivative and underdeveloped” (1160), an inevitable consequence of his decision to bypass his foreign and defence policy experts. Moreover, the Prime Minister’s motives were cheap and tawdry: “little more than an electoral ploy” (1160). But what is worse in Brunet’s view was that Trudeau’s initiative represented a threat to the deployment of Euromissiles and was likely to divide the alliance for so little purpose.

Let me comment on three points. First, I was intrigued by the central importance that Brunet attributes to Trudeau’s secret efforts to spark an allied review of NATO’s nuclear strategy of “flexible response and first use” (1148). On reflection, my own account clearly underplayed this aspect of the mission, which Brunet convincingly shows loomed large in Brussels and Rome, whose declassified records he uses well.2 Nonetheless, I am not sure that Brunet has the full story exactly right. The idea for a review of NATO strategy was strongly opposed by most senior Canadian policymakers (who were hardly as isolated from the venture as Brunet claims) as well as Trudeau’s influential Foreign Minister, A.J. MacEachen. Consequently, it was never really incorporated into the core of the mission in a coherent manner. Indeed, Trudeau’s effort to float the idea in public in early 1984 was one of the elements that turned MacEachen against the mission, ultimately prompting the minister to engineer a series of leaks to hamstring his prime minister.

Second, it seems unlikely that Brunet has Trudeau’s motives right either. This was hardly about politics. The Prime Minister had already resigned from politics once, in 1979, and looked upon his unexpected return to power in 1980 as an opportunity to spend his remaining political capital.3 And spend it he did, mostly notably in bruising fights to Canadianize the country’s oil and gas industry and to amend Canada’s constitution. Re-election was hardly a realistic priority by 1983.

Rather, Trudeau’s motives were largely ethical and philosophical. He had a long and abiding opposition to nuclear weapons. In the early 1960s, he jeopardized his political future by bitterly denouncing Liberal leader L.B. Pearson, who agreed to station U.S. nuclear weapons in Canada, as the “defrocked priest of peace.”4 In the 1970s, he was a vocal champion of nuclear disarmament measures at the United Nations, including an ambitious proposal to “suffocate” nuclear weapons development.5 Where Brunet and his European foreign ministry sources see political weakness in slumping poll number and focus on Trudeau’s “lame duck” (1160) status, Europe’s political leaders took him as a serious threat to their Euromissile

2 Donaghy, ‘The “Ghost of Peace.”

3 John Hilliker, Mary Halloran, and Greg Donaghy, Canada’s Department of External Affairs: vol 3: Innovation and Adaptation, 1968-1984 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 334.

4 John English, Citizen of the World: The Life and Times of Trudeau, vol 1: 1919-1968 (Toronto: Knopf, 2006), 383-84.

5 Paul Meyer, “Pierre Trudeau and the ‘‘Suffocation’’ of the Nuclear Arms Race,” International Journal Volume 71:3: 393-408.

Third, Brunet challenges the integrity of the initiative and its namesake. Brunet shows none of the deferential admiration for Trudeau that marks the habitual outlook of many older English and ethnic Canadians, at least in central Canada. His sensationalized Trudeau is almost unrecognizable, the Prime Minister’s admittedly self-interested but unexceptional Page | 3 interpretation of a Commonwealth declaration dismissed as “wilful deception” (1157) and his use of European ideas as “serial appropriation” (1161). These charges are unfair and inaccurate. Whatever Trudeau’s faults, a lack of integrity was not one. Politicians are not academics, and they are rarely expected to attribute authorship to particular policy proposals. Indeed, the idea for a peacekeeping force that won Pearson a Nobel Peace Prize during the Suez Crisis of 1956 had been kicking around for most of a decade and the resolution that he moved in the UN General Assembly was American.

What then are we to make of Trudeau’s initiative? Sometimes for middle powers like Canada foreign policy is not only about interests, but values. Canadians value compromise and dialogue, and they cheered Trudeau on—then and now—for championing peace. And in a world where Thatcher could dismiss nuclear war by pointing to the green grass growing in Hiroshima within a year of the U.S. atomic strike in 1945 and Deng could boost of winning a nuclear war with the West, was he so wrong?

Greg Donaghy is Director, Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History, Trinity College, University of Toronto. His most recent publication, with David Webster, is the edited collection, A Samaritan State Revisited: Historical Perspectives on Canadian Foreign Aid (University of Calgary Press, 2019).