Trudeau’s trade mission also about security
Justin Trudeau was back in the future last week. The Canadian prime minister paid homage to the world’s first use of nuclear weapons.
He said they should never be used again. Then he and fellow great powers made it easier to do so.
This is all taking place at Hiroshima, site of the first use — in war — of an atomic bomb.
The Americans dropped that bomb back in 1945. The U.S. was at war back then.
When it came to taking out its enemies, no one bothered with the niceties.
It was only later that Hiroshima, with its fused death sculptures and poisonous gamma rays, became the symbol of everything that is wrong with the nuclear age.
Now nuclear weaponry is just another form of death. Russia threatens to use it to heat up the Cold War. So too NATO. The North Atlantic alliance reserves the right to be the first to use nuclear weapons in a war.
Canada is signing on to the extended version of the Cold War. It is confronting Russia in Europe. And it is joining the U.S.-led alliance that is taking on China in Asia.
That is the significance of Trudeau’s visit this week to Seoul.
The Korea gambit is not just a trade mission. It is a security mission as well, one that promises to tie Canada into the Great Game taking place in Korea, Japan and China.
In that sense, the Trudeau visit to Seoul has little to do with Canada-Korea trade. Rather it is a new front in the reinvigorated Cold War.
It is only the weird irony of celebrating the Hiroshima atomic bombing — weird because there is nothing great or good about the 1945 nuclear attack on Japan.
Indeed, the most significant development since the Hiroshima bombing is that the great powers have made it easier to touch off a nuclear conflict.
That’s because every tiny country involved in the Russia-Ukraine war has access to NATO’s entire fleet of weaponry.
If even the most minor NATO member is drawn into the war, the spectre of widespread nuclear warfare becomes a possibility.
Similarly, if China or North Korea becomes involved in nuclear war, Canada will be drawn in through the web of alliances that it is now carefully weaving.
And that means every significant country in Asia, from China to North Korea will be tied into Canadian security interests.
Whether we want to be or not.