How Trump factors into Canada’s peacekeeping decision

Memories of Afghanistan haunt Canada’s Liberal government as it searches for a politically saleable United Nations peacekeeping mission. So does Donald Trump.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is caught between the two.

On the one hand, he knows public opinion will not countenance another open-ended war that produces hundreds of Canadian casualties.

On the other, he wants to show the new U.S. president that Canada is a robust military partner in the fight against terrorism and thus deserves special treatment in any renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

If Canada were limiting its military engagement to the faceoff against Russia in Europe and the fight against Daesh, also known as ISIS or ISIL, in Iraq, neither of these would be problems.

The Russian gambit, which involves sending Canadian troops to both Latvia and Ukraine, is merely a revival of the old Cold War.

Unless it escalates into an all-out nuclear conflict, it is unlikely to produce any battlefield casualties.

Canada’s role in the Iraq War concentrates on air reconnaissance and training. Both are dangerous, but also unlikely to produce the number of casualties suffered in Afghanistan where, over the course of the war, 158 soldiers were killed and more than 2,000 wounded.

But Canada isn’t limiting its military operations to these two theatres. It has also pledged to commit 600 soldiers and 150 police officers to an as yet unspecified UN peacekeeping mission.

That would be fine if peacekeeping were still relatively peaceful. But it is not. In Mali, an African country in the midst of a war against Islamic radicals tied to Al Qaeda, 114 UN peacekeepers have been killed.

In South Sudan, which is suffering from a bitter civil war, UN peacekeepers have not suffered as many casualties. But the cost of this has been their inability to prevent either side from committing atrocities against civilians.

As my colleague Bruce CampionSmith has reported, Mali is the destination of choice for bureaucrats trying to figure out the contours of any Canadian deployment.

It is also the one most like Afghanistan, featuring an elusive enemy, a weak central government and foreign forces attempting, with mixed success, to engage in counter-insurgency operations.

If Trudeau’s government were picking a UN peacekeeping operation solely on the basis of political acceptability at home, it would not choose Mali. But then there is the Trump factor. The U.S. president is not a fan of the UN. But he is a fan of fighting what he calls radical Islamic terrorism.

He would almost certainly look with approval on any Canadian counterinsurgency effort against Islamic radicals.

This matters. Trudeau’s government is desperate to have Trump’s approval. Ottawa is terrified the U.S. president might follow through on his threat to tear up NAFTA and impose stiff new border taxes, either of which could savage the Canadian economy.

Ministers, including Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, have been dispatched to Washington to make nice with their U.S. counterparts.

Among other things, Ottawa seems keen to get the Trump administration’s imprimatur before embarking on any military mission anywhere.

None of this is new. In 2005, a previous Liberal government committed Canadian soldiers to a major fighting role in Afghanistan, largely to mollify then U.S. president George W. Bush.

Then, as now, Ottawa’s main aim was to keep goods flowing freely across the Canada-U.S. border — even if that required Canadian soldiers to sacrifice their lives and limbs in a far-off and ultimately pointless war.

Sajjan, a veteran of the Afghan War, understands that military counterinsurgency can go wrong. He has said it is complicated business that nations should get into only when they understand the full ramifications.

Think of this as the reasonableness factor.

But reasonableness accounts for only part of Ottawa’s thinking. On Wednesday, Trump’s new commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, told reporters the U.S. wants substantive changes to NAFTA and expects Canada and Mexico, the other parties to the pact, to make concessions.

That’s the Trump factor. It too will inform the Trudeau government’s final decision on where to send Canadian peacemakers. If recent history is any guide, it will be paramount.