Arthur Menzies

ARTHUR MENZIES

Interviewers: Hill, Pawelek

 

[HILL]* Good morning. Our guest today is Ambassador Arthur Menzies, former Canadian Permanent Representative to the North Atlantic Council and holder of a number of other senior positions, including Ambassador to China, and Ambassador for Disarmament. Ambassador Menzies, we're delighted to see you this morning and very pleased that you are ready to participate in this project.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] I'm glad to have this opportunity to join in this very imaginative project of yours.

 

[HILL] Thank you. Ambassador Menzies, as you know, this project is an oral history of Canadian policy in NATO. We're examining the development of Canadian foreign policy since 1945, with particular reference to this country's membership of NATO.

 

Ambassador Menzies, just to make some further comments on the thrust of this project; it is aimed at examining Canada's contribution to the work of NATO, Canada's involvement in NATO in pursuit of its own direct national interests, and the function of NATO in helping Canada to pursue some of its broader foreign policy goals notably that of enhancing the prospects for international peace and security. We are looking at the formulation of Canadian foreign policy in Ottawa and elsewhere in this country, at the work carried out inside NATO headquarters in Brussels and in other inter-allied councils and channels, and at the evolving role of NATO in world affairs. So, in your own case, I would like to focus very strongly on the period when you were Ambassador to the North Atlantic Council. I'm referring to those four years, between 1972 and 1976, when you were Canada's Permanent Representative in Brussels to the North Atlantic Council and years which were a very significant period in NATO affairs. I would like to take all the time we need to go over them in a very thorough and careful fashion. I think, to that end, what we will do is deal with that as a separate entity at the end of the other parts of the discussion, so that we will have ample time for preparation and a large block of time in which to go over those issues. However, while focussing on the NATO periods of your career and on the service within NATO, at the same time I would like to ask a few questions about your years as Head of the Defence Liaison Division of the Department of External Affairs, when you were dealing with NATO issues among others; and with your perceptions of the wider world scene based on your experience in such important posts as the Embassy in China, and as Ambassador for Disarmament. I think we want to try to see NATO not only in terms of the internal workings of the North Atlantic Council and its committees, but also in terms of changing perspectives of NATO's role in world affairs, as the Atlantic Alliance and international society in general have evolved over the years.

 

Ambassador Menzies, the way we would like to approach these two interviews is to examine your career in a series of phases. Part One will deal with the early years up to 1940, prior to joining the Department of External Affairs. Part Two will deal with what I would call, just for the sake of a label, global service, that is to say the years from 1940 to 1972 when you held a succession of positions in Ottawa, Japan, Malaysia, Australia and so on. Part Three will be a little bit out of chronological sequence, since we'll deal with the years 1962 to 1965 when you were Head of the Defence Liaison Division in Ottawa, that is to say, prior to your posting to Australia. Part Four will concern the period 1972 to 1976 when you were Ambassador to the North Atlantic Council, and as I remarked we will deal with that as a block at the end. Part Five will deal with your years as Ambassador to China and Vietnam from 1976 to 1980. Part Six will cover the years from 1980 to 1982 when you were Ambassador for Disarmament.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] That order suits me.

 

PART I - Early Years, to 1940

 

[HILL] Good. Well, if we may move on to Part One which covers the early years up to 1940. Ambassador Menzies, if I am correct, I believe you were born in China, and I believe as a son of one of those many Canadians who went out to the Far East to serve in missionary and similar capacities. You grew up in China and Japan I believe, and acquired some knowledge of the Chinese and Japanese languages; then you obtained a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto and an MA from Harvard University before joining the Department of External Affairs in 1940. I wonder if you could tell us something about those early years, especially about the impressions they left on you regarding global issues and the changing role of Asia in the world, the place of Canada in the international community and so on.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] It's true that I was born in China, the son of a Canadian United Church missionary, who became an expert on Chinese archaeology and taught in one of the big Christian universities in China, supported by the United Church of Canada. At that time there was no Canadian school in North China beyond the elementary level, so I went to the Canadian Academy in Kobe, Japan, for five years of high school from 1931 to 1935, and then returned to Canada to attend the University of Toronto. Looking back on those early formative years, I would say that the opportunity to live in a country like China, which was going through a very difficult period of internal civil war, was an eye-opener for me in terms of the use of military force by Chinese warlords to achieve pretty selfish and limited aims. The experience which I had in Japan was again one in which the Japanese were remarkably self-disciplined at home, but that social discipline of the community seemed to fade when they invaded Manchuria and North China, and I saw something of this in its early phases, as I traveled back and forward on ships carrying Japanese officers and Japanese businessmen to North China. I also had an opportunity when I was a boy of 12 and 13 to travel around the world when my father was on a sabbatical, and visited both India and what is now Pakistan, the Middle East and Europe, and, I suppose, in that way became a little more conscious of the world than most Canadian children brought up in a more limited environment. My father, being a professor, insisted that we do our homework every night on a trip of this kind, and that we should write up our impressions in diaries every night and I still treasure those diaries which I wrote back in 1929 about the world. Coming to the University of Toronto, I suppose that one of my disappointments was that there was no instruction available in any Canadian university in 1935 on Asian history, culture, language, economics or what have you. Of course that is quite changed today and about forty universities now provide some courses on Asia. I had to go down to Harvard to do my post graduate work on Far Eastern history, and I had the benefit of studying there under two eminent American scholars. Doctor John King Fairbank, who is one of the great American authorities on US/China relations, and also under Dr. Edwin Reischauer who was, and is, an eminent authority on Japanese history and Japan’s part in world affairs. Both of these men had a considerable impact in terms of my own outlook on international affairs and the need to understand the historical background of developments in Asia and not take a superficial journalistic approach to developments which had deep sociological and economic roots.

 

[HILL] So in fact you were deeply involved from your own background with an interest in Asia. You grew up there in effect and pursued it also in post-graduate studies at Harvard University.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Yes.

 

[HILL] And what about the impact of international security? I was thinking of the Manchurian question and things like that. Was there a strong sense at that time that that was part and parcel of the global international scene as well as part of the regional East Asian situation?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Yes, I think that the emergence of Japanese militarism and of the manipulation of the Japanese people in the pursuit of the Imperial manifest destiny and Japan's Co-prosperity Sphere in East Asia did expose me to the sort of way in which a group in a country could manipulate the destiny of their people, through propaganda and through control of the levers of power. To be able to see that at first hand had quite an educative effect on me as as a boy growing into a young man. The question of my introduction to international political security affairs was perhaps a little more by accident than by design. I was sent to Japan, in 1950, to succeed Dr. Herbert Norman as Head of the Canadian Liaison Mission to the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur at that time, and this was just a few months after the outbreak of the Korean War. The first Canadian Forces began to arrive in the Far East during my time, and during the three and a half years that I was in Japan I visited the Canadian Forces in Korea, the Canadian Brigade which was part of the Commonwealth Division and Canadian Destroyer Flotilla Far East which served in those waters under broad American command, and I had a great number of senior officers of the Canadian Forces stay in our Embassy residence in Tokyo, on their way to and from Korea. I got to know a great number of them as well as Ministers like the Honourable Brooke Claxton and the Honourable Ralph Campney and the Honourable Hughe Lapointe and others quite well. Then at a later stage in my career, as Head of the Far Eastern Division, I got caught up in the establishment of the Canadian component of the International Commissions for Supervision and Control in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, following the Geneva Conference of 1954, and once more I had to work quite closely with officers of the Department of National Defence, in setting the terms of reference and guidance for these Canadian delegations which were a mixed group of External Affairs and military officers. So I acquired in my first fifteen years in the Department a fairly broad acquaintance with many of the middle and senior rank officers who had served in World War Two, in Korea and again in Indo-China, and that gave me some of the background. I think it was partly because of that background, and partly because I had an all-round foreign affairs foundation, that I was selected in 1962 to be Head of the Defence Liaison Division, which is the division within the Department of External Affairs which deals with international security questions, with NATO, with North American defence and with international peacekeeping questions.

 

[HILL] Actually, I'd like to go on to deal with that period shortly. But before that could you just tell us something about how you came to join the Department and what your early career was from 1940 on?

 

 

Part II - Global Service, 1940-62 and 1965-72

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] I think that my interest in serving in the Department of External Affairs matured, in a rather general way, during the period that I was at the University of Toronto as an undergraduate; but it probably became sharpened when I went to Harvard and the international situation in the Pacific was deteriorating, during the early years of the war in Europe and the Atlantic, and I thought that some of the background which I had in having lived in China and Japan and having some knowledge of the languages, and having studied Far Eastern history at Harvard could be of some service to the Government of Canada. So I took the competitive exam for Third Secretaries, just after the war had started in Europe. I was interviewed in the Easter holidays of 1940, and was lucky enough to be included in an eligible list of, I think, 11 or 12 officers who might be called up for service in the Department of External Affairs. It was, again, an accident that the United States Congress passed a law in June of 194 0 requiring all aliens entering the United States to have American visas. Up to that time I suppose three or four hundred thousand Canadians wandered across the border into the United States to visit relatives, to shop, to holiday, to work, with just a driving licence or other simple means of identification. So the Canadian government was required to set up very hastily a network of offices across Canada to issue passports which could then have US visas put in them. And they decided to issue passports valid for travel only to the United States and valid for only a two-year period, on the theory that we could probably afford to take back to Canada any of these people that might be deported from the United States. So all of us, who were on the eligible list, were contacted at the beginning of July 1940 and brought in, and I was sent to open a passport office in Toronto. Outside the door were some 800 impatient businessmen and relatives of sick people in the United States who wanted immediate service. We had in Ottawa only two people who knew anything about passports and it was very much a case of learning on the job. After some three months of this, I got permission from the Under Secretary to go back to Harvard to complete my Ph.D. work there.

 

During the early spring of 1941 I was contacted by the Under-Secretary to know when I would be available to return to service. I assumed that my knowledge of Asian affairs was needed by Canada for its war effort. Imagine my surprise, when I was assigned to replace Robert Ford as Head of the Passport Office in Windsor Ontario. There I lingered in a slow death for some 11 months. A side benefit from that experience, was that I came to know the Hon. Paul Martin relatively well because he had a great number of clients from his legal practice and political supporters who needed passports in a hurry, and the Hon. Paul was a great one to look after his friends and supporters in the Essex area. So that's how I came in, and it was only in the Spring of 1942 that I came to Ottawa and began to learn some of the ropes of the system. I shared an office initially with Gordon Robertson and Marcel Cadieux. We got to know each other very well in those early bachelor days when we were all working together. During those early years in the Department I also did a stint of about 18 months in intelligence work in an inter-departmental committee, so I got to understand some of the grayer side of international relations, and what the bigger powers are able to do and try to do in the conduct of informal international affairs, which is very often out of public sight.

 

[HILL] Then you went to Havana, and afterwards to Tokyo. Then you became High Commissioner to Malaysia and Ambassador to Burma, all in this period leading up to the fifties. You also headed the Far Eastern Division of the Department for some time in that period. Based on your own background and your service in those years, what sort of views did you have on the development of the Far East and of Asia in world affairs? This is a very broad question.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] I served as Head of the Far Eastern section of the American and Far Eastern Division, from 1946 to 1948, when the Far Eastern Commission was meeting in Washington to lay down policies for the occupation of Japan. And I did have an opportunity to see and learn something about how an occupation administration can mould a country, its constitution and its economic operation. When I returned from service in Japan in 1953, I served until 1958 as head of the more specialized Far Eastern Division, and during this period we observed the takeover of China by the Chinese Communist forces. As I had been born and brought up in China and was very much interested in developments there, I think I followed those developments in China more closely than I might otherwise have done. I also learned a certain prudence in my handling of subjects related to the Far East, because of the pressures of the McCarthy Senate Committee on Un-American Activities on the old China hands in the US State Department, and the extent to which that influence extended to Canada, particularly in terms of the accusation against Dr. Herbert Norman for his connections at Cambridge with the British Communist Party. I also got drawn in, as I mentioned, to Indo-Chinese affairs. In the case of Vietnam one learned at first hand about the political and military technology of a peasant-based revolutionary group under Ho Chi Minh tackling first the French in North Vietnam, and then confronting the Americans who got drawn into the struggle there, with an increasing military commitment. That was for me another educative experience. During my time as High Commissioner to the Federation of Malaya, the British, Australian and New Zealand governments had forces in the Malayan Peninsula combating the Communist terrorist movement there. That had a profound effect on the organization of the country, the concentration of the Chinese Malayan communities into special villages for protection purposes against the Communist terrorists and to keep them under surveillance. Once again I saw the use of propaganda and political indoctrination on both sides for the control of the hearts and minds of people in Malaya as it had been in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos. Military force was used in dealing with insurgents, either effectively as the British did in Malaya, or with less success by the Americans in Vietnam. All of this was in an Asian and Pacific setting. I suppose that if I did acquire some experience a lot of it emerged from this period and it was also very useful to me when I went as High Commissioner to Australia from 1965 to 1972 because the Australian government was very much interested in Asia and that was a common link between Canada and Australia. We did find ourselves then on slightly different sides of the fence with regard to the war in Vietnam. The Australians had forces there, committed to maintaining the independence of South Vietnam, whereas Canada was on the International Control Commission and therefore not militarily involved in the war in Vietnam.

 

[HILL] In the early fifties, there was an inclination to see a confrontation between two systems, the Communist system and the Western system, but then that broke down to some degree later on, in the sixties, with the split between the Soviet Union and China. Did you see that kind of shift in perception over time?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Yes. I think there’s no doubt that there was a shift. I had always felt that the Chinese Communist movement was an indigenously based peasant movement joined by lower echelons of the nationalist intellectual group of high school and university students and that they had taken on Marxism/Leninism as the guiding principles for their revolutionary movement. But I did not think that the Chinese were going to accept Soviet control, because historical records indicated a good deal of antipathy between the Soviets and the Chinese and not much love lost. Nevertheless, the Soviets and the Chinese both supported the North Koreans in invading South Korea and resisting the United Nations forces in Korea, and I think, at that time, it was the natural approach for people like Mr. St. Laurent and Mr. Pearson to talk about global Communism as a movement across Eurasia. And certainly when the Communists took power in China, just before the outbreak of war in Korea, it looked as if there was a certain monolithic unity and that unity did remain for the first ten years, or so, until the Soviets probably overreached themselves, or the Chinese got more conscious of their own peculiar national interests which they decided they wanted to defend. There were at the same time suggestions that Communism, and sometimes the yellow hordes, would sweep down through South East Asia, through Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos, and the dominoes would fall over in South East Asia. Thereby hangs a little tale. I mentioned that we in Canada were members of the Commonwealth Division in Korea. At the end of the Korean War the British, Australians, and New Zealanders proposed to move the Commonwealth Division to Malaya or what is called Malaysia today. Canada did not agree to its brigade being included in this movement, and we stayed out of what we considered to be a regional security problem in South East Asia which was geographically very far from Canada, and historically unrelated to Canada, and also not a United Nations undertaking as the Korean conflict had been. Secondly, we also declined to become involved in the South East Asia Treaty Organization, which John Foster Dulles organized in 1954, after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, to resist Communist pressure in South East Asia.

 

[HILL] I just wondered if I could ask you one last question on this period. Your own interests and the interests of those you were dealing with at that time were in Asia. What part did you see NATO playing in world affairs, looking at it from your perspective? Were East/West relations in Europe still seen as being the most fundamental issue of world affairs, or did you think that the world had changed to the point that concern about Europe had become a bit passe?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] I think that anyone who was educated in Eastern Canada and the Eastern United States, and who had worked in Ottawa for quite a few years, couldn't help but be aware of the importance of Western Europe and the Atlantic to Canada, and the emergence of NATO as an organization in 1949 certainly had a strong impact on world affairs generally. And the Korean War, in global and strategic terms, as seen by General Douglas MacArthur, was part of a policy of containment of Communism, whether Soviet or North Korean or Chinese, to its land mass area in Northern Eurasia, and blocking its expansion outward. I think that the fact that Canada fielded ten thousand men to go to Europe in 1950, at the same time that it was fielding about 8,000 in a special force to go to Korea, may have encouraged the belief of military people in Canada and people who wished to see something of the military strength which we had achieved by the end of World War Two recreated, that if you could have 18,000 abroad playing a role both in Europe and in Asia, that that was a desirable balance of the military posture of Canada. But it became pretty clear by 1953 that the government felt that it could only really support one significant non-United Nations undertaking, and that was in Europe. That area was more critical than the Pacific. Also, those of us trying to think out the military strategic situation recognized that Canada could never project a significant military force across 5,000 miles of the Pacific that would have any significant influence on the United States, short of an all-out war effort, and that position, of course, has not been altered since the end of the Korean War in 1953. The Canadian government has never sought to project its military power or to show flags in the Pacific. We are overwhelmed by the strength of the US Pacific Fleet, including its aircraft carriers and its positions in Hawaii, in Guam, in Japan, in Korea, in the Philippines and so on and we haven't that capability. I think that one learns over a long career that there are limits to the amount of GNP or of national federal budgets which the people and the Government of Canada are prepared to spend on defence in peacetime.

 

[HILL] Of course it's a rather interesting thing that the build¬up of NATO forces in Europe didn't really get going until the impact of the North Korean invasion of the South was felt.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] That's right.

 

[HILL] Looking at the West's overall approach to world affairs, do you think that there's been an undue focus on Europe and on NATO as opposed to taking an interest in developments in the Far East? Or has it been more or less the right sort of balance?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Well, given my background, I think that you would be able to guess the answer. Certainly it is my view that the Canadian government over the last forty years has given insufficient attention to Asian affairs. It is only in the last ten, fifteen years, largely for economic reasons but also because of China's opening to the world, that we have begun to see our interests in the Pacific as important. The balance of foreign trade with trans-Pacific countries exceeded all our trade with Western Europe and Eastern Europe put together, although this is relatively small compared to our trade with the United States. The fact that there has been no comparable organization of a political security type in Asia to which to anchor a Canadian position has had some bearing. In Europe we had ties with Britain and France, with Belgium and the Netherlands, with Italy, from World War One and World War Two days, and a security organization was set up into which we could fit, both from a military point of view and which also provided us with a political consultative mechanism which served Canadian foreign policy purposes very well. In Asia, I think its true to say that John Foster Dulles made a number of attempts to create, artificially, organizations which would link the non-Communist elements of the Far East together. He was successful for a time with SEATO, the South East Asia Treaty Organization, but there was not the homogeneity in Japan, Korea, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaya, the Philippines and so on that existed in Europe, other than being held together loosely as part of the US containment policy. Now I would not wish to underrate the importance of the US role in NATO, in any way, but there was in addition to the United States a significant grouping of countries in Western Europe which were also eventually moving together in economic terms to form the European Economic Community, or European Community in political terms, that has emerged.

 

Part III - Defence Liaison Division, 1962-65

 

[HILL] Ambassador Menzies, from 1962 to 1965 you were head of Defence Liaison (I) Division in Ottawa. This was the time of the Cuban missile crisis; some very touchy relationships between Canada and the United States; the election of the Lester Pearson Liberal Government in Ottawa in 1964, the decision to resolve the problem of nuclear weapons for the Canadian Armed Forces; and the issue of the 1964 Defence White Paper. It was also a time of detente in East-West relations, the agreement on the partial nuclear test ban and so on. The United States was revising its nuclear strategy and encouraging NATO to do likewise, and there was a lot of consultation about things like the Multilateral Nuclear Force and the Atlantic Nuclear Force. NATO was also trying to cope with the problem of General DeGaulle's efforts to establish a more independent France and with that movement towards quote "the dismantling of the blocs", which among other things threatened to create widespread complacency about defence requirements throughout the Western Alliance. I wondered if you could just tell us something about this period? What happened? What were you involved in in that period and what were the major issues as you saw them?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] I came back from Malaya in the summer of 1961 and was assigned as Deputy to Herb Moran, Director of the External Aid Office, and was happily ensconced in that operation for a six month period. Indeed looking back over a career, I think I could say that playing Santa Claus with the money of the Canadian taxpayer would have been quite an attractive career for me. I always enjoyed working on aid projects. However, in February of 1962, I was suddenly summoned to take over Defence Liaison (I) Division, the division responsible for NATO, North American defence and peace keeping. Little did I know of some of the pitfalls that lay in that assignment, but I was compelled to learn rather quickly about what was for me a completely new set of substantive subjects and geographical subjects dealing with North America, Western and Eastern Europe and the developing world for peace keeping operations. The first thing that hit me was the realization that there were severe strains between the Progressive Conservative Government of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and our Secretary of State for External Affairs, the Honourable Howard Green, and the United States administration over the arming of Bomark II missiles, which had been accepted in Canada but which did not have nuclear warheads. Each meeting of the Canada-United States Permanent Joint Board on Defence was faced with this problem, that the Diefenbaker government wished to have joint control over the warheads if they were to be kept in Canada, whereas the United States insisted that they have exclusive control of the key to the storage depot, although it would be within a Canadian enclosure and the Americans couldn't operate without Canadian concurrence as well (but that was perhaps a semantic question).

 

This issue lingered on until 1963. In January General Loris Norstadt, who was the Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, SACEUR, came to Ottawa and held a rather disingenuous press conference in which he said that Canada was committed to accept nuclear tactical weapons for the CF104 aircraft, which were being deployed to Europe at that time. This really put the cat among the pigeons. A few days later Mr. Pearson made a famous speech to a Liberal Party group, down in the Toronto area, in which he said that Canada was committed to NATO's nuclear policies and couldn't escape this responsibility, and that he was ashamed of the position which the Diefenbaker government had taken. The US State Department issued a press release giving their account of the negotiations which had gone on in the PJBD on the operation of nuclear weapons for Canadian forces. This resulted in Mr. Diefenbaker's government being defeated a couple of times in the House of Commons and calling a General Election for April 1963. I think you said '64 but it was in '63. Well Douglas Harkness the Minister of National Defence resigned, the ever young George Hees resigned, Mr. Sevigny resigned. The election was probably fought as much on this question of nuclear weapons as on anything and the Liberals came in with the assurance that they would work out an agreement with the Americans on the acceptance of nuclear weapons.

 

This, I think, was perhaps the one issue which required a great deal of attention and flexibility because a civil servant is expected to support the government that is in power, namely the Progressive Conservative Government; and then to change policies completely to a Liberal Government. Another thing which occurred and muddied the waters was the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962. This put a great deal of pressure on the government to accept nuclear weapons in Canada for defensive purposes, in case what started as a local problem in the Caribbean should escalate into a military confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. We also had to very quickly update our emergency measures procedures, and I was allocated the External Affairs responsibility for dealing with the survival of government in Ottawa in the event that some of the missiles planted in Cuba were to land in the Ottawa area. We had a team of special persons picked out, with the most beautiful stenographers, who were to go down a hole out near Carp and provide some continuity of government. This was just an added strain at a time of international crisis, and gave one to understand that the whole mechanism for crisis management requires a very, very elaborate structure of planning and of communications and of contingency arrangements and so on.

 

Also arising out of the Cuban Missile Crisis there was an issue raised in NATO regarding consultation on the use of nuclear weapons. While everybody understood the crisis which had faced President Kennedy and his small group of associates, and the serious decisions that they had to take about the Cuban missiles and the blockade of Cuba, there was an awareness that there was no mechanism in NATO, per se, for emergency consultation on the use of nuclear weapons. And two types of things were developed. One was a proposal to establish a Multilateral Nuclear Force — a naval force was envisaged, and this was discussed — so that in fact there would be no temptation for the proliferation, or further proliferation, of nuclear weapons in NATO countries, to countries like Germany. This was a particular concern of the Americans, British and French, and I think also a political question in Germany itself.

 

We had to study this question of the proposal for a multilateral nuclear force, and the conclusion was that while it might respond to some requirements in Europe it didn't really meet any Canadian needs, and Mr. Pearson eventually indicated that we were not going to take part in any Multilateral Nuclear Force. However, the subject didn't go away. It was being discussed by the Americans with individual countries outside of NATO, and this caused interventions by both Mr. Martin at NATO foreign ministers meetings and the Honourable Paul Hellyer at NATO defence ministers meetings. Eventually this ended up with the proposal, from the US Defense Secretary McNamara, for the establishment of a restricted meeting of defence ministers which evolved into the Nuclear Planning Group, which still exists in NATO and on which we take a rotating seat with Norway and Denmark, from time to time.

 

I think this was not a period of significant East/West tension, these years of 1962 to 1965 after the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, because I think Khrushchev and his military advisers realized that they did not have the maritime power to project themselves to the Caribbean. I think at the same time it generated in their minds the need for a steady, accelerated build-up of their own armed forces so that they would not have to back down again if something like the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred again. Perhaps we were a bit too much lulled by the fact that Khrushchev had backed down, and also by the signing of the Test Ban Treaty and developments in the field of disarmament. I think it's proper to say that disarmament became a favorite subject under the Progressive Conservative government, and that the Honourable Howard Green, in particular, took a very strong interest in disarmament matters, in the establishment of the Eighteen-Nation Disarmament Committee, and there was a lot of support for General Burns and his initiatives there. The subject was continued by the Liberal Government when it came to power in the spring of 1963.

 

A further development in this period was the conflict between the Greek and the Turkish Cypriots which broke out in 1964, and Canada was one of those invited to provide forces to a United Nations Emergency Peace Keeping Force in Cyprus. We had very little background on Cyprus, and I had to do a great deal of digging in libraries and to get British Foreign Office reports and so on on the problems of Cyprus as it had emerged, from being a British colony up to and after World War Two, to an independent country largely ruled by President Makarios and the Greek element and with the Turks sitting in a relatively limited area in North Cyprus, and playing only a token part in the government of Cyprus. Then the struggle that broke out between them drew us in. It also weakened the southern flank of NATO, because you had Greece and Turkey really at loggerheads in support of their two communities and sending forces to assist those communities; and Mr. Martin spent a great deal of his time at NATO meetings talking with the Greek and Turkish foreign ministers and asking them to intervene with their communities in Cyprus and trying to calm down these flare-ups of community fighting between the Greeks and the Turks. Mr. Martin went to Cyprus in 1965, just before the London Ministerial meeting in May 1965, and I accompanied him on this trip. We saw President Makarios and Dr. Kucuk, the Vice-President representing the Turkish community, and the Secretary General's political representative, and got a lot of the flavour of the life lived by the members of the Canadian element of the United Nations force, because we had provided a brigade headquarters which controlled the operations in one section along the blue line between the two communities. There was this interface between United Nations peacekeeping and NATO, because it so affected Greece and Turkey and their relations.

 

As you know, Mr. Pearson was very much interested in the possible creation of a stand-by United Nations peacekeeping force, and with his encouragement a conference was held in Ottawa in November of 1964, I believe it was, where we had representatives from something like 23 different countries to talk about the technical aspects of the operation of a peacekeeping force. This was something that brought us into touch not only with the Scandinavian countries, which were providing people for UNEF in the Middle East and for UNFICYP in Cyprus, but also with some countries like India which provided forces, with Pakistan, with Nigeria and some of the developing countries of Africa. It was a very interesting experience.

 

Partly as a result of this, Canada, because of its technical competence in military affairs and the fact that it wasn't one of the great powers, was drawn into the area of military training assistance to Commonwealth countries. I remember one of our bigger projects which emerged, at the end of 1964, was to send a military investigation team out to Tanzania. We had a Brigadier Herb Love who led the group, and Arthur Kroeger who was working for me at that time went out as the External Affairs representative; and they came back with a proposal that we take on training and advisory services for the Tanzanian Armed Forces, and the government accepted this. A little while later the Tanzanians asked if we would provide an air unit and we provided a couple of Caribou and six Otter aircraft. These were to help move the troops around in case there were security requirements in the country. This was a 20 million dollar proposition with perhaps 80 Canadian officers in the field at the time; it did draw off some of the contribution which might otherwise have been made to NATO, but it was one which was enjoyed by the Department of National Defence which thought it was a good operation, and it related quite a bit to Mr. Pearson's view that it would also contribute to our capacity in the peacekeeping field.

 

[HILL] A couple of other points, if I might raise them, on that period. One is you mentioned the question of nuclear control in NATO and consultations about nuclear questions. This was a central issue, so far as the French were concerned, in this period. I mean they had their own proposals, which they put forward in 1958, for a three power directorate.. General De Gaulle backed Mr. Kennedy very strongly during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but on the other hand his reaction afterwards was to say that if this had taken place in Europe, France would have wanted to have much more of a say in things; and then, of course, gradually France moved to an autonomous position within NATO. How much involved were you with this issue? What sort of role did Canada play in trying to bridge the gap, shall we say, between the French and some of the others?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Well, I would say that Mr. Martin tried very hard to maintain links with the French and his manoeuvers before and during NATO ministerial meetings were to rush to see the French Foreign Minister Couve de Murville, I believe it was at the time, and to try to ease the relationships between the French and the Americans. And probably at the Foreign Minister level he had some impact. But I think General De Gaulle had his own ideas which were perhaps not wholly communicated to all the members of his entourage. All of this, of course, was in a period in which Canada thought it had a special relationship with France—as it was before General De Gaulle's visit to Canada and his famous outcry of "Vive le Quebec libre". During this time Mr. Pearson was the first Canadian Prime Minister to ever visit Paris, and he was well received by de Gaulle and given a big dinner, and so on, and had talks with Prime Minister Pompidou and I think we felt that we were doing about as much as could be done in terms of toadying to the French. In the end it didn't do us much good because our couple of squadrons, CF104 squadrons, had to be moved out of France to Germany and the squadrons which we left at Marville had to be taken out of the nuclear strike role and made into reconnaissance aircraft, because General de Gaulle would not have nuclear weapons which were not under French control on French soil.

 

[HILL] There was a period when there was a whole lot of Alliance consultation about the role of France and of bargaining with the French. But I believe that would have been after the period when you were dealing with these issues.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Yes, after I'd gone to Australia.

 

[HILL] But this issue of the French was there throughout the whole period you were with Defence Liaison. It was felt in the public, I remember.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Yes. Well, one must remember that, at that time, NATO Headquarters was still in Paris, and we went there for all our Ministerial meetings that were held at NATO Headquarters. It did have some impact that the meetings were being held in Paris rather than in Brussels.

 

[HILL] About this period, I remember issues of Time magazine proclaiming the New Europe, which was going to be like America. Barriers between East and West were supposed to be breaking down. There was talk about the two political systems, Eastern and Western, drawing closer together. It was really in many ways a period when it looked as though NATO could be on the verge of becoming obsolete. Is that your impression of that period?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] I wouldn't have said so, myself. I think there were enough problems about Berlin. I would have said that while there was certainly not a, "severe strain", in East/West relations at this time, there was not the same euphoria which emerged in the second period when I was Ambassador to NATO and the German Ostpolitik was in play and the CSCE conference was convened. This was a period nearly 10 years later when I think detente did become a significant factor. It's also interesting that during this period, the end of 1964, October perhaps, Khrushchev was ousted by his colleagues, and I think there was an awareness after that that the Soviet leadership was not going to be as flexible as this shoe thumping Khrushchev had seemed to be prepared to be in his meetings with Kennedy.

 

There's one other little issue that I'd like to mention here and that is an experiment which was tried, I think it was in 1964 also, of a meeting of a Defence Committee of Ministers between Canada and the United States. The relationships for North American defence, from the time of the Ogdensburg Agreement, had been handled by the Canada/ United States Permanent Joint Board of officials and military people on Defence, and also by direct liaison between Canadian military commanders, naval, air and army, with their opposites. The experiment was to send down a team of Ministers chaired by the Secretary of State for External Affairs, Mr. Martin and including Paul Hellyer, the Minister of National Defence, and the Minister of Finance and a couple of others, and they met with the US Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Treasury. I think this was tried about two times, and then it was realized that this put Canadian Ministers under too much direct, heavy pressure and that it was really easier to sidestep pressure from the United States by keeping them at civil servants' arms length through the PJBD, and to avoid the embarrassment of direct organized meetings in which the Americans could put pretty direct pressure on Canada. And the mechanism for control of North American defence, either as a separate subject or as a NATO sector, has never been either brought into NATO as a political military subject nor organized in a way that Canada's contribution to NORAD or the emergency plans for the defence of North America, or cooperation in military exercises or naval exercises off either coast, well off the West coast in particular, are brought under some ministerial committee. Canada always felt a lot more comfortable in the NATO environment than it did meeting directly with the United States and the pressures that could be brought on Ministers.

 

[HILL] That's very interesting, because a number of other people have touched on that kind of issue, the question of the bilateral relationship with the US in NORAD and otherwise.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Well, it has never been completely organized, and has been, I guess, deliberately left unorganized because a satisfactory mechanism is difficult to achieve. And it shows the difficulty that other bilateral or trilateral partners of the United States face, whether it is the US/Japan Security Treaty or the ANZUS arrangement between the United States and Australia, New Zealand, where they meet perhaps once a year and a lot of things are brought together at that point, and there can, I think, be a feeling that because of the disparity of both economic and military strength, the dialogue is not between equals in any way at all.

 

[HILL] Which I presume indicates that membership in NATO is a great advantage to Canada. It is easier to deal with the United States when one is associated with others, as in NATO.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Yes, and it is economical for the United States to keep 14 or 15 allies informed through a mechanism in NATO, far easier than calling in the Japanese Ambassador, the Australian and New Zealand Ambassadors. Indeed, one of the things that emerged in my first contact with NATO in the early sixties was arrangements by which we did some briefing of the Australians and New Zealanders about the international issues which were part of the consultative process, the political consultative process, or studies that were prepared in NATO. The Australians and New Zealanders were very grateful to get this larger perspective on East/West relations because their own arrangements with the Americans in ANZUS focused very much on the South Pacific security area and perhaps South East Asia. It did not bring them into what were in fact world balance of power and nuclear deterrence issues to the same extent. During my second time around in NATO the Japanese began to take a considerably increased interest in what was going on in NATO because they realized that there were exchanges of views on broad strategic questions taking place there which they were curious about. But they were so, what shall I say, sensitive about being seen to have any connection with NATO because of the No War clause in their constitution and the opposition of the Socialist Party, that this all had to be handled very discreetly and sometimes under the rubric of disarmament.

 

[HILL] I wonder if I could ask you one last question before we complete this morning’s session. That is, while you were at Defence Liaison between 1962 and 1965, the 1964 White Paper on Defence was written and adopted by the Canadian government. This looked toward having more mobile forces. It also led to the unification of the armed forces. Did you feel then that the government was already looking at some changes in Canada's role in NATO and perhaps to some diminution in Canada's military contribution? If so, was this seen as a reflection of normal changes in world relationships? Did it or did it not indicate any diminution in Canada's involvement and interest in NATO in general?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] In preparation for the White Paper on Defence which Mr. Hellyer brought down, a great number of studies were prepared in the Department of National Defence and in the Department of External Affairs. In the first draft, which was prepared by a committee in the Department of National Defence with representation from External Affairs, one got something that might be described as a traditional 10 year projection of existing roles and priorities in National Defence. Little did we realize that all this effort was not going to be incorporated in the final paper which was written by Mr. Hellyer with the assistance of his personal executive assistant, Wing Commander Bill Lee. I think the short term impact of the White Paper was the devastating impact on the armed forces of the proposals for integration, and there was a great deal of resistance, particularly in the naval command, and a general feeling among a lot of people that this was not in the NATO pattern. No other country in NATO had done the same thing. So to some extent the creation of Mobile Command, which really was a command for the land forces to balance Maritime Command and Air Transport Command and Air Command, was perhaps obscured by the shouting and clamour over this integration of the armed forces. But there's no doubt that the idea of a Mobile Command Headquarters at St. Hubert, in Quebec, with responsibility for the brigade in Germany and in fact for the Tactical Air Units which were over there, this was a new concept which I think was only being raised, but it was not significant. It was not projected to the same extent that it was when Donald Macdonald's next review of defence came out, in which they specifically talked about air mobile forces and units. The sort of commitment which we had, particularly to Northern Norway, was something that required air portable forces. There was something a little incongruous certainly, in peacetime, in terms of the tank-equipped unit in Germany and the air mobile requirement, which fitted in with peace-keeping in terms of support for Norway and in order to be able to move people quickly through Air Transport Command, to Cyprus or the Middle East or wherever else.

[HILL] But, in effect, although it looked towards some sort of structural changes, it was not really an indication of a diminution of Canadian interest in NATO.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Oh, I wouldn't say so. I think that Mr. Pearson himself was a very, very strong NATO man. We had a meeting of NATO Ministers in Canada, in 1964 I think it was, and Mr. Pearson made quite a strong statement at that time, in which he re-emphasized Article Two of the NATO Treaty, and said if we didn't include the political, economic, and social cooperation among members of NATO, NATO would sooner or later fade away. Other mechanisms were being evolved at that time for dealing with the economic problems through the OECD and the European Community concept.

 

[HILL] Well, I think we will close at that point for today.

 

Part IV - Ambassador to the North Atlantic Council, 1972-76

 

[HILL] Ambassador Menzies, you took up your appointment as Canada's Permanent Representative to the North Atlantic Council in the autumn of 1972, if I'm not mistaken. You were there in Brussels till 1976 during four very eventful years. What strikes me about that period is the fact that prior to that you'd been in Australia I think for seven years, and then, as we mentioned during the previous part of the interview, much of your earlier experience too had been on what one might call a global basis, in fact to some degree focused on the Far East aside from the period as Head of Defence Liaison (I) Division. Could you tell us something about how you came to be appointed Ambassador to the North Atlantic Council and what sort of situation you found when you arrived there?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] I had spent seven years as High Commissioner to Australia during quite an exciting time in Australian economic development, and I was certainly ready to move but didn't expect to be asked to go to NATO because I had no background in European affairs, other than the period from 1962 to 1965 when I served as Head of Defence Liaison (I) Division which dealt with NATO. I suppose that my general background and that period of specialized experience was thought to equip me for an assignment to NATO, but I'm not privy to the discussions that may have taken place. My predecessor, Ross Campbell, had already spent four years at NATO, and it was publicly known that he had been opposed to the Trudeau government's reduction of the Canadian military contribution in Europe by fifty percent, and therefore I suppose it was time for a change of representatives. As I was not involved in any way in the decisions of the 1969/70 period, that may have been one of the reasons I was selected for the assignment. When I reached Brussels, in the autumn of 1972, I think it fair to say that the other Permanent Representatives to NATO had digested the Canadian reduction. The world had not fallen apart because of that reduction. But the redoubtable Secretary General Luns certainly wasn't going to avoid any opportunity to chide Canadians for the example which they had set in reducing. I felt that my job was to accept the situation, as it existed, and make the best of it, and I had a great deal to learn about Western Europe, Eastern Europe, . about what had been going on over the last seven years in NATO and about how to run a great big multi-faceted delegation and it took me some time to settle in.

 

The situation which I found on arrival at NATO I try to summarize this way. The United States had been trying to disengage from Vietnam. It was changing its approach to the Peoples Republic of China. President Nixon had been having discussions and had been making some progress in his talks with the Soviet leaders. Our own Mr. Trudeau had his Ostpolitik which in a small way was consistent with these American efforts, and Chancellor Brandt of the Federal German Republic had his Ostpolitik, and these things made up to a spirit or tentative feeling toward detente which was reflected in the proposals for a Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe. It’s true that this was to be balanced by discussions about specific troop reductions in central Europe, the so-called Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction Talks. We in Canada had, I think, been somewhat disabused of our idea that we had a special relationship with the United States when Secretary Connolly slapped some restrictions on Canadian trade with the United States, in the same way that those restrictions were applied to everybody else's trade, and we were perhaps reviewing how we could lessen our excessive dependence on the United States. At that time Britain was in the last stages of entry into the European Economic Community. Britain had been an important trading partner of Canada, and I think the thought was that we should try to develop an economic relationship with the European Community at a time when we were going to have to change our trading relations with the United Kingdom if it entered the European Community. In broad terms, I think there was considerable European and Canadian relief that the Americans were disengaging themselves from Vietnam. There was inevitably some spill-over of dissatisfaction in Europe with what the United States had got itself into and the methods it was using in Vietnam. I think there was also a desire to see some of the troops which had been taken out of Europe by the United States for service in Vietnam, returned to their positions; and I think the Europeans hoped that the United States would pay more attention to European affairs as a result of their disengagement. Dr. Kissinger's talk about a multi-polar world struck a responsive chord. I remember Secretary of State for External Affairs Mitchell Sharp recognizing this, in seeing that in addition to the United States and the Soviet Union there were elements of either existing or potential strength in Japan, in China and certainly in Western Europe as it was pulling itself together as a community. But the nature of that polarity was not just a balance of nuclear terror as it existed, and rather uniquely between the United States and the Soviet Union. These were to indicate other emerging centres of power; and I think on the whole the Europeans and we in Canada welcomed this.

 

[HILL] Did he make these views known already in 1972? So the end of 1972 was in a way rather a watershed, because first of all you had the re-election of President Nixon, and then you also had in early 1973 the Vietnam Cease-fire Agreement, which in effect marked the pullout of the United States from Vietnam; then the United States was able to turn its attention more fully to the European theatre and the general, global scene. So these ideas about a multi-polar world that you mentioned, was that early 1973 more or less?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Certainly the ideas began to be more firmly expressed, but I would say they had their origin in American recognition of the split between the Soviet Union and The People's Republic of China and the decision to move toward a more forthcoming working-relationship with China, which ended in The Shanghai Communique of September 1972, and the decision of the United States to turn over responsibility for the conduct of the war in Vietnam to the Thieu government, although they had difficulty in disengaging and in the negotiations, which had been going on for a year or so before the cease-fire of early February 1973. I think that there was a shift in Dr. Kissinger’s thinking already emerging at the end of 1971-1972, and it was certainly more clearly articulated after President Nixon's re- election at the end of 1972 and going into 1973.

 

[HILL] I think that what you mentioned is quite fascinating, partly because you may have been more aware of some of these changes in US thinking, and at an earlier stage, than others who were involved in international affairs at that time. In my own case, being absorbed in the work of NATO in 1972-1973, inside the machine, the impression was that relations between Europe and the United States and Canada in NATO were extremely good. Things seemed to be moving along. Everybody seemed to be moving in parallel. Consultation was good. I think the only difficulty in that period, say early 1972, was sometimes in getting the attention of the United States, owing to its absorption elsewhere. But I think that what most people expected was that the United States would follow along what you might call the more traditional paths of perhaps beefing up the Western Alliance as a solid first base before dealing with anybody else outside. But one's impression was that, instead of that, President Nixon, having been re-elected, and the Vietnam cease-fire agreement having been made, gave more attention to this other, new policy. But China and Japan were still not the nuclear superpowers that the United States was. Neither was Europe, of course. I wonder if you could say something about that. Of course Dr. Kissinger had his Year of Europe, which came in early 1973. But what about US relations with Europe? What were they trying to do there, and how did this compare with Canada's views towards Europe in this period?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] That's a difficult question to speak about. It seems to me that Dr. Kissinger had in his mind a sort of Atlantic dumbell relationship, that is the United States with the European Community, and there was, I think, a hankering that, instead of having to deal with the major European partners individually, they would talk out their positions among themselves, and somehow or other become a more integrated and a more responsible element that he could talk to in some kind of a collectivity. Now that concept was certainly not one that enthused Canadian ministers or their official advisors at all, because we had had a position in NATO for nearly 25 years that we regarded as giving us a multilateral forum in which we could express views, influence the formation of policies and so on, and we valued that particular forum. Not only that but in 1972 under the direction of the Secretary of State, the Honourable Mitchell Sharp, a paper had been prepared on Canada/United States relations, a paper that was missing in the five part folio on Foreign Policy for Canadians that had been issued in 1970, and this came down to favouring what was called the Third Option, that Canada should seek to strengthen its relations with other countries and particularly with the European Economic Community. So that we were thinking in terms of developing a contractual link with a consultative mechanism with the European Community. I'd like to just elaborate on that a little bit further. It seems to me that we had the objective of establishing our own economic contractual link with the European Community. But in addition to that we wanted to maintain a flexible relationship with the Western European countries on foreign policy questions, not just strategic, and not just within the NATO area, but a consultative mechanism, which had been worked out over the years of NATO, to discuss, to inform each other, take into account each other's interests and so on, in the formation of foreign policy. Now we found that the European Community foreign ministers were beginning a process of political coordination, foreign policy coordination, especially on matters which were not strategic, and quite often on matters which were outside the NATO defence perimeter area, questions like the Middle East and policies of that kind. Here we were confronted with an initiative, which involved the political directors general of the foreign ministries of the European Community getting together on a regular basis, quite often every two months, with working groups under them to coordinate their positions on a whole series of foreign policy questions. Then when they reached some common position they put that up to their foreign ministers and the foreign ministers finally hammered out a position. They weren't going to back down in consultations with the United States, Canada, Norway or the Southern flank countries, like Turkey and Greece, which perhaps were not as closely involved in some of these issues. And I think it was as a result of the discussion of that foreign policy formation by the European Community, that we probably exercised in that period a considerable influence in impressing upon the Europeans the value of keeping a good part of the discussion and exchange of views and consultation on foreign policy things in NATO, rather than creating a dumbbell situation. Now this was a real situation, for instance, for the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe. The European Community developed their own positions before the subject was brought to the NATO Council for discussion. We had this with regard to the Middle East, with regard to Cyprus, with regard to a whole series of issues and at one stage, I think, the professionals in the State Department, if my guess is right, managed to persuade Dr. Kissinger that it was not entirely desirable to emphasize to the European Community: "you fellows make up your minds first, and then we can talk together as equals". And of course it suited our purposes that the consultative process should remain more diffuse, because there was no room for Canada if it became a kind of trans-Atlantic dumbbell with two main focuses of power and decision-making. We would be left out of it, and some of this found its expression in the drafting of the 1974 Atlantic Declaration.

 

[HILL] I wondered if we might come on to that later. Although Dr. Kissinger wanted a united Europe, he wanted one which would be fast-reacting and be able to move quickly on the international scene, the way that he liked.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] That's right. That's right. Which wasn't possible with five vetos there. Our experience was that Monsieur Jobert, the French Foreign Minister, was particularly prickly and difficult. He and Dr. Kissinger clashed constantly and there was almost bad blood at that time, and a willingness on the part of the French to just hold things up, and I think that Britain and Germany began to see that this was going to affect the whole sense of trans-Atlantic solidarity. The British had always had their special relationship in discussions with the Americans and it hadn't really dawned on them, but the Germans certainly began to realize, that this type of obstacle to co-operation, trans- Atlantic co-operation, was not in their interest. Fortunately, there were also some very able officials, I'm thinking of Andre De Staerke, the Dean of the NATO Council in Belgium, and Viscount d'Avignon, who was the political Director General of the Belgian Foreign Ministry, people like that who had a great deal of understanding of the diffuse but necessary character of the trans- Atlantic relationship, which probably should not be jostled too much.

 

[HILL] The other thing, I think, is that Dr. Kissinger's vision of Europe wasn't always in tune with the reality. In effect, what he was looking for was a Europe which was under single direction, in terms of not only economic policy but also of foreign policy; and of course at that point it hadn't reached that stage on foreign policy or even more on defence. In fact the defence of Western Europe is conducted through NATO, so it wasn't really quite in tune with reality.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] And quite apart from NATO there was the OECD, which met in Paris and which was not restricted to NATO membership. When a crisis like the oil or energy crisis came on that was an OECD responsibility, and basically the economic aspects of the oil crisis were handled by the energy committee of the OECD, not by the European Community as such, not by NATO, but in this other body; and I think Dr. Kissinger somehow overlooked the fact there had grown up "like Topsy" a certain framework for the discussion of different subjects, and that it was better to patch that up, than to start all over again.

 

[HILL] I was very struck by the comment you made that there was a certain amount of friction, shall we say, between M. Jobert and Dr. Kissinger and others. I wonder if you could say something about the general atmosphere inside NATO in terms of consultations in early 1973? For example, how well conducted, in your view, were the MBFR Exploratory Talks? What was the general sense, the feeling among the NATO countries, about the state of consultations in the early part of 1973?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Well, on the CSCE, the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, there had been advance discussion and consultation and position papers on desiderata prepared in NATO, but once the negotiations got under way in Geneva, the working talks, governments tended to send guidance directly to their delegations in Geneva, and both European Community and NATO caucuses met there. But they were not only thinking of the position that would be adopted by the Eastern European countries under Soviet leadership, but also of the bridging role that could be played by the non aligned countries - Sweden, Finland, Austria, perhaps Malta, although Malta was a special thorn in the flesh at that time. On the other hand in the case of the MBFR, which was a conference basically between two blocs, the policy was decided at NATO headquarters and the delegations in Vienna discussed tactics, and they had of course an input to their own governments but they did not have the authority to develop policy. Now as the talks began on MBFR I think it was recognized that both the US and the Soviet Union should make the first troop reductions. What emerged, however, was that the Europeans, and particularly the - Federal Republic of Germany, could see that the design of the Warsaw Pact countries was to get a first phase agreement which would put a straitjacket on their forces to hold them to a certain size, to have them perhaps subject to some kind of inspection. And there was a great deal of nervousness about the imbalance of forces between East and West if some kind of restrictions were to be put on the Western countries, and this slowed the whole process down as governments began to think of the implications of an agreement. It was also interesting that, in this period, the MBFR on-going discussions were used by the United States government as a way to fend off any pressures from Congress to reduce American forces in Europe for financial reasons, balance of payments reasons or other things - they would only reduce their American forces in Europe in a balanced sort of way. That had its implications for Canadian forces as well. We would not reduce our forces in Europe until some agreement had been reached at the MBFR.

 

[HILL] By and large, do you think that these talks were reasonably well conducted, or was there any sense of, say, the United States trying to move faster than the others wanted to go, or slower? What was the sentiment about that in the NATO Council?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] I would say that the MBFR talks were probably one of the best examples of NATO coordination that I've seen. I think that there were obvious differences between the interests of the United States and the Soviet Union on the one hand, and other countries, but any sort of regime of control that would be established under MBFR would be imposed on Germany in particular and there was considerable sensitivity in Germany. In fact, I can recall in later years learning with interest that the German foreign ministry had weekly meetings with their Members of Parliament to talk about where the MBFR talks were going, practically on a weekly basis because of the potential implications for them of a regime that might be set up for Central Europe that would affect them. You can’t imagine Canadian Members of Parliament being that much interested in the MBFR talks.

 

[HILL] What about the impact also of the Year of Europe, Dr. Kissinger's call for a Year of Europe? He also called for a new Atlantic Charter in early 1973. My impression was that the United States found that the Europeans picked these up and Canada picked them up a little bit, but not quite in the spirit that the Americans wanted. Then the Americans dropped them to some degree afterwards. They lost a large degree of interest in these things at a certain point.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Yes, but there was this below-the-surface need to find or to reconcile the intention of the European Community countries, to coordinate their foreign policy, and a feeling that if they retreated from that it would be a sign of lack of cohesion. Yet each of the five main members of the European Community were trying to retain their veto power. There was no permanent secretariat like the European Economic Commission staffs in Brussels. The Chairmanship rotated every six months, and it was the responsibility of each foreign office under the foreign minister who was chairman for six months to provide the secretariat, and the reconciling of that aspiration, and legitimate aspiration, of the European Community to coordinate their foreign policy in certain areas had to be reconciled with their relationships with the United States, in particular, but also with the other members of the Alliance. There was the special position of Ireland which was not a member of NATO, so NATO was not for all purposes an entirely satisfactory forum, alternative forum, for these discussions. But I think there were other distractions that came in, like the Middle East War in 1973 and the fact that the United States flew supplies, military equipment for Israel, through Germany, through Spain, through Portugal to the Middle East without so much as a by-your-leave; and the fact that the Americans went on to stage a world-wide alert for their forces, without consultation, came as a shock. Now this had reverberations even in Canada because the American component of NORAD went onto alert and the Canadian component didn't go onto alert and questions were raised in Parliament about this. There was, I think, as a result of that experience - and the fact that the Europeans also made certain proposals for a settlement of the Middle East dispute which were not entirely to the American's liking and made them as a European Community proposal without consulting the United States - these things were all recognized as being rather divisive incidents and it was necessary to find ways of healing those misunderstandings; and that, I think, did result in some recognition of the need to pull together. The Americans, for instance, also wanted to see the Western position on oil fully coordinated and that we should as a group deal with the OPEC countries. Whereas the French, looking after themselves, wanted some bilateral deals and went ahead and entered into them, and this certainly didn't help relations and we tended to sympathize with the American position on this.

 

[HILL] It seems to me that was kind of a re-assertion of traditional cleavages within the Alliance and that was the kind of thing that had arisen in 1956 in the Suez Crisis. It's rather a different thing than Dr. Kissinger's architectural moves to restructure the world. I think one thing that seems to me to have been there is a concern about the United States going over the head of the Europeans, and Canada too, and perhaps also Japan at times, in dealing with the Soviet Union and other powers. I was wondering, what was the reaction of NATO to the early 1973 US/Soviet Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War? Did that cause much of a stir?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] I think one would have to say that the Americans have pretty consistently had so much difficulty within their own administration and internal opposition that they were almost as hidebound as the European Community countries were and that they tended to not consult sufficiently with their partners. They informed but they didn't consult. I think this has been a problem of American relations with their partners on strategic weapons discussions from the very beginning. Mechanisms have been worked out in recent years for consultation at the senior official level on intermediate range nuclear forces, but generally speaking NATO has been informed of what the United States is doing on the strategic weapons side. And there was, I think we mentioned this last time, the differences due to lack of consultation, real consultation, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which resulted eventually in the establishment of the Nuclear Planning Group of NATO defence ministers; and that Nuclear Planning Group is again a place where the United States informs its allies of its appraisal of the strategic balance and what it's going to do about it, but not in detail (although certain exercises, hypothetical studies about the consultative mechanisms on the use of nuclear weapons, are prepared for these NPG meetings). But it is really quite difficult to envisage a full scale discussion in NATO of all the pros and cons of each option that could be chosen by the United States in its negotiations with the Soviets, and there is a problem of possible security leakage of information through out-of-date communications systems or things of that kind, that are a matter of great concern when you're dealing with such fearsome weapons as Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles of one kind or another.

 

[HILL] If we could then wrap up this question of the allied relationships of the United States: by and large, I have the impression that you feel, on the whole, while there may have been some concern about US relations with the Alliance, on the whole people were more or less satisfied. I'm thinking now about the situation prior to the specific issue of the Middle East War in 1973.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Yes. One of the things that was, I think, a source of satisfaction was that Kissinger came from Moscow on his way back even before going to see the President, to brief the Council, or deputed his number two man to come and brief the Council, and this meant that the information was made available to governments pretty quickly on what went on; and the atmospherics of the discussions with the Soviets were given to you; and provided we wrote our telegrams in a colourful way we could put that back to Ottawa in a way that was meaningful.

 

[HILL] Let's go on to the summer, then, of 1973. Already Watergate was an issue in the United States. Did that have an effect on US policy in NATO?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Well I don't think the summer of 1973 was a particularly eventful time if my recollection is correct. It's really when the Middle East war broke out that problems arose, but certainly any lame duck situation with regard to the position of the US President is difficult. People in Europe as in well as Canada are very aware that decisions are just not taken in Washington for six months or so and nothing happens unless the initiative comes from somewhere else. Watergate certainly had that effect, that the Americans were not taking initiatives because of their concern about conditions at home.

 

[HILL] Right. Let's go on to the Middle East War of 1973 and then the Energy Crisis. You touched on it a little bit earlier, I think. My impression is it was almost the case that you could say, looked at from the outside: ''Will NATO ever learn?" "Will the Alliance ever learn?" I mean the Middle East always seems to be the biggest problem, it creates the biggest splits inside the Alliance. I wonder if you could tell us something about what happened in that period inside NATO headquarters?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] I'm not sure that my memory is very clear on details of that particular crisis. But the US support for Israel, military support and political support, was pretty evident and it included the transfer of military equipment through Germany, through US bases in Germany and through Portugal and through the Azores to Israel without so much as a by-your-leave to the governments concerned. There was a world-wide alert of US forces also when the threat of Soviet intervention loomed. There was a good deal of discussion in NATO about Soviet capability of moving two or three divisions by air, because they had demonstrated their capability to airlift in the annual rotation of their troops in Eastern Europe; and so there was I think a good deal of concern. The French again, and in particular, were at that period a good deal more pro-Arab and I think French logic also took the view that it was the Arabs who controlled the oil and one should pay attention to that fact. So, you had Dr. Kissinger wanting to get the Western partners to decide policies jointly, which meant really supporting US positions, and the French attitude was to go off and negotiate their own deals on oil with the Arab countries, and to get the European Community to offer to play a role in mediation in the Middle East. And they came out with a declaration, which they hadn't shown the Americans in advance, and that irritated Dr. Kissinger who always wanted to handle the Middle East himself. He didn't want the Soviets in. He didn't want the European Community to play a role in the Middle East. He wanted to run it himself. I think that did create a good deal of unhappiness in NATO and it's a constant sore point and I don't think one can say it has been solved yet, except to say that the US has not in recent years been quite as interventionist.

 

[HILL] This also raised the question of the utility and the depth of NATO consultations on economic issues, because, for example, you mentioned the French being dependent on Middle East oil but of course the Italians were even more so. The Greeks and the Turks and that whole Southern wing were very dependent on Middle East oil. And to some degree the other Europeans also. But how good was the consultation on the economic aspects, on the question of oil supply, inside NATO? Did it prompt NATO to think - it should do more in the area of economic consultation?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Well, as you know, NATO has an economic committee which does some quite good studies particularly on the economic position of the Warsaw Pact countries. Some studies on the Middle East and so on and other areas were made by the Economic Committee but they were more informational than actual suggestions about policy. The intelligence people within NATO, that is the military and the civilian intelligence people, also did a number of papers on Middle East oil, and there were also some discussions about contingency planning, in the case of interruption of the supply of oil from the Middle East, done by the Military Committee. But by and large, I think the attitude of the governments was that this was an OECD responsibility and there was an energy committee struck which dealt, I think, pretty vigorously with oil and what could be done about sharing oil in the event of the interruption of supply and so on. Canada, and the United States, were perhaps less immediately affected than the Europeans because we had a good share of what we needed anyway in Canada and the United States was drawing oil from Venezuela and places like that, which were not subject to interruption by the Middle East war.

 

[HILL] When you mentioned the energy committee you were referring to the energy committee of the OECD?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Yes.

 

[HILL] If we could move on then, into the 1974 period. That was the time when Watergate became really a major issue in the United States; and then eventually President Nixon stepped down. It was also the period in which, I think it was by June 1974, NATO had moved to establish the Atlantic Declaration, which was agreed in the Ottawa ministerial meeting here in June of that year. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that whole process, how that declaration came to be written and agreed upon. Did it have its antecedents in the call for a new Atlantic Charter of Dr. Kissinger earlier on?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Yes, I think it did, and it also flowed, I think, from the backroom discussions of the relationship of the United States, of Canada, of Norway and other non-European Community countries with the efforts of the Europeans to stake out an area and a procedure for foreign policy coordination among them. And it was as much a reiteration, I would say basically, of two concepts; one, the reiteration of the interdependence of North America and Europe for each other’s security, and this was an area in which I, and other members of the Canadian delegation, had to do a great deal of work to ensure that each time the importance of the US military contribution in Europe was mentioned that there was ’’and Canadian troops" also put in there, because we were not to be left out on any occasion; and the second aspect of this was to emphasize the importance of close and continuing consultation within NATO on items that would have both a direct and indirect effect on the interests and security of the members of NATO, and a specific reference to the fact that these interests could be affected by events which took place outside the NATO area. I think on the whole that declaration stands up pretty well. We were enormously pleased with what we achieved. I thought I should have got a Canada decoration out of this operation, and it was rather unfortunate that it wasn't called the Ottawa Declaration, because it was approved here at the June Foreign Ministers meeting in Ottawa, but at the last moment the President of the United States said he wanted to go over to Brussels at the Head of State level and sign the document. Mr. Trudeau was sufficiently miffed by this undercutting of the Canadian role that he decided not to go to Brussels and sent the Honourable Senator Paul Martin to sign the document.

 

[HILL] I think one of the key phrases in that document, if I'm not mistaken, is the phrase that it was a question of things which affected members of the Alliance "as members of the Alliance". It wasn't simply that all of the other allies would back up one of the members who was in trouble in, lets say, Africa. If they were in trouble in Africa, it was a question of whether that affected Alliance interests. Then everybody else would take a role.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Certainly. But there was, I think, an attitude of interdependency or a recognition of interdependency to the extent, for instance, that it is stated in one of the paragraphs that the maintenance of adequate defence forces by the European countries makes a contribution to the security of North America. It wasn’t just Americans and Canadians contributing to the security of Western Europe.

 

[HILL] My impression, though I was not at NATO at that time, I was in Kingston, my impression, looking at this development from the outside, was that it was rather a nice development, a good result out of the earlier calls for a new Atlantic Charter. There was a solid recognition of the need for sound consultations and there were some advances made there in terms of defining just what it meant to be a good ally in terms of consulting with one's partners. Did you see it, also, as a sort of following on from the work of the Three Wise Men in 1956? The Pearson, Lange and Martino exercise?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Definitely. Except that this was drafted by the permanent representatives, or some of us, and it was a very long-drawn out exercise. I'm sure if one were to get out the files of the various delegations we should find several inches of paper.

 

[HILL] It was a sort of deepening of the principles recorded in 1956, a further development of them. Your mentioning President Nixon's involvement with the final stage of this is interesting, because my impression of that particular visit of his to Europe was that it was a last scrambling, a looking for popular support for his administration, at a time when it was in very deep trouble. In fact it was only shortly afterwards that he stepped down. Then you had President Ford come in, and normally when a new US President comes in, as with any other government, but perhaps even more so in the US case, it takes a while for them to get a grip on things; and my impression was that from then on there was a sort of return to normal in East/West relations, and things became normal in the sense of almost too normal, solidified if you like, into the old patterns, because of President Ford being rather more small ’c* conservative in his approach to international affairs. Also, of course, in Moscow you had Brezhnev still at that time, already in a state where he was not being at all adventurous about anything. Was that how you would see the state of East/West affairs at that time?

 

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Yes, and I think some of the lampoons about President Ford and his intellectual qualities had their effect on European attitudes. He was a very nice man and the NATO Council was invited after a SACLANT meeting to go up to Washington, and we had our photograph taken in the Oval Office and everybody got an enormous ashtray and a pen and we were taken out in the Presidential yacht on the Potomac and everything was done in an avuncular sort of way, but there really wasn't any substance in it.

 

[HILL] But on the other hand, perhaps it was a relatively safe period in East/West relations in some ways, was it not, more or less up to 1976?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Yes it was.

 

[HILL] Could we turn now to the question of Canadian policy in this period. Mr. Trudeau was re-elected in 1974, I think it was. Did you find any difference in his approach to NATO and international affairs, as compared with 1968 for example?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Well, I would have said that Mr. Trudeau's attitude to NATO appeared to be changing about the time of the NATO foreign ministers meeting in Ottawa, in June of 1974. He made some very supportive statements when he opened the meeting in the House of Commons chamber for the foreign ministers of NATO and he was, I think, pretty enthusiastic about the Declaration on Atlantic Relations. I mentioned that he was disappointed this wasn’t called the Ottawa Declaration, as many of the rest of us Canadians were. In 1974 he was finally invited by President Giscard D'Estaing to visit France, and that, I think, was a pretty important thing for him as it meant a kind of a healing of the wounds of President De Gaulle's visit of 1967. No Prime Minister had been in France or had been invited to France since then. At the same time, while he was well received by President Giscard D'Estaing and Prime Minister Chirac, the French were still not prepared to support a contractual link with Canada for the European Community, without insisting on a thorough understanding of what was involved in this, and I think- -this area's not my responsibility, or was not—but I think part of their concern was that this might open the way for the Americans to ask for a contractual link. Therefore they wanted a very good definition of what was exactly involved and how much leverage might be given to Canada, and therefore to the United States, to interfere in European Economic Community internal decision-making. Mr. Trudeau came to visit the NATO Council on that particular trip in October of 1974, and quite frankly I had primed most of the Permanent Representatives in advance and discussed with them what they should say on this occasion and he was very much impressed by the level of political discussion among the Permanent Representatives. Mr. Trudeau is a person who is always captivated by stimulating conversation. That's what he likes about the Commonwealth Heads of Government meetings and things of that kind. He thought this was a pretty good club and he literally said at that meeting that Canada wants to be a good member of the club. Then in the next year, I guess it was early 1975, the spring of 1975, he made a tour and the most important stop was in Bonn where he got along very well with Chancellor Schmidt. There was a certain intellectual bond between Chancellor Schmidt and Prime Minister Trudeau, and Schmidt and Foreign Minister Genscher emphasized to Mr. Trudeau the importance which Germany attached to Canadian troops being in Germany. That was beginning to put some pressure on him, that if he wanted to get a contractual link there was probably also some link also to Canada’s contribution to NATO. Then in May of 1975, there was a summit meeting of NATO, and Mr. Trudeau made quite a Pearsonian type of statement, including references to harmonizing our economic policies and social policies and things of that kind, which seemed to be harking back to Article Two, but also to one of the paragraphs of the Declaration on Atlantic relations. And he went on to say that he thought there ought to be more summit meetings so that the Heads of NATO governments could give more impetus to the work. Now here again is a characteristic of Prime Minister Trudeau, in my view, that he is not as keen on material that works its way up through a bureaucratic structure, but he likes to see intellectually competent heads of government meeting and exchanging viewpoints and giving directions which then will flow down into the bureaucracy. But I would say that on that occasion again, Chancellor Schmidt told Mr. Trudeau, because I happened to be there, that he would feel a good deal easier about the Canadian forces remaining in Europe if we were to get some new heavy main battle tanks and Mr. Trudeau told his press conference afterwards that he and Chancellor Schmidt had agreed that their Permanent Representatives would discuss this subject afterwards. So that I felt we had achieved just about as much as was possible, in terms of Mr. Trudeau's conversion to, or acceptance of, Canada's role in NATO being a part of our overall foreign policy in our relations with Western Europe. But there were still problems at home, in that the DND budget has always been an area where money can be cut off at the last moment, if there's the need to economize a billion or two. And frankly, as a Permanent Representative to NATO I couldn't help but be disappointed with the constant deferral of decisions on the replacement of the main battle tank, the replacement of the CF 104, the long range maritime patrol aircraft, the replacement of ships and so on. Now it was mainly the battle tanks and the air surveillance capability and air defence capability over the brigade in Europe that was of concern to the Europeans. They weren't nearly as concerned about LRPAs and things of that kind, not to the same extent. Our area of the Atlantic was the North West Atlantic not really adjacent to Western Europe. So you had a positive attitude being expressed in meetings, with European statesmen and at the NATO summit meetings, and yet the performance at home was pretty slow in coming forward with the necessary cash to support it.

 

[HILL] My impression is that in fact up until about 1975, it wasn't clear where the armed forces were going to go. In fact the trend was all downwards. We have heard, I think, in some of the interviews we have had, that it was the Defence Structure Review of 1975/76 which paved the way for the turnaround to go back up again. That, in addition to Mr. Trudeau's conversations with Chancellor Schmidt and so on, turned around the direction in which defence policy was going.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] That's true. It's also I think probably true that that rather blunt old fellow Joseph Luns, the Secretary General of NATO, had a press conference, I think it was in November or something like that of 1975, in which he said very, very bluntly that Canadian troops were among the best that there were but that the equipment was just out of date, and I think it shamed the government or certainly put ammunition into the empty muskets of the opposition to fire at the government, and I think that also helped to precipitate some action rather than putting off decisions and putting them off, and putting them off.

 

[HILL] One interesting piece here, as I understand it, is that when the government decided to do the Defence Structure Review here with DND and External and so on, the initial instruction was that they should see how well they could get along on an even lower budget. In fact what happened was they came to the conclusion that if it was a much lower budget the armed forces would have to move, down to a radically smaller and different kind of organization. But if they wanted to keep it more or less the same type of organization they'd have to increase the budget. There seemed to be all these reasons why in that period of 1975/76 the corner was turned. You mentioned Mr. Luns' attitude towards the state of the Canadian forces at that time. Was this one of the crosses that you had to bear as ambassador in dealings with your colleagues, the fact that others were so very aware of the fact that some of the equipment of the Canadian forces was getting out of date and so on?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Well as you know there is in preparation for the Defence Planning Committee, that is the twice a year conferences of the Ministers of Defence of the NATO countries, there is a review paper prepared both in the national headquarters of each Department of National Defence, a questionnaire made up for each country. And then there is a committee of one's peers, in other words, three, I think it's three Permanent Representatives make a review of this document, and you're literally up on the carpet to justify what you have done since the last review, and what your projected expenditures are going to be. We, I think, were toying around with things like saying we were increasing our defence expenditures by eleven percent, when in fact inflation was eating up a great part of that, and how we could think that when there were these performance reviews all set out on paper, with pretty competent defence accountants from Norway or Italy having a look at this stuff, that we could get away with kidding the other members of the Alliance that we were in fact increasing our contribution by three percent, in real terms, I don't know. But Mr. Richardson made a couple of statements which were hardly sustainable, and I myself hid my head out of sight on these occasions.

 

[HILL] That's very interesting, because I think there is sometimes the impression that things can be hidden. But these days, with all the public information that there is on the state of different countries defence forces, for example in The Military Balance, that really isn't possible.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Oh, yes, the IISS, they don't hesitate to state quite bluntly what's missing.

 

[HILL] Then, in addition to that, you've got all the machinery inside NATO headquarters, where people are doing the accounting exercises that you mentioned. And of course there are visits here, there and everywhere, to the different countries' forces, by senior military officers and officials. And there are joint exercises and so on. So it's all very plain what the state of each country's forces is. Did this question of the state of Canada's forces have an impact on your ability to function? Was it something which in any way affected your position and your capability to perform as Canada's Ambassador and to present Canadian interests inside NATO?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Well, I think the whole halving of the Canadian contribution to NATO back in '69/70, and then the very slow pace of re-equipment, had meant that Canada was not regarded as being as keen a contributor as we had the capability to be. We certainly weren't an example to anybody, say compared to our pride in the technical competence of our peace-keeping units in the UNEF and UNDA, where we were responsible for communications for helicopters, for things of this kind; and we had a pretty good reputation because Canadian forces could be technically competent, and I think that the attitude of the military officers and one which I took, was that even if our forces in Europe were relatively small their quality was that of professionals. They weren't conscripts. They were professionals with an average of 12 to 15 years experience in the armed forces and they were very good. And they were good, but as their equipment got older and older it was pretty difficult to maintain that line that we made up in quality what we didn't have in numbers. I wouldn't say, however, that that really seriously undermined Canada's role in political consultation. I think that* Canada as a country and an economy and a piece of great geography was still a substantive member of the club and that we ranked, you know, reasonably well in the middle, in the upper middle ranks of the NATO member countries.

 

[HILL] Let's follow on a little bit from what you said earlier about how you felt about your capacity to represent Canada inside NATO. My impression is that to some degree there's not really a very tight linkage between the military contribution and the diplomatic capabilities. To some degree Canada's diplomatic role depends upon ideas, upon having capable people, and being able to put forward coherent policies in Alliance discussions. How would you see that situation?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Yes. I think that the NATO Military Committee of permanent military representatives does a good deal of work but it is always subject to and eclipsed by the Council of Permanent Representatives representing the governments. When the ministers of national defence get together, my experience has been that the meetings of the defence ministers are organized in such a way as to review the threat from the Warsaw Pact countries and their capabilities, to review again the infrastructure side within NATO, the common defence facilities that have been built up, to go through such things as the integrated communications system, a lot of necessary infrastructure of maintaining forces in Europe and to get reports. But they don't appear to have any real thinking sessions on strategy in broad terms; that's something that I think they all tend to avoid. In Canada's case, of course, the defence ministers do not discuss the North American component of the North American region, that is the NORAD, and the other plans for the defence of North America, naval and military. On the other hand, the foreign ministers do appear to be the more senior group in - NATO, after all it is called the North Atlantic Council, and when they meet they are not so much going through detailed reports, although they get some from let's say the Committee of the CCMS and things of that kind, but generally speaking the foreign ministers like to have at least one restricted session in which they get down to talking about real issues that are bothering some of the foreign ministers; and I think that, on the whole, that applies also to the Permanent Representatives meeting in Brussels.

 

[HILL] In addition to the political side, I mean the ministers, there's also the calibre of the Canadian officials and the officers who serve with NATO.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] I think that that's true. We have had in the NATO delegation some capable Permanent Representatives, but at the deputy level there have been some rising and competent, very competent, officers who have gone on to greater things in the Canadian foreign service, and that would apply at Counsellor and First Secretary level as well. Usually, the quality of officers that have been selected to man the NATO delegation has been pretty good. I would like to say, though, that the military officers that Canada has assigned to the various joint commands in Europe have been very good value. I think they have made good contributions where they are, have got on very well with both their American and European colleagues. I think they've also gained a great deal because otherwise within our own limited Canadian forces environment the opportunity to see a big picture and to deal with things in terms of corps and armies and tactical airforces, that opportunity isn't there. There is some in NORAD, but the NORAD operation is a fairly static operation, and I think the opportunities for Canadian officers from Major, Lieutenant Colonel up to Major General level to serve in integrated headquarters at NATO has been very good. And this also applies with Canadian ships in the Standing Force Atlantic, and we've had a Commodore commanding this five ship standby fleet a couple of times; and I think they've got a great deal of experience in the interoperability of naval units at sea.

 

[HILL] It seems to me that it would have been nice for Mr. Trudeau, after his conversion to a relatively positive attitude towards NATO, to have participated in the regular meetings of the Council, with the Permanent Representatives. Because there you have a forum where there is a lot of give and take. One of his main criticisms of NATO, I think, was that he found the two-day formula for the ministerial meetings rather stultifying, and a bit stylized, if you like, because each one began with a tour d'horizon which took up most of the first day. Then you had to draft a communique and so there wasn't really much time for the Prime Ministers, Foreign Ministers, and Defence Ministers, when they did gather together, to actually have a free give and take. But that free give and take does go on continually in the Council when it's meeting in permanent session.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Yes that's true. There is also a language problem, in that the Prime Ministers of NATO countries are elected, chosen for their political importance and role at home and not in the international field. So it is quite normal to assume that the Prime Minister of Turkey will perhaps have at best some reading knowledge or limited speaking knowledge of English or French, the two working languages of NATO, and not feel able to mix into a discussion. And that, of course, is one of the things that Mr. Trudeau liked about the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting, because there they all spoke English, or if he went to a meeting of La Francophonie, you again had people at the Heads of Government level who were fluent in French. But in NATO, at any one time, you'd certainly find that three or four of the Heads of Government would have too inadequate a command of either English or French to really get into any serious discussion of issues.

 

[HILL] One could imagine, for example, that if Mr. Trudeau and Ambassador De Staerke, the Belgian representative were on the same level, which of course they were not, but if they had been, one could imagine them having a very fascinating conversation between themselves, both being francophone and having a command of language and enjoyment of ideas. I always thought that if Mr. Trudeau had been able to be at the regular meetings of the Council, he might have had a different impression of NATO in general.

[ARTHUR MENZIES] There's a small extension to that comment of yours, and that is we used to hold reinforced meetings of the Council from time to time with senior officers, usually political Directors General or Under Secretaries, from capitals, and I have to say that in a number of instances there was a certain amount of jealousy on the part of the Permanent Representatives when their bosses from home came and pre-empted the chair that they were normally used to sitting in, and took over speaking for their government. And Andre De Staerke would certainly be a good example of that. He didn't want to yield to his political Director General from the Foreign Ministry.

 

[HILL] Well, that brings back to mind one thing I always remember from my beginning at NATO: as you know, the Secretariat had about six seats behind the Secretary General. These were all very carefully assigned, but it depended on which meeting you were at. There was never any label on them, so you had to know that if you sat in a certain seat at the wrong time you would very rapidly be turfed out. This brings me to one other thing. I think Canada's contribution to NATO is a very human sort of activity. It depends in part on intellectual capability and also on using imagination from time to time, when the opportunity arises. For example, what about Canadian involvement in response to the Italian earthquake crisis that took place while you were at NATO headquarters. I wonder if you could recall any of that, what happened then?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Well, I'm glad you brought that up. Actually, I take some personal pride in what was an interesting development. I think it was on the 6th of May 1976, just before I left NATO to be posted as Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China. There was a big earthquake in the Friuli region of north eastern Italy, up near the Austrian border, and a great deal of serious destruction. At that time, the Permanent Representatives were meeting in the Deputy Secretary General's room discussing preparations for the meeting of foreign ministers, which was taking place the following month in Norway. We got word of this earthquake and I had the idea that perhaps some of the NATO forces could be of assistance on the medical and engineering and other sides in dealing with the aftermath of this earthquake. It so happened that at that time General Jacques Dextraze, the Chief of the Defence Staff, who had with him General Duncan McAlpine, the Commander of the Canadian forces in Lahr, was in Brussels, and I got General Dextraze on the phone and said "What would be the possibility of sending some medical people and perhaps a few hospital units to this devastated region by air and perhaps sending some engineering people to assist in clearing roads and so on". General Dextraze, who was a very operationally-minded Chief of the Defence Staff, took this up right away and said: "If you can get permission from the Minister of National Defence, we will perform". Before the day was out we had that permission from Mr. Richardson and two hundred Canadian medical and medical assistance people and others were in Italy on May 7, that is the day after the earthquake. Heavy equipment was moved through Austria in the next few days by road and the troops stayed there, about three hundred in all, for a period of about six weeks, gradually moving back as their jobs were completed. They did some very good work on the medical side, in disinfecting water and things of that kind, and I think this was also greatly appreciated, not only by the people of the region and the Italian government, but by the million Italian-Canadians in Canada, who also proceeded to raise something in the order of eight million dollars for earthquake relief. It was one of the notable examples of quick reaction and flexibility on the part of the Canadian forces in Europe that I think we have had. There have been other small activities in the Lahr-Baden-Solingen area, in terms of their relations with their German neighbours, by the Canadian forces, but on a large scale I think this was the single example that took place, and I was glad to have a little part in it.

 

[HILL] Most of the aircraft must have been flown over from Canada, from Trenton. Presumably they were Hercules and so on.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Well, there were always aircraft, Hercules, in Europe, because they went from Lahr to support the forces in Cyprus and the Middle East there. Equipment and men came over by Boeing 707 from Canada. Then there were several aircraft which flew to Cyprus and the Middle East and also went to the various NATO headquarters where we had contingents in Europe in places like Brunssum and so on. So there was an airlift capability, and we had Chinook helicopters there by that time. So we had a remarkable airlift capability. Part of the idea was that, because Canadian forces in the Lahr area were so far behind the front, that if war broke out the roads would be so clogged with refugees that you had to have helicopters to make this move of men and equipment forward quickly.

 

[HILL] You mentioned Cyprus and also the Middle East. I would like to turn to them in a minute but just before going to that, I wonder if you could say a little bit more about the state of Alliance consultations on East/West issues and strategic issues, and arms control, in 1974, 1975, 1976, in the second half of your period at NATO. There wasn’t very much forward movement on any of these things, although there was the Vladivostock Accord, supposedly going to lead rapidly to SALT II; but in fact it didn't move ahead very fast after that. How good were the consultations, in your view, under the Ford presidency?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Well, there were a number of areas. There was an arrangement by which the NATO representatives dealing with disarmament in Geneva, under the United Nations umbrella, would come and present a report, and frankly there was very little movement at this time in Geneva on anything, and the NATO ambassadors were often immobilized by rather large lunches and when the reports from Geneva were made after one of these lunches it was possible to see some of the better trenchermen nodding off, paying not too much attention. On the other hand the MBFR talks involved a monthly report to NATO, but there was relatively little progress at the MBFR talks. They got bogged down on data, verification and whether air forces were to be included and that type of thing. And there was the CSCE follow-up under preparation.

 

[HILL] Can I interrupt there, with reference to the Final Act of Helsinki being signed in 1975. This must have been very well received in NATO, was it?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Yes, it was pretty well received. I think on the whole it was felt it struck a balance between the intention of the Soviet Union to get frontiers confirmed and to get their Communist government hold on Eastern Europe confirmed, and on the other hand the desire of the Western governments for greater freedom of information, freedom of movement, re-unification of families, visits, marriages and things of that kind. But after the Final Act was signed in Helsinki, the sort of statements that began to appear out of Moscow seemed to suggest that on the basis of CSCE detente it would be easier for the Soviet Union to push on with its ideological struggle of undermining the capitalist countries, and there began to be, I think by the end of 1975, a good deal of scepticism about how far the Eastern European countries would go in fulfilling the spirit of the agreement, and that there was really very little movement of individuals in and out. The jamming of Radio Free Europe continued and there was very little freedom of information. And there was therefore a definite view that there should be a review conference, and that it was fortunate the provision had been put in the Final Act for periodic reviews. Officials were beginning to say: "Well, we're going to nail those chaps the next time, because we've got high sounding phrases in the CSCE". There were beginning to be signs of movement within the Eastern European countries for monitoring CSCE performance, monitoring groups in Czechoslovakia and places like that, and I think that all of this began to register with ministers who received letters from ethnic groups in Canada. We got a good deal of that. In fact the words of the Helsinki agreement were high sounding, but the performance by the Eastern European countries was not really upped and there began to be a certain amount of cynicism and a feeling that one would have to continue to press, to push, to send notes, to send lists, that there would be nothing voluntary done from the Eastern side, unless the Western governments monitored performance and continued to press in their individual relations, meetings of foreign ministers and so on, for more forthcoming performance.

 

[HILL] What about the general state of East/West relations in ‘75 and '76? Was it a general view in NATO that, while maybe things would change eventually, probably the West would have to wait until Brezhnev had gone, and until some sort of succession had come? Or was it a period of fairly intense competition, or what was the general feeling?

[ARTHUR MENZIES] No, I'd say it was a relatively quiet period in terms of East/West relations. But there was a good deal of concern about the momentum of the defence industries in the Soviet Union in building up their equipment capability, and this was particularly true in terms of the ability of the Soviet navy to send quite large fleet units not only into the North Sea but well down into the Atlantic Ocean to conduct fairly large-scale manoeuvers. I suppose that one should have expected this as a result of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it was taking quite a few years for them to build up their capability. But there was no  doubt that they had a growing capability to operate world-wide; and with the continuing problem about oil, there was some alarm that the Soviet fleets in the Indian Ocean, in the Mediterranean, in the North Atlantic, that these capabilities were a threat to Norway, to the oil lifelines and that they also put in question the US fleet in the Mediterranean and its complete freedom to move whichever way it wanted.

 

[HILL] One has the impression that in 1972, with the SALT I agreement and then the start of MBFR and CSCE, there was an expectation of fairly rapid movement towards SALT II. There seemed to be the possibility of some kind of breakthrough in East/West relations, which might turn the armaments build up downward, or stabilize it or control it. But that did not happen for a variety of reasons. By 1975 and 1976 things seemed to be going the other way. There was a relatively cautious administration in the US, and at the same time a continuing build up of armaments in the Soviet Union which was a bit hard for people to understand. There were assessments done of the Soviet build up, presumably, in NATO. What were the conclusions of that, do you recall?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Well, it just seemed to be a momentum. It was in the system. They kept turning out more tanks, more field guns, more ships, more aircraft; and the Military Committee was constantly reminding us that if there was an atmosphere of detente in East/West relations it was cloaking a military build-up that was a very real one. I don’t think that any civilian government of the NATO countries could say we didn't know that this was going on. We certainly did know. We were well informed, and I think the public, if they wanted to know about it, could get it from public sources, like the Institute of Strategic Studies' annual reports and other balanced statements that were being published.

 

[HILL] Shifting, then, slightly, to another area, which we've already touched on once. In 1973, the end of 1973, the Middle East was obviously the big, the hot issue around. But by 1975, for example, and 1976, how much attention was paid to the Middle East in NATO?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Well, certainly not anything like during the time of crisis in the Middle East in the October War period. It had died down. But I think it was about that time that the Egyptians ousted the Soviets from their facilities in Egypt, and that of course was a very good development from the point of view of NATO. It was a very, very important thing because, if the Soviets had had a naval facility in Alexandria it could have been awkward. I think there was a desire on the part of the European members of NATO to reach out a hand to the moderate Arabs including Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia and the Emirates of the Gulf, and so on. And there was a wonderful outlet for military equipment in Iran, because the Shah was building up all sorts of stuff. There was a great competition between the French and the British and the Italians and the Americans for sale of equipment. I think if the Americans had not been so single-minded in support of Israel the weight of NATO might have been more in the direction of supporting some kind of a balanced negotiation between the moderate Arabs and Israel. But, you know, Prime Minister Begin was not easy: - he was an irrascible chap who was extremely stubborn in terms of his ideas of Israeli objectives, for preserving and enhancing their national security.

 

[HILL] But there must have been a sense, nonetheless, that there would be a continual danger from that area if NATO didn't watch the whole thing fairly carefully, if the Allies didn't coordinate carefully, or do what they could to coordinate their viewpoints, or at least to consult adequately on the Middle East issues.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Yes, I think so, but I would again say that the United States was more strongly pro-Israel than the European members, for a variety of reasons. They didn't really see eye to eye on this. But the United States was the dominant factor there in the Middle East and they intended to keep that position so far as they could.

 

[HILL] Of course, this was also the period when Sadat went to Jerusalem, wasn’t it, in 1975 I think? I wonder if we could go on to another question. We touched earlier on the question of Cyprus and I think it's been said that the Cyprus crisis was in some ways a great success for NATO consultative practices. The crisis was a very severe one, in which Turkey eventually intervened in Cyprus, but at least the two, Greece and Turkey, didn't go to war, not open war. I wonder if you could say something about how well you think the NATO consultative procedures functioned at that time, and also about Canada's role in peacekeeping in Cyprus. Canada had peace¬keeping forces there, of course.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Yes. There's a long history of this, going back to 1964, so that by 1974 we had had forces there for ten years, and the mandate was being renewed every six months by the United Nations. We had anywhere from 450 to 1050 men in Cyprus, which was the second largest contingent there and the one that was patrolling the green line in Nicosia and got involved, therefore, whenever there was a fracas between the Turkish and Greek communities in Cyprus. Well, I don't know, I would say it was my assessment that the Greek Cypriots under President Makarios aimed at really running the country as a Greek Cypriot government, with a pretty minor role to be played by the Turkish Cypriots, and there was quite a large officer group from mainland Greece operating with the army. We all of course recognized the government of Cyprus, which was the Greek Cypriot element there.

 

Then there was a coup d'etat and President Makarios was ousted and it looked for a time as if there was going to be an even more nationalistic Greek regime. Then the Turks intervened rather massively, in a military way, and there was some conflict with Canadian troops as the Turks simply bulldozed their way into the country, and eliminated some of the Canadian observation posts and so on, and pushed the Canadians back.

 

[HILL] There was actually some fighting between the Canadians and the Turks.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Oh yes, oh yes.

 

[HILL] Between the Canadians and the Turks at Nicosia airport, I think.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] That's right. Well, there's no question but what this subject was immediately a very live one in the Permanent Council. It is a fact that the Turkish Permanent Representative, Eralp, was a very, very experienced and capable diplomat, who had an excellent command of both English and French, and was a very persuasive operator, whereas the Greek representative, who was a much younger man, did not have the same rapport with his colleagues that the Turk had, and he had been really a defender of the colonels' regime in Greece so that his stock was not too high at NATO headquarters. I guess one would say that at the NATO meetings, particularly the one in December of 1974, efforts were made by Mr. MacEachen to talk to both the Greek and Turkish foreign ministers. SACEUR also played a role in trying to influence the military of Turkey; and the Americans had the capability to offer military aid - they were giving, I don't know, military aid of several hundred million to Turkey and perhaps half that amount to Greece. There was military equipment assistance and that gave some leverage, and certainly appeals were made to not weaken the southern flank of NATO, etc. But there were temporary withdrawals of the Greeks from the integrated military command for a while. There was a very fragile situation. Certainly, if Greece and Turkey had not been members of NATO, both of the integrated military structure, and had not been receiving military equipment from the United States in particular and a certain amount from- Canada, why I think they probably would have had a bash at each other; and so NATO did serve to keep the lid on, although the amount of steam that was under the lid made it jump from time to time on the stove. It heated up from time to time. Certainly NATO did prevent, I think, the two countries from going to war. That would be my view. But it's been an uneasy relationship and continues to be that.

 

[HILL] I understand that there was a constant succession of Council meetings in that period, and endless telephoning to Athens and Ankara from Brussels, to try to get people not to go any further than they were already going. How would you rate the utility of the peacekeeping contingent in Cyprus now. It had a certain type of role before 1974, which was to some degree to keep the two sides apart and hopefully thus stave off a Turkish intervention, but of course eventually the Turks did intervene. The peacekeeping force is still there, and I suppose its role now is to try and maintain some degree of civility between the two sides at least at the local level. But do you think it's worthwhile to keep that contingent there at the present time?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Well, I haven't been following the Cyprus situation. I visited Cyprus with The Honourable Paul Martin in 1964. I had been there once before, and I went through Cyprus with James Richardson also in connection with an NPG meeting in Ankara, Turkey, but I haven't been following it for the last twelve years or so. So I'd be very hesitant to comment, except to say I think having had a UN peacekeeping force on the island established a presence which does give back-up to the Secretary General's ' representative, who has been trying and trying to bring the parties together to work out some kind of a federative regime. But there is so little trust between the communities, and the enmity between Greek Orthodox and Muslim Turkish communities is of such historical significance; and both the Greek and Turkish governments with their  claims to islands and to offshore oil resources and so on seem to keep that situation hot. The policies of the two mainland governments don't do anything I think to cool down the historic differences between the communities.

 

[HILL] Another major development that was going on while you were at NATO was that there was a great deal of change and ferment in the Mediterranean end of NATO, and also not just there, but in some other NATO countries as well; there was a lot of talk of Euro¬communism at that time. There was even talk of revolution in some areas. It was also a little bit coterminous with, and mixed in with, the Portuguese situation, which involved the giving up of the overseas empire and the effects this had on Portugal itself. I wonder if you could say something about how these developments, the so-called Euro-communism, the developments in the Mediterranean, and so on, were perceived in NATO headquarters?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] I think I'd want to divide that into different parts. When the coup d'etat took place in Portugal, there was a good deal of political uncertainty, and it looked at one time as if the Communists in Portugal might get sufficient support in elections to claim a part in government, and therefore there was a great deal of satisfaction when the more moderate elements in the elections, that is socialists rather than Communists, came out. I remember Mitchell Sharp had been on a visit to Africa and came back through Lisbon and met with Mario Suarez, the Foreign Minister and head of the Socialist Party, and he, I think, formed a very reassuring impression of the trends in Portugal itself; and Canada offered to provide assistance to the Portuguese if they requested it. We have quite a large Portuguese community including quite a lot from the Azores islands, in Canada. Fortunately the threat in the case of Portugal did not materialize in as serious a way as it might have. By that time governments were seriously considering whether there would need to be some kind of a naval blockade of Portugal, if there was a Communist take-over in that country. There were questions about whether the Portuguese representative at NATO would be given classified information.

 

That situation again presented itself, of course, when the popular Euro-communist movement showed itself in Italy, and it looked as if by legitimate means the Communists could insist upon a seat in a coalition government, or at least get that much, or that they might even become a predominant force. But it was quite clear that some of the major members of NATO would not be prepared to share intelligence and planning information with a government like the Italian government, if in fact Communist cabinet ministers were included. And there were questions then being discussed and examined as to whether you could have a special arrangement with a defence minister and a defence establishment in such a European government; and people looked at the experience of governments in Eastern Europe immediately after the War and what sort of possibilities there were to avoid infiltration of Communists into government. I would say my strong impression is it would be difficult for governments to be prepared to share sensitive information including real intelligence, hard intelligence and planning information with any government that included Communists in anything other than two minor posts dealing with non security subjects. I think that that's, - I wouldn't want to be drawn into too detailed discussion of this subject - but I think it would be very difficult for this to happen. Many other governments, members of NATO, have experience in sharing intelligence information, lets say at the confidential level, with the independent governments of former colonies. The British had this experience, the French had this experience, in providing information up to say a confidential level to their independent former colonies. The Americans have a certain amount of experience in passing classified information up to a certain level to some of their allied country associates with whom they have bilateral security agreements, such as Japan and the Republic of Korea, Taiwan at that time, and the Philippines and to SEATO countries and so on. So that it would probably have been possible to keep, let us say for the sake of argument, an Italian government with a representative in the Council of NATO, if the Italian Communist party as a Euro-communist party said that they believed in NATO and wanted to stay in NATO. It probably would have been possible to keep a representative in the Council but not to share certain information on*the military side, because a great part of the discussion that goes on in NATO foreign ministers’ meetings and Council meetings is only at the confidential level and in fact is mainly in the public domain. But there's always some fear about infiltration of agents. NATO's had its experience with disloyal servants of one government or another, leakages out, and I guess that sort of thing is something security people will always have to worry about.

 

[HILL] Of course there was a model for an allied country with some Communist ministers before that time, which was the case of Iceland.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Yes, that's right, but Iceland was not a member of the Defence Planning Committee. They had no reason for being given military intelligence and planning and policy papers. They had always said they didn't want this stuff anyway.

 

[HILL] And again since your time at NATO the French, of course, have had Communist ministers in the government, but there again they're in a specialized situation vis-a-vis the Alliance. My impression, looking at it from the outside, was that on the whole the Alliance "played it cool", didn't get too worked up about it.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] My recollection in this is that, I think Mr. Sharp was still in when this issue first arose, and that he said it presents a real problem, it presents a problem for us, we don't like Communists in western governments, but if the democratic system throws these people up and they're elected by the people of Italy or Portugal or France, then we've got to find some way to live with that. I think he showed a good deal of, as you say, of cool about it, and fortunately the issue has not come up in an acute form as far as I know in the Alliance.

 

[HILL] Better to have Italy, for example, within the Alliance, with some Communist ministers, than outside. It’s better of course when the Communist partner has in fact announced its dedication to the Alliance, as I believe the Italian Communist party in point of fact did.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] What was the name of the leader of the Euro¬communist party?

 

[HILL] Berlinguer, wasn't it?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Berlinguer, yes. Well he was a pretty able and astute person, and there's no doubt in my mind that the emergence of Euro-communism was a good thing for Europe generally, because it certainly undermined the Communist party of the Soviet Union's claim to papal infallibility in prescribing how Marxism, Leninism,’ should be applied not only in the Soviet Union but all over the world. I, of course, being a student of Chinese affairs, remarked that the Maoist parties in Europe faded out. They weren't a success, and the Chinese government finally abandoned those in Europe, for all intents and purposes, and decided that it would be more effective from their point of view to concentrate on state- to-state relations, although they have maintained relations with the Maoist parties in South East Asia, but not in Africa or Europe or the Americas.

 

[HILL] Communism continues to evolve. I believe now that the full edition of Pravda is banned in the GDR, due to the fact that Mr. Gorbachev is going a bit too fast for them. I just wanted to ask one last question on this period which is based on your experiences in NATO. How would you assess the importance of NATO to Canada. Do you think that being in NATO is a valuable thing for Canada?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Yes. I'm quite certain of that. We have, after all, been involved in two great wars and it has been more efficient for us to be part of a collective, regional collective security organization than to try to run our security on our own. So that it has, I think, given us a link with Europe which has helped to keep us more open-minded than we would have been if we had simply been part of a North American defensive organization. I have also felt that there was an advantage to Canada being in a larger organization with a number of others rather than in a position which would have been as unequal as a Canada/United States type of organization. I think that the political consultation that has gone on in NATO has been especially valuable over the years, and I think it continues to serve a role; and now that negotiations are going on for the reduction of nuclear weapons, I think that there is an opportunity for an input into, at least, the medium range and short range weapons discussions, and I'd say even into the discussions on strategic weapons. If we didn't have NATO, we would be living a more isolated or else a more dependent type of existence in world affairs. I'm not one of those that feels that NATO is the beginning and end of our foreign relations. It looks after a portion only. We have a role to play in the United Nations. We have a role to play in the OECD and the international financial institutions, the development assistance institutions and so on, and all of these are a complex in which NATO occupies a part related to international political, strategic, security considerations and the exchange of information on foreign affairs.

 

[HILL] Before we end this section, is there any other particular issue or event of that period that you'd particularly like to mention at this time?

 

[ARTHUS MENZIES] No, I don't think so. Probably I'll go home and think about it tonight but that'll be too late.

 

Part V - Ambassador to China and to Vietnam, 1976-80

 

[HILL] I’d like to ask just a few more questions this afternoon, and we'll divide them into two segments. The next section we have to deal with is Part Five, when you were Ambassador to China and to Vietnam from 1976 to 1980. Here is a very broad question: where do you think China and the Pacific world is going? Is it going to be the brave new frontier that sometimes grasps the imagination of people here and in the United States?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Well. That's a very big question. I might say that going to China in 1976, directly from NATO, gave me a great deal of "face" in China. I guess I was the first NATO ambassador to be posted to the People's Republic of China, and I'm not sure that there's been anyone since then. The Chinese were at that time, even immediately after the death of Chairman Mao, strongly suspicious of the Soviet Union and interested in the role of NATO as a counter-weight to the Soviet Union's threat to their eastern flank; just as the NATO countries were not unhappy that the Chinese were drawing off a million Soviet troops on their frontier. During the time that I was there and because of the increased influence of the pragmatic group in China, there was a great transformation in Chinese understanding of the outside world and the Western world in particular. Some of this stemmed from their decision to establish diplomatic relations with the United States, and when they did that people like Harold Brown, the US Secretary of Defence, began to draw the Chinese into dialogue on international strategic questions. I think it is true that up until that time the Chinese had thought in rather revolutionary terms about international warfare and the balance of power, and I think that they were very much intrigued by the conversations which they began to have with the Americans and the vocabulary and the information that was supplied. We had a visit fairly early on, I'm not sure whether it was perhaps 1978, of the National Defence College of Canada to Beijing. The senior military man Mr. Wu Xinchuan, who was, I guess, a Vice Minister of Defence or something like that, talked at length to the Commandant, Deputy Commandant and myself about their conflict with the Soviets and what was their idea of the nature of the Soviet threat and the logistics of a war if it should break out. But all that was, I think, part of a growing realization that China had to play a role on the world scene as well as just within the region. And as the People's Liberation Army, the military, represented perhaps one third of the total administrative structure, infrastructure of China, this was a pretty important group. The leadership was made up largely of old men who had been involved in the Long March and the revolutionary wars, who had a great deal of practical experience of moving tens of thousands of foot soldiers around the countryside in China but very little real knowledge of the high technology of modern warfare. And to see the changes which have taken place in China over the last decade since the death of Chairman Mao and the emergence of the new leadership is a very important thing, and I've always been a very strong advocate of educating the Chinese or giving them the opportunity to educate themselves as to what the real world outside is all about in military and strategic terms.

 

Where is this going? Well it's pretty hard to be too clear. Certainly the fact that the Chinese took a whack at the Vietnamese indicates that there is always the potential for the use of military force when they reach the stage where they have that capability. I think a number of the governments in South East Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia to some extent and others are a little worried about the eventual military posture of China and that is a risk which one can't write off. On the other hand, my own view is that the Chinese have an enormous job of economic re¬construction and their big trade, which they depend on, is with the advanced industrial countries, and so it will be seen by them to be in their interests to trade effectively with the industrialized countries who are able to offer them bigger markets. I, therefore, think that there are certainly going to be inducements for the Chinese to play a peaceful role in the future. There’s no doubt that China serves as a real balance to the Soviet Union in the Far East, and I would hope that eventually the Soviet Union would see advantages to itself in adopting a less military posture in the Pacific, and becoming more commercially oriented in terms of exporting some of their products of Siberia to Japan even if that competes with raw material exports from Canada.

 

[HILL] What about Japan, too. That's the other big country in that area, still growing at a great rate. One wonders where that is all going to end. Are they going to emerge as another major superpower?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] To go back to the Soviet Union, it is my view that the build up of Soviet forces in the Pacific is of concern to NATO. It's a very important factor for both the United States and for Canada, and of course to our allies like Australia and New. Zealand, even though they're very far away from where the Soviets are. But think of all the shipping that moves across the Pacific, the North Pacific from Japan to Canadian ports, a hundred Chinese ships a year in Vancouver, and I don't know, fifty or sixty in Prince Rupert, many more Japanese ships coming in, many Soviet ships coming to pick up wheat and so on. All of that. If you had a crisis in the Atlantic it would immediately affect the stability in the Pacific, and therefore an alert of NATO forces in Europe would be reflected immediately in increased tension in the Pacific region.

 

The Japanese position I regard as very, very important from a technological point of view. They're the cutting edge of the computer revolution in the world. In my view, Japan and the United.. States are quite a few years ahead of the European countries, in terms of that technology, and the European countries a good deal ahead of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The technological revolution that is going on right now, in terms of control of industrial production by computers, this will mean that Japan is going to play a really important role in the world. It is after all one of the group of seven industrialized powers. I think that through its economic and technological strength it can play just as important a part in the world as if it had large armed forces. I would certainly support those who would like to see the Japanese able to defend more of their sea lanes, at least out to 1000 kilometers from their shores, which they are not able to do yet but will gradually build up a modest capability. However, reflecting on Japanese militarism of the past and the attitudes of the Chinese and the South East Asian countries, one doesn't want to see Japan remilitarize much faster than it is doing now, and I think the aversion of many Japanese to war is a healthy thing for the country. I doubt that the Japanese will want to ally themselves much or involve themselves much more than they are now in the next decade in actual military planning arrangements rather than their security agreement with the United States. We do a little, we do an annual exercise, the RIMPAL exercise, out of Hawaii, with Australian and American and Japanese vessels. We used to have the New Zealanders till Mr. Lange blotted his copybook with the Americans.

 

[HILL] The second main question I have is this: when you were in China, returning to China and coming from NATO - and you mentioned that this gave you "face" in China - but going back to China and immersing yourself in Chinese affairs for a while, how then did you view NATO's role in world affairs? I mean, looked at from Beijing, say about half way through your term there, did you see NATO still as having a key role to play in world affairs?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Very definitely. I think that view was held by the NATO ambassadors who met in Beijing, though that was not a formal grouping because there were other countries like Australia and New Zealand with whom we maintain very close contact in the - Western group of embassies, and with the Japanese there in terms of evaluating what was going on in China. It’s the practice of governments in their diplomatic services to repeat telex messages to important embassies abroad, and we got copies of quite a lot of the reports out of the Canadian NATO delegation which helped us to fit China into a world picture, rather than to see it as just a regional power. And we were expected annually to produce there papers for the NATO delegation, and there were reviews of ’’where is China going?” in NATO and discussions. There was a reinforced Council meeting with a subject such as that and I had to sit down on a weekend and scratch my head to try to think up some profound observations to make on ’’where is China going?” in geo-strategic terms, and about its relations with the Soviet Union and other countries; so that NATO continues to provide a piece of the framework for all of our missions that are dealing with world-wide geo-strategic questions.

 

Part VI -- Ambassador for Disarmament, 1980-82

 

[HILL] The last part of the interview is Part Six, when you were Ambassador for Disarmament, from 1980 to 1982. Here again, it's a very large subject, and we could do a complete tape on that I'm sure. It must have been in many ways a fascinating period. It's a very unusual kind of job in some ways for someone who's been involved in the international diplomatic scene, because as Ambassador for Disarmament, you also have to deal very much with the public. This was the time of the rise of the peace movement, and of rising concern in Canada about cruise missile testing, the nuclear freeze issue, no-first-use of nuclear weapons, and that kind of thing, heading towards the UN's Second Special Session on Disarmament. As Ambassador, I believe, you would have been very much involved in work done in the UN in New York. You were representing the government before parliamentary committees. You had a lot of speaking to do across the country in church basements and so on. Do you have any general reflections about that period, about the role of Canada's own interests in peace and security, and the interests of the Canadian public in international peace and security? And what part do you think NATO plays in this respect?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Well, I haven't really thought out an answer to that question. I certainly got a liberal education in the two and a half years that I served as the first Ambassador for Disarmament, in terms of relations with the advocacy groups in Canada. Now these are not unique to disarmament. There are advocacy groups on the environment, on native affairs, on women's issues, on all sorts of subjects; but on the whole it is a relatively new phenomenon for senior public servants to become involved on a day to day basis with large groups of people who are emotionally involved in the backing of the peace movement. I learned a lot in the process, and I guess I became a more humble person in the process because it was the desire of the government to enable all Canadians to have an opportunity to express themselves on this subject. We also made quite an effort to get some balance in the thinking of people who were peace advocates or disarmament advocates by having academics to speak with the different groups, to get retired Canadian forces officers to meet with them and to get some dialogue between the different groups who were part of the Canadian mosaic as we call it, the political mosaic in this case. We also needed to develop a lot of information of a Canadian kind rather than being dependent upon literature produced in the United States for the United States groups. I found that my NATO background was of considerable assistance to me in recognizing what were the real international issues involved in disarmament, and what was involved in negotiating a chemical weapons agreement, or a biological weapons agreement or what was involved in an agreement following SALT I, SALT II and so on. And in terms of the international negotiations between the Americans and the Soviets or the Disarmament Committee meetings in Geneva or the MBFR talks or other discussions of that kind, the NATO background gave me a solid technical knowledge of~ the subject matter. But it wasn't of great assistance in dealing with the advocacy groups here in Canada. It was of assistance in putting up submissions to Cabinet about what directions Canadian delegations should take at different international conferences on disarmament, and I also found that it was helpful when I went to meet my opposite numbers in NATO countries. I made an annual visit to London and Paris and Bonn and The Hague and so on to be able to look at the problems as they saw them in the development of disarmament positions on a series of different things, and I succeeded to the position of Chairman of what was called the Barton Group in the United Nations in New York. This was a committee made up of NATO representatives plus Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Ireland, because Ireland was a member of the EEC, and we met regularly to discuss policies and issues and Canada was the permanent chairman of this group and it was our job to farm out studies to be made and so on. The NATO connection really meant that there was some pretty frank talk about which part of this was real disarmament and which part was window dressing, which resolutions were put in by whom for what, for the benefit of different public opinion groups and posturing and so on. And my experience at NATO, I think, was very helpful in that regard.

 

[HILL] And would you see NATO as being an important vehicle for the pursuit of international peace and security, particularly in the area of arms control and disarmament?

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] Oh yes, definitely. I think it gives the member governments status vis-a-vis the major players. For example, I, as Ambassador for Disarmament, invited Victor Karpov, the principal Soviet negotiator on nuclear weapons with the United States, to come to Ottawa, and we had a day and a half of very good discussions and I was the host at that. If I'd stayed in the job, probably at another time I would have been invited to go to the Soviet Union. I think that Mr. Karpov and the Soviet ambassador at the time and his staff and those who accompanied him were aware that Canada was knowledgeable in this field, not just as a United Nations member but as a member of the NATO Alliance, that we were involved in the MBFR talks, that we were involved in the intermediate nuclear force talks in Europe and I think that our position was enhanced because of our membership in NATO. I don't mean by that in any way to play down the potential role of Sweden or Austria or Finland who also made their contributions to disarmament and peacekeeping operations. But I think that we command respect as a member of NATO and this enhances our credentials for taking a serious part in serious negotiations on disarmament, not those that are perhaps concerned with ideal but rather with real situations.

 

[HILL] You would not then agree with the viewpoint that suggests that if Canada was to adopt a position of neutrality, then that would enhance Canada's moral standing in the world and put it in a better position to urge disarmament on others.

 

[ARTHUR MENZIES] No, I wouldn't. I think that in the real world of power, which I suspect is going to be with us for a long time, we, in our peculiar position, is one that we have no real option but to be a member of a regional security organization. I don't think we could operate an integrated economy with the United States if we opted out militarily. It would take us twenty-five years to detach ourselves, and our standard of living would go down a great deal in the process if we were to opt out of the Alliance arrangements which we have.

 

[HILL] Well, thank you very much. I believe that brings us to the end of this interview.