John Halstead

JOHN HALSTEAD

*Interviewers: Hill, Pawelek

 

[HILL]* Good morning. Our guest today is Ambassador John Halstead, former Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany and to NATO, and former Deputy Under-Secretary of state for External Affairs and Acting Under-Secretary. Ambassador Halstead, I am delighted that you could be with us this morning, and we are very pleased that you were willing to participate in this project.

 

[HALSTEAD] I'm very happy myself to contribute to it.

 

[HILL] As you know, this project is an oral history of Canadian policy in NATO. We are examining the development of Canadian foreign policy since 1945, with particular reference to Canada's contributions to the work of NATO, to Canada's pursuit of its own direct national interests within NATO and to the utility of NATO in helping Canada to pursue some of its broader foreign policy goals, with respect notably to the enhancement of international peace and security. We are looking at the formulation of Canadian foreign policy in Ottawa, at the work carried out in NATO Headquarters in Brussels, at relations among the Western allies, and at the evolving role of NATO in world affairs. So, in your own case, I would like to focus on your years of service as Acting Under-Secretary and Deputy Under-Secretary between 1974 and 1975, as Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany from 1975 to 1980, and as Ambassador to NATO from 1980 to 1982. However, I would also like to ask one or two questions about other phases of your career, for example about the years prior to your appointment as Deputy Under-Secretary in 1974.

 

[HALSTEAD] Well, I'll be very happy to respond to any questions you have on these various periods of my career.

 

Part I - Early Years, to 1946

 

[HILL] Ambassador Halstead, you were born in Vancouver and educated there, partly at the University of British Columbia, before joining the Royal Canadian Navy during the war. You served in the Canadian Navy from 1943 to 1946, with the rank of Lieutenant. I wonder if you could tell us something about those early years in British Columbia and then in the Navy, especially about how they affected your views on international peace and security.

 

[HALSTEAD] Well, I remember my early years in British Columbia and in Vancouver with a great deal of affection and nostalgia. It was, from my point of view, an almost perfect environment for a youngster to grow up in. There were wonderful opportunities for recreation and, perhaps more important than that, from my perhaps very limited perspective, it appeared to be an almost classless and raceless society, and socially a very mobile one. I remember in public school and in junior high school I had classmates of every conceivable racial origin, and yet never once during all those years was any remark made about their race. In fact, it wasn't till years afterwards that I realized from their names that they were from Japan or China or Lebanon or Italy or wherever it might be. That never entered into the relationships we had. People were judged very much on what they were, rather than on who they were, which was an almost idyllic sort of situation. It was a very British sort of atmosphere in the sense of political ideas and democratic values and the rule of law. My own parents were both of English origin. I guess it was inevitable in that sort of environment that we grew up with very little sense of Canadian identity. I mean, I remember being aware that we were part of the British Empire and then the British Commonwealth and then the Commonwealth. But Canada as a political entity, or even a political idea, was not very prominent, and we were taught very little in the schools about Canada. I think we had in the whole of my pre-university education maybe six months on Canadian history, and another six months on American history, and for the rest it was about Europe and classical history and so on. Combined with that was the isolation in which we grew up, the isolation from the rest of Canada; the Rocky Mountains were in those days quite a physical barrier - since the development of air travel of course, that has disappeared as a physical barrier - but it was also a psychological barrier and I'm struck every time I go back there that the psychological isolation remains to some extent. We really did grow up in a world of our own which was not an integral part of Canada. Canada was over there somewhere, east of us, and we were British Columbia and the British was very pronounced in that name. I would also say, however, that although there was little sense of Canadian identity, and I'm talking very personally now, there was a very real sense of differentiation from the Americans. Bellingham and Seattle were the closest towns in the United States and of course even in those days there was a lot of traffic back and forth. Every time we went down there I was very struck with the different atmosphere. That differentiation was very clear, but the other was very vague, and I think perhaps the very strong sense of identity and even of nationalism I have now, may be a result of a kind of delayed reaction to that lack of identity in those days. I went to U.B.C., as you have noted. I took modern languages there, which meant, in practice, French and German, because that is all they taught. I studied modern languages because languages have always fascinated me and they're still a hobby with me. I didn't have much of an idea of what kind of a career I might have. An example of the isolation I spoke of is the fact that I didn't even know there was a foreign service in Canada. Nobody at any time ever mentioned the fact that there was a Canadian diplomatic service. Of course there were only, I think, about forty officers, but their very existence was totally unknown to me and so that idea never entered my head. I thought vaguely I might become a teacher. My own father was a high school teacher, though not in languages. So vaguely I thought I might become a teacher, but really I gave no serious consideration to my career because it was already clear when I prepared to go to university in 1939, that we were going to war. So I knew that I would be lucky if I could finish my university career and that if the war was still on then I would go straight into the services. My goal was to get into the navy, I don't quite know why, I suppose because I grew up in a port city and boats and ships always fascinated me and I did a fair amount of travelling. I travelled to England three times before the war, in the 20's and 30's, with my parents. I went around the world once in 1933. I also went to England in the summer of 1939 with an organization that brought Commonwealth students to Britain. With the light of hindsight I can see that the idea was to encourage support for the Commonwealth in the sense of Commonwealth solidarity. I was just finishing high school at that time, and as part of this tour we went both to France and to England. In France we toured the battlefields of the First World War and in England we visited various defence establishments and went on a battleship from Portsmouth up to Scapa Flow. It happened to be the Royal Oak, which was one of the first battleships sunk during the war. So those were fascinating days, because everybody knew the war was coming and yet nobody seemed to be able to do anything about it, a kind of Greek tragedy atmosphere about in that summer of 1939. Of course, to look at those acres on acres of crosses in Flanders and to think that this was going to happen again made a very deep impression on me.

 

So in 1943, the day after my graduation from U.B.C., I enlisted in the navy, not the Royal Canadian Navy because that was a permanent force, but the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve, the so-called Wavy Navy. And because of my study of German I was taken into Naval Intelligence. I served the first couple of years in Ottawa with Naval Intelligence here. I got once to go on a four-stack destroyer out of Halifax with a group of U-Boat prisoners who had been taken shortly before, and I interrogated them between Halifax and Boston, where they were put off for their trip to a prisoner of war camp in the United States. Then I went to England and spent most of the last year of the war interrogating U-Boat prisoners in England in an Allied Interrogation Centre. This was a very challenging experience for me, because I'd always been rather shy and always had difficulty articulating my thoughts and this forced me to do things that were very unnatural. Because it was a real battle of wits you see; I mean it was a one-on-one situation with each prisoner of war and of course I had to do it in German and it took a tremendous amount of work to get my German up to speed here in Canada before I went over there. But then it was a battle of wits with each prisoner to persuade him really to tell you what he knew but wasn't supposed to tell you. On each U-Boat that we sunk we compiled a volume a quarter of an inch thick with the whole history of that U-Boat, from the time the keel was laid to the time it was sunk, a complete story, all its armaments, all its equipment, all its crew, where it went, what it did.

 

[HILL] Was there any particular lesson you drew from all this, I mean the U-Boat crews had the reputation of being very hard-headed?

 

[HALSTEAD] Yes, and so they were. I mean, they were the elite of all the Nazi forces and they were all volunteers, right to the end of the war. Although towards the end it was almost a suicide mission, and of course they resorted to all kinds of unconventional kinds of U-Boats - one-man U-Boats, and this kind of thing, which were totally suicide missions. And yet these people volunteered right up to the end and they were hard-bitten Nazis. So, yes, one thing I learned was what made these people tick and what Nazi ideology was all about. That was a very useful lesson, because it taught me about the political motivation behind war. Whereas those chaps who were fighting the war in the fields or on ships might or might not ever have any human contact with the enemy, I had the closest possible contact, not only with the man but with what was going on in his head, because that's what I had to deal with in order to "break" him, "break" him in the sense of persuading him, as I say, to either tell me things that would be useful to us or even, as we were able to do in some cases, to persuade him to collaborate.

 

[HILL] It would be interesting to put some of those thoughts down in terms of the psychological bases of war.

 

[HALSTEAD] Well, I have thought that it could be. Certainly it gave me a tremendous insight into the political motivation of war. After that period in England I was part of one of the first teams - I think it was the first intelligence team - to go from England to Germany. We flew in an old Dakota from Gatwick to Flensburg, on the border with Denmark, and that was where, if you'll remember, at the end of the war, the whole of the Nazi High Command was bottled up, including Admiral Donitz, who had become the new Fiihrer after Hitler had committed suicide. The whole of the High Command was bottled up there and what was left of the German forces were in that neck of Schleswig dn the border with Denmark. We landed there; we had no idea what kind of reception we would get, you know, we didn't know whether the Germans were in a kamikaze mood or what. In fact, once the order had gone out from the Fiihrer to lay down their arms, the Germans all obeyed; they were used to obeying and thank God they did. So I participated, first of all, in Flensburg, in the operation that was designed to clear the mine fields - to find out where they were, we interrogated the German High Command - and to bring in the U-Boats which were all over hell's half acre, make sure they came in and surrendered. And then after that I went south to Kiel, I saw that city 99% destroyed. We could only drive in along the streets that were cleared through the rubble, and the people were walking on those streets as if they were shell-shocked. Where they lived I don't know, they came out of their cellars somehow. I participated in the hunt for war criminals. This was a new kind of operation for me, I had never done that before, it was a kind of detective game. I remember chasing one suspected war criminal on to a barge in the middle of a little-known harbour on the West Coast of Schleswig. I should explain that I was attached to the Royal Navy at this time; Canada was not operating a programme like this on its own. I mean this interrogation in England was for the Royal Navy and these operations in Germany were for the Royal Navy. I was then engaged in an exercise to find German engineers who had been working on secret weapons, including rockets. One of these enterprises (the Walther Works) was in fact in Kiel and they had developed rockets fueled by hydrogen peroxide and we wanted to find the people who had done this and they had scattered of course at the end of the war. This took me all over the three western occupied zones of Germany and even into Berlin. I remember tracing one of these fellows down to a mountain hut on the border with Austria, down in an area called the Allgau, in southern Germany, and boy, was he surprised to see an Allied Naval officer knock on his door!

 

I'll just mention one amusing incident because it does have some political significance. In Berlin, at the time I was there, there were no restrictions as between the various sectors. You could go through all the sectors, including the Soviet sector, and I went to see the Reichskanzlerei when it was still there, Hitler's official office, and I went in to the reception hall, the enormous, impressive reception hall, where Hitler had received visiting Heads of State. It was a drizzly day, and rain was dripping through the ceiling which had been damaged of course during the battle for Berlin. The original curtains were on the walls hanging in tatters, there was rubble on the marble floor and the remains of the desk and so on, at the end of the room, were still there. There was only one other person in the room in that enormous reception hall. You know who he was? He was a short, slant-eyed Soviet soldier from Central Asia, huddled over a charcoal brazier in the corner. There you had it in one vignette: the conqueror and the conquered; and it is a scene that will always be in my memory. I might say also in that connection, because it made a tremendous impression on me, I had nine months in Germany from May shortly after the end of the war, the capitulation, to Christmas. One thing that seared itself in my memory, well two things I guess, the enormous physical destruction of the cities: Kiel just a pile of rubble because it had been destroyed by high explosive bombs, Hamburg a cemetery of burnt-out buildings, because Hamburg had been destroyed by incendiary bombs; and every other city of any size at all between 50 and 90% destroyed. But beyond that it was the human tragedy of war, in the form of the refugees. Every road, every highway in Germany in those first few months after the end of the war, was filled with people moving somewhere. The fortunate ones were on horseback, practically nobody had cars; I mean all the cars were taken over, so most of the people were on foot; again the fortunate ones had baby carriages or a child's wagon or something to carry their personal belongings, the others toted them on their backs. This went on for months, this enormous movement of people across the face of Germany. So I had a very deeply impressed idea of what war meant, not just to the soldiers, but to the whole population. And when I came back to Canada, in the early months of 1946, I came back for about six months again to Naval Headquarters, and I was given the job by the then Director of Naval Intelligence in Ottawa, I think a very imaginative idea, to go out and visit the prisoner of war camps in Canada. I went out first on Christmas leave to Vancouver and then on my way back, by train of course, I stopped off at about half a dozen prisoner of war camps across the country, starting with one, I remember, in an idyllic situation in the Rocky Mountains, a place called Seebee, somewhere in the neighborhood of Banff or Lake Louise, which housed the hardest bitten senior Nazi officers of all three services. And that's where I started, and that was really a shaking experience. These prisoners were convoked to this meeting. They sat there ramrod in front of me in seried rows, and I was introduced, and I then began my story of what I had seen in Germany. And they could not believe it, they did not want to believe, they couldn’t believe. I mean they had been away, they hadn't seen Germany, some of them, for most of the war. And they were mumbling, and when I finished, the commandant asked if there were any questions. Not a peep. Nobody would lend credence to my story by asking any questions, and they stood up as if they were on drill on the parade ground and marched off. But I heard later that that had made a tremendous impression on them. I spoke in German, of course; of all the camps - that was the hardest. In all the others they were more than willing to hear and ask; they all wanted to know what their own home town looked like and so on. I think it was a very sobering experience for them because, of course, I wove into this factual account implications - you know, you see what a certain policy has done, has created and so on, and where violence leads. And I guess the overwhelming impression I took from this war experience into my subsequent career was that wars are politically motivated, above all, and that general war must not be allowed to happen again. I guess those are thoughts that I have kept with me throughout my career.

 

Part II - Main career, 1946-74

 

[HILL] Ambassador Halstead, after the war, I believe you attended the London School of Economics and obtained a B.Sc.(Econ.) there in 1950. I believe after that, at some point, you joined the Department of External Affairs and then in your career rose through the ranks in a range of positions. I wonder if you could tell us something about your career, in that period of almost twenty-five years. Where did you serve, how much of your work was related to NATO in one way or another, and what lessons would you draw from those years regarding Canada's contributions to, and interest in, NATO?

 

[HALSTEAD] Well, I should explain first, perhaps, that I did join the Department of External Affairs in 1946, on July 1, the day after I was demobilized. I joined the Department of External Affairs as a result of really an accident or a coincidence. You'll remember that, in speaking of my time in Vancouver, I mentioned that I didn't even know that there was a Department of External Affairs. Well, I didn't learn that there was one until I came to Ottawa during the war in the navy. And during my time in Ottawa I met two officers of External Affairs, who really were instrumental in persuading me to join the Department - not that they tried, but that was the effect on me. Those two officers were George Ignatieff and John Holmes. I saw a fair amount of them because we had mutual friends; they knew colleagues of mine in the navy and that's how I first met them. It was as a result of listening to them tell about their work in the Department, and the things they did, and the people they worked with, and so on, that the idea first formed in my mind that this might be an interesting and indeed a rewarding sort of career. Well, I didn't do anything about it at that time, but at the end of the war, when I was in Germany, I got a circular that had been sent out from the Canadian Forces Headquarters in London, to all Canadian officers, informing them that the Department of External Affairs was holding an examination, and that anybody who had a university degree was eligible to sit for this examination, and should do so, if he was interested in joining External Affairs. So I jumped at this opportunity and replied positively, and in due course I was informed that there would be an examination, held in Brussels, for all Canadian officers serving on the Continent. So on the appointed day, I think it was sometime in July 1945, I went to Brussels and I reported to the Canadian Embassy, only fairly recently re-established, well I suppose the year before, re-established in Brussels. I wrote the examination under the supervision of the Third Secretary of the Canadian Embassy in Brussels. And what impressed me most, at that moment, about the Third Secretary of the Canadian Embassy in Brussels, was that he wore striped pants and a black jacket, and I thought this was really something for an examination. You know who that officer was? Marcel Cadieux! So that was my first meeting with Marcel Cadieux. Well, in due course, I heard that I had passed the written examination successfully and I was convoked to London to an oral interview. One of the people on that oral interview board was Charles Ritchie, who was then serving in London, and again in due course I heard that I had been accepted, tentatively, and that they would like to have another interview with me in Ottawa when I got back, so in due course I was accepted, and as I say I joined the Department in July 1946. I served in Ottawa in something called the First Political Division of the Department, which was responsible for two things: one was the post-war settlements with the Axis powers; and the other was post-war planning and particularly the United Nations. And there were two officers in that division under Charles Ritchie: one was Jake Warren and the other was myself; Jake did the post-war settlements and I did the United Nations. My first job in the very first months of that summer of 1946 was to prepare the commentary for the second half of the first session of the United Nations General Assembly - the commentary, mind you! Nowadays, you know, hundreds of officers contribute to this; they threw this at me as my first job. Anyway, I had a very interesting first year doing United Nations work, but in the course of this year I realized that I wouldn’t get anywhere in External Affairs if I didn't have some economics training. And so, at the end of the first year, I went to the then personnel Administrative Officer, Don Matthews, and explained this to him and told him I had an educational credit from the Forces and that I would like to use it if he would give me a leave of absence. He very kindly, and I think, intelligently, did so. So I was the first officer in External Affairs to take educational leave. My one idea was to go to L.S.E. (the London School of Economics), because that had the reputation of providing the best economics training you could get. So in the summer of 1947 I went to London, and I hadn't any idea what I was going to do except that I wanted to study economics. After talking at length with the supervisors there, I came to the conclusion the best thing I could do was try for the B.Sc., although I had only one year's leave of absence and of course a B.Sc. takes three years. I thought at least I'll start. So in that first year I did a year and a half towards a B.Sc., and I then went back to the Department and said: ''Look, I've done a year and a half in one year. Would you give me another year and let me finish it?" And they came back and said, "No, we can't do that"; we can't spare you for another year, but what we will do if you are serious about this is post you to Canada House in London and you can finish your degree in the evenings." So I wasn't going to let them call my bluff, I felt I had to go on with this. So I accepted their offer and from the summer of 1948 to the beginning of 1952, I was posted to Canada House in London, and from 1948 to 1950 in two years I finished the B.Sc. in the evenings. I must say I think I worked harder during those two years, than I ever have before or since, but I felt it was worth it.

 

What L.S.E. did for me, which I now think is what every university should do, but too few in fact do, is it taught me how to think. That may sound like a funny thing to say, but I think too many universities are intent on stuffing students with information. Information you can get anywhere, you can absorb anywhere. But learning how to think, learning how to analyze, learning how to synthesize, learning how to ask the right questions, and judge the answers accurately, is an invaluable tool, and that's something that L.S.E. did admirably well.

 

[HILL] I think the thing that I got out of it was exposure to a much broader world than I'd previously experienced. Of course you'd been in Germany and all that. You rub shoulders with people from all over the world, which gives you a wider range of perspective.

 

[HALSTEAD] I certainly gained enormously from that as well. I took economic history, which I think is an ideal way of learning economics without having to get into the nitty gritty of advanced economic theory, and it throws a totally new light on history, which is complementary to the usual political history one studies. I would highly recommend it for anybody who wants to deal with what is in fact usually the political economy of a country or indeed of the world. So in 1952 I came back to Ottawa and stayed in the Department from 1952 to 1955. I was at the NATO desk there, so that was my first introduction in fact to NATO. That is how my connection with NATO began, and I have calculated that out of the thirty-six years I spent in External Affairs, I was dealing either directly or indirectly with NATO Affairs for about fourteen of those, including those first three years at the NATO desk. In that job I went to all the NATO Ministerial meetings, between 1952 and 1955, except for the one meeting in Lisbon, unfortunately that is the one I missed. But I went to all the others and got an enormous insight into the working of NATO at those meetings. I also went to a meeting that was of crucial importance to NATO, that is very little remembered these days, and that is the Twelve Power Conference in London in 1954. That was, as you may recall, the conference called by Anthony Eden after the failure of the European Defence Community, (the E.D.C.), when it was defeated in the French parliament. That was the conference that successfully negotiated both the establishment of the Western European Union, which exists still today, as you know, and the entry of the Federal Republic of Germany into NATO, and of course at the same time German rearmament; those were the three things that were tied up together. And that Twelve Power Conference was fascinating to someone like myself because it was the first time that I had ever seen heads of government actually negotiate around a table. Usually, you know, heads of government meetings are formal affairs where they ratify what has been negotiated by officials. Well, of course, officials had been negotiating, but because of the time frame in which this was held, the urgency of getting results and the delicacy of the questions under negotiation, it was in fact only the heads of government that could finally put this to bed. There was Adenauer, the Chancellor of West Germany, and there was Mendes-France, the Prime Minister of France, and they were negotiating across this table in Lancaster House. That was a fascinating insight into diplomacy at work and a very successful conference, due largely to Anthony Eden, who played a masterful mediating role there between France and Germany. Dulles was also there, and of course the Canadian representative was Mike Pearson, and that also gave me a very interesting insight into the way Mike Pearson thought and operated.

 

[HILL] The whole question of German rearmament was of course a major issue for all of NATO in this period. I take it there were no real reservations in Canada about this process?

 

[HALSTEAD] I think there were. I think there were reservations almost everywhere except in the United States about this process, and in fact the pressure for German rearmament came from the United States, because Washington had decided that the European allies were not going to be able to produce the conventional forces that the American military thought were necessary to meet the Soviet threat. Of course that Soviet threat had been re-evaluated upward in light of the Communist take-over in Czechoslovakia and the invasion of South Korea. So it was those two events that led Washington to re-evaluate the Soviet military threat because, as you will recall, NATO was originally created not so much to meet a military threat from the Soviets, as to meet the threat of ideological influence and internal subversion. This comes out very clearly if you read the articles of the time, particularly things like George Kennan's article which is forty years old now. So it was the Americans who then decided, in 1951-1952, that NATO needed to counter a potential military threat of a much greater order than they had previously calculated and that they could do this only if they could re-arm Germany. If you read again the literature of the period, very prominent in American thinking at that time was their memories of the Second World War when the German soldier became fabled for his ability to stand up to tanks, as it was put in one piece that I read, - he's the only soldier that you can rely on to fire at an advancing tank until it's only one hundred meters away, or something like that. So this kind of thinking was dominant in the idea that Germany would have to be re-armed and that is really what triggered all this. But, I think there were very serious reservations about the wisdom of going that route.

 

[HILL] I think I used the word wrongly, I think what I meant was that, as far as Canada was concerned, it was more or less something that had to be done, given the fact that the Americans were in favour.

 

[HALSTEAD] In that respect, I think we were on all fours with the rest of the allies. I mean everybody realized that something had to be done to respond to this pressure for German re-armament, and the preoccupation was to see that there were sufficient safeguards to avoid it boomeranging. Okay, well then in 1955 the personnel people in External Affairs decided that I ought to have a change of scene, and I went to Tokyo for a three year stint, which I must say I enjoyed enormously, as did my wife. I was married in 1953, so that was the first post abroad that I went to with my wife. I guess the most important aspect of that posting for me was to give me an insight into a culture and a society, and a civilization, indeed, that was totally different from anything I had been exposed to before. It was based on assumptions and premises that were almost the opposite of the assumptions I had always taken for granted. And so it was enormously stimulating, because there is nothing like exposure to something totally different to make you look again at your own assumptions. And here was a society, as I say, based on premises that were almost the opposite of ours and yet seemed to work extraordinarily well and has proved since then to be absolutely remarkable. The great irony is that we have in the West an ethic which is supposed to put the emphasis on the worth of the individual. We have in Japan an ethic that puts the emphasis on the worth of the community, whether it be the family, the clan or the larger community, right. Yet in practice what the Japanese have done with their economic miracle is to build on the worth of the individual. And where the West has fallen behind economically, it has tried to treat individual workers like cogs in machines. I find that an enormous irony. Anyway, it was a fascinating time in Tokyo because it was a transition period between the American occupation and Japanese independence. You could see the first seeds of their independent thinking; they were still rebuilding Japan, I mean there were still signs of the war-time destruction and even more signs of psychological remnants from the occupation. It took the Japanese a long time to emerge from this occupation dependency but the signs were there and it was fascinating.

 

[HILL] Did that tour give you cause to reflect in any way about the role of NATO in world affairs and Canada's participation in NATO? You were able to look at it from another angle there, did it seem as relevant as it must have seen when you were on the NATO desk?

 

[HALSTEAD] No, it didn't. Of course I was exposed there, and I should have mentioned this perhaps, to the aftermath of the Korean War. The Korean War was over by that time, just; but we were accredited in Tokyo to Seoul as well, and then we didn't yet have an embassy, in South Korea. And on one occasion when I went over to cover Korea, so to say, with one of the periodic visits, I went up to Panmunjom and saw the armistice line and all that bit. But I think I have to say that the connection with NATO was very tenuous if at all - it seemed like another world. My impression was really of another world with which the West would have one day to come to terms, rather than anything that seemed to have a connection with the European - North Atlantic world that I had been dealing with before. Well, then, in 1958 I went from Tokyo to New York to serve three years at the United Nations and I re-joined Charles Ritchie there; on that occasion he was the Ambassador to the United Nations and I went as his Deputy. That was of course a fascinating exposure to still another world, which I had had some exposure to in ray very first year in the Department, but which had grown of course since then. The multi-lateral diplomacy that one was engaged in at the United Nations was a most interesting experience. I must say I think three years was probably enough there, because it tended to be repetitive. One General Assembly was very much like another; some of the subjects changed, but an enormous number did not, because they went on from one assembly to the other; the items were put automatically on the agenda from one assembly to another. But there were also some unique events. For example, within a couple of months of my arrival in New York - and I should mention that the first two of my three years in New York were when Canada was on the Security Council, so it was particularly active, and particularly interesting, - and within a couple of months of my arrival in New York there was the first Lebanese crisis, which people nowadays may no longer remember because we have had so many Lebanese crises since then. But that was the first overt conflict between the two communities, the Christian community and the Muslim community, in Lebanon, caused by the machinations of the Arab states which had destabilized the situation in Lebanon. It was really the first sign of that enormous iceberg that we have seen so much of since, and if you remember, it provoked the landing of the U.S. Marines, which was not the most helpful aspect of the U.S. role there, but brought home to me, really, for the first time how - I mean it was the first practical example of U.S. intervention that I had seen, and I was fascinated to see how it had come about - and it revealed to me for the first time how different arms of the U.S. government operate independently, and how difficult it is to coordinate U.S. foreign policy between these various agencies. For example, I learned that the assessment, on which the decision was based, to send U.S. Marines to Lebanon, was contributed not by the U.S. Ambassador in Beirut but by the C.I.A., the local C.I.A. officer. This was the first time I had got a glimpse of this kind of operation and what a difficult problem was posed for the allies of the United States when action of this kind was taken unilaterally, and so on. And then before I left New York we had to deal with the Congo crisis, which was a very severe crisis not only for the Congo but for the United Nations and more particularly for Dag Hammarskjold as Secretary General of the United Nations. He in fact died in a plane crash about a month after I left New York. So that was an interesting experience at the United Nations. I said earlier that I thought three years was about enough; my reason for saying that is that there is an inevitable tendency, when you work in that sort of, rather hot house atmosphere, to begin mistaking words for deeds. There is an inevitable tendency to think that when you have passed a resolution or when you have achieved a resolution which may take enormous effort to put together and negotiate, and after this enormous effort, you have such a feeling of success if you get your resolution through, that you may think you have done something; in fact of course you've not done anything at all - I mean those are words on paper - if by doing something you mean actually changing the situation somewhere. That's the great temptation, and that is very difficult to keep in perspective. So I felt that three years was probably about right to be involved in that, but I mean I have maintained my interest in the United Nations. And don't misunderstand me, I agree with people who say that if it wasn't there we'd have to create it; we'd have to invent it, it plays an absolutely invaluable role, but it is necessary to keep it in perspective in order to make the maximum use of its potential. The danger is that we downgrade it; I would submit that mistaking the passing of resolutions for actually achieving something on the spot is downgrading the United Nations, because it is substituting words for deeds and what we constantly need to do in the United Nations is remind everybody that we should be doing things not just saying things.

 

Well, then, from New York I went to Paris in 1961, this time for five years. That was, needless to say, a very enjoyable post, but also a very difficult one, a very challenging one. At the same time a very rewarding one.

 

[HILL] You were assigned then to the embassy in Paris.

 

[HALSTEAD] I was assigned to the Embassy. I went as Minister, in the Embassy, which was the number two position there. There were only three or four of the largest embassies, including Paris, that had Ministers as Deputy Heads of Mission. When I went there Pierre Dupuis was Ambassador. He subsequently went as Commissioner General of Expo in Montreal and he was succeeded by Jules Leger. It was a challenging post, first of all because, although I had studied French at university, and spoken it over the years in Ottawa, it was not up to speed to deal with the Parisians in Paris. And what I very quickly learned - or I mean I knew really before I went there, but it was confirmed in the very first days there - was that unless I could deal with my French colleagues, in the Quai d'Orsay and elsewhere, in their language, on their terms, then I could never gain the credibility necessary to deal with them on an even footing. So from the very first days in Paris I refused to speak English to any Frenchmen, and they grimaced and they groaned and they tried to persuade me to speak English, which, of course, they spoke fluently. I mean I'm talking now about my colleagues in the Quai. I stubbornly refused and said I am going to learn French and you're just going to have to put up with me. As a result of that, after about a year - and it took about that long to speak French fluently, fluently enough to deal with them on a basis of equality in conversation and in negotiation; I knew I had arrived, incidentally, when I found myself speaking French in my dreams. That is the ultimate test of your ability in a foreign language. But as a result of that I was accepted then even to the extent of being invited into the private homes of French officials, which practically never happened. We were invited, and my wife Jean integrated herself equally into French society. That was where she studied sculpture and had a really very active and fruitful time. To be invited into homes of French officials was the last accolade.

 

[HALSTEAD] The Paris posting was challenging in another way, too, because this was also the De Gaulle period. When we arrived in Paris the plastique explosions were going off all over the city, and in fact the windows of our apartment were blown in one evening with a plastique that went off just down the street at the door of a Communist publication. So these were the days of the O.A.S., and as you will remember De Gaulle himself was almost assassinated at a place called Petit Clamard, just south of Paris. So they were exciting days, exciting days for De Gaulle, exciting days for France. But they became exciting days for Canada as well, because it was during that period that De Gaulle became convinced that he had a personal role to play in encouraging Quebec to become either autonomous or independent. He became convinced that Canada was not really a state, it was two nations, that English speaking Canada was really part of the Anglo Saxon world, as he used to say, and that only Quebec was representative of the French Canadians and could be representative of the French Canadians. And some day I think I'm going to try to write about this because this story has never been properly told. It's a story of the way an idea and indeed a mission formed in De Gaulle's mind, under the influence of some very shadowy and interesting characters who came to Canada and associated with the Independantistes in Quebec and came back and told the General stories about what was going on here and what could be done. And this, married to the General's inherent tendency to think in terms of France's mission in the world, produced the very deliberate plan, during his visit to Canada during Expo, - that famous visit - to provide the spark to light the torch of Quebec independence.

 

[HILL] That was deliberate?

 

[HALSTEAD] That was deliberate. The whole thing was carefully planned down to the last detail long before he set foot on Canadian soil. He landed, note, at the foot of the cliff where Wolfe had landed two centuries before to conquer Quebec. He landed to reconquer Quebec. And the whole thing was planned down to the last detail including the cry from the balcony of the City Hall in Montreal. I think this story should be told. I was at the Canadian Embassy in Paris during all this period. I was there of course when Jules Leger presented his letters of credence, in which he said the famous line to which the General took such severe exception, so severe that he practically ostracized the Canadian Ambassador for the rest of his tour in Paris.

 

[HILL] What was this famous line?

 

[HALSTEAD] I can't give you the quote but the sense was that French Canada, while it owed an enormous debt to France for its culture and its language, had its own independent - I don't mean independent in the sense of an independent Quebec - but had its own path to follow and didn't need France, or at least that was the way de Gaulle read it and he reacted fiercely to that. That affected the whole of Jules Leger's mission in Paris.

 

[HILL] Were you involved in any way with any NATO related issues in this period? Of course NATO itself was in Paris.

 

[HALSTEAD] Yes indeed, I should have mentioned that, it was during my time there that De Gaulle decided to pull out of NATO. And this of course was a direct result of his proposal for a NATO Directoire being rejected. So I was there when the Directoire proposal was put forward, when De Gaulle was trying to work out with Britain and the United States a relationship that would put France into an inner decision-making circle. And when he failed in that, he decided that France would go its own way in defence and he pulled out of NATO, and stayed in the Alliance. He made this distinction between NATO as a military organization and the Alliance as a creature of the North Atlantic Treaty. I was there also during the time when the M.L.F., (the Multi-Lateral Force), was under discussion and negotiation. So there were a lot of NATO related issues which were very active during my time in Paris. Of course I remember vividly the decision to pull out of NATO. It caused a tremendous uproar not only in the Canadian Embassy but in all the NATO Embassies in Paris. It was a decision that affected us not only as members of NATO, it affected us also as a country with troops stationed in France, because we were told to get our troops out of France. We were told to vacate the two airfields in France and the Headquarters. The Headquarters of the air division was in Metz and there were two airfields, Grostenquin was one and Marville was the second; and it was interesting because as NATO desk officer, years before, I had negotiated the agreements with France for those two airfields. So here I was in Paris negotiating their removal from France. We were of course very upset by De Gaulle's decision, but it was clear that he had made up his mind and nothing could be done about it. And it was while I was in Paris that the NATO Headquarters was then moved from Paris to Brussels, although I was not directly involved in that because, of course, our NATO delegation, which was also in Paris at that time, was the one directly affected.

 

[HILL] Could you say anything about the operations of the Embassy in Paris?

 

[HALSTEAD] Yes, I might just mention one thing that throws some interesting light on how recent the whole consciousness of bilingualism is in Canada and in the Canadian Public Service. When I went to Paris, in 1961, I found that in the Canadian Embassy there, nothing official was ever written in French. English was used exclusively for all official correspondence, despatches, telegrams between the Embassy in Paris and the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa. French was used only in communications with the French Government. Moreover, French was used only in personal communications among French Canadian officers in the Embassy; all staff meetings were held in English, in spite of the fact that more than half the officers there were French Canadian and that we were operating, after all, in France. I found it astonishing, so astonishing that I took the personal initiative of telling my French Canadian colleagues in the Embassy, my fellow officers, that as far as I was concerned they could and should use their own language in memoranda to me and to the Ambassador, and moreover, that I would be prepared to sign and to recommend that the Ambassador sign despatches and telegrams to External Affairs in French. And so in a way I started, single-handedly, in Paris, a programme of bilingualism before it became the official policy of the Canadian Government. I didn't know what the reaction from Ottawa was going to be to this, but I was prepared to take the chance, and as it turned out I calculated correctly, that nobody would have the nerve in Ottawa to object to this fait accompli, because it was so obviously a sensible thing to do. But that shows you, as recently as 1961, how completely unilingual the Canadian Foreign Service was, and little wonder, I have to say, that there was an underlying feeling of resentment and a feeling of second class citizenship on the part of the French Canadians. So we have made enormous strides since then, in a relatively short time. Well, I thought that might be interesting.

 

So, from Paris I returned in 1966 to Ottawa to take over as Head of the European Division, which in those days dealt with relations with all of Europe, East and West. And what I found was, of course, that I had to catch my own forward passes then, from Paris. I was dealing from the Ottawa end with all the same issues that I had dealt with in Paris, which was both easy and difficult - easy because I was familiar with these issues, but difficult because they were just as intransigent in Ottawa as they had been in Paris, and more particularly the whole question of the emerging triangle, Ottawa-Quebec-Paris, which De Gaulle's actions were making increasingly difficult to manage. And of course, all this came to a head with De Gaulle's visit to Canada in the summer of 1967, a year after I had returned to Ottawa, his visit to Canada on the occasion of Expo '67 in Montreal. As head of the European Division I had the chief responsibility at the working level for the preparation of this visit, along, of course, with the preparation of all the other visits of European heads of state and government. They were not State visits, but visits of heads of state on the occasion of Expo. That distinction was important, because we were unable, obviously, to give head of state treatment to so many visitors in such a short period. But the one outstanding visit that caused more headaches than all the other ones put together was de Gaulle's. And it was under negotiation for the whole of the time that I was Head of the European Division, I mean for a whole year beforehand, because of course there was increasing evidence during that time that De Gaulle was embracing a philosophy and a view of Canada which was quite inimical to the view and the interests of the Federal Government, in Canada. He was encouraging the advocates of independence in Quebec. He was talking and acting as though the government of Quebec was the only legitimate representative of the French fact and the French speaking population of Canada, and as if the Federal Government was representative only of English speaking Canada, and moreover was but a North American extension of the Anglo Saxon world, which he, of course, blamed for so much of his own problems in getting the sort of recognition he felt was due to France. This goes back to the war years, as you know. He focused on Canada only relatively late in his life, but when he did, he focused on it in a typically De Gaulle manner, full of nostalgia for past French glory, full of the sense of France's mission in the world and full of a dream that an autonomous or independent Quebec would be a jewel in the crown of a world-wide French community. So he planned his visit to Canada in that context, and there was mounting evidence, in the year before that visit, that he had intentions that might be embarrassing, to say the least, and disruptive, to say the most, to Canada. And various attempts were made to find out what he really had in mind; various attempts were made to negotiate a programme that would be consistent with Canadian interests; various attempts were made to restrain and control what appeared to be the intention of both De Gaulle and the Quebec Government to blow this up into something far beyond what Ottawa envisaged. And they were all unsuccessful, these attempts. And so when it came to the day, De Gaulle carried out his well-planned visit, from the time he landed where Wolfe had landed two centuries before to the time he cried from the balcony of the city hall of in Montreal, “Vive le Quebec Libre"; it all went, I am convinced, according to his well-laid plans. And I had the honour of drafting the statement by Prime Minister Pearson which branded his behaviour as unacceptable. I produced a draft which Prime Minister Pearson then added to, very much out of his own feelings and his own historic experience. It was Prime Minister Pearson who added the remarks to the effect that it was ironic - that's not the word he used, and that's not quite the right thought, but anyway - that it was ironic that De Gaulle should talk about an atmosphere of liberation as he moved through Quebec, when there were Canadians lying in the soil of France who had given their lives for the liberation of France as recently as the Second World War. That was very much Pearson, and came as you can see directly from his personal feelings, but I drafted the main part of the statement, the famous word - "unacceptable", plus the important invitation, the important passage, which assumed that de Gaulle was still going to come to Ottawa, and said that we hoped that that visit to Ottawa would provide the opportunity for him to obtain a better understanding of this country. That was very important in my view and that importance was accepted by the Prime Minister. It was very important that we not be the one to kick de Gaulle out of Canada. We said his behaviour had been "unacceptable", and that was justified by any criteria, but we also said that he should complete his visit and that we looked forward to the opportunity to correct some of his misimpressions. So it was de Gaulle who took the initiative to curtail the visit, and I am personally convinced that he never intended to come to Ottawa, for the reasons that I suggested, that Ottawa was the capital of a country that, in his vision, had nothing to do with France. But it was de Gaulle who took the initiative to curtail the visit, so the onus was on him. He not only made an unacceptable public statement in Montreal, he also committed a protocol sin, if you want, by slamming the door in the face of his host. So that way the whole onus for the fallout of that incident fell on de Gaulle's shoulders. And he returned, as you may remember, to Paris, to a French public, and indeed to a cabinet, absolutely aghast at what he had done. And the reason for this is very simple - he did it entirely on his own. I am personally convinced that not even Couve de Murville, his Foreign Minister and companion on this trip, knew what he was going to do. However, that has nothing directly to do with NATO, but it does very much have to do with Canada's relationship with France, which passed through an extraordinarily difficult period, with very important domestic repercussions in this country and also with repercussions on our broader relations with Europe. Because it complicated, it clearly complicated, our relations with Europe more generally, complicated our . relations with the European Community, where France played such an important role and still does, complicated our relations, our role, in the Alliance, because it made it practically impossible to maintain any sort of constructive relationship with a key member of the Alliance, though no longer a member of the military organization. And it focused public attention, in Canada, in a most negative way, on the whole European-NATO dimension of our foreign policy.

 

[HILL] So this is one of the roots of the subsequent decisions on the part of the Federal Government, under Mr. Trudeau, who came in in 1967, to cut the troop levels in Europe?

 

[HALSTEAD] Yes, I think this whole background had a profound, if not entirely acknowledged, impact on the thinking of both the Canadian public and Canadian Ministers. So when the time came under Trudeau to review our place in NATO and our contribution in Europe, instead of there being a predisposition to evaluate that relationship positively, the predisposition was to evaluate it negatively. The predisposition was to say, as a number of Cabinet Ministers did say, "What the hell good does this do us? Europeans aren't interested in us, I mean the Europeans are not acting in accordance with Canadian interests, why should we spend money on their defence, their defence, not our defence?". And I think it substantially coloured the approach to the review of NATO policy. Perhaps, as I say, not consciously.

 

[HILL] Ambassador Halstead, as you mentioned, from 1967 to 1971, you were Director General, I think, of the European Division.

 

[HALSTEAD] Yes, I think I may have given you the wrong date there, because in fact I took over as Head of the European Division in 1966, when I came back from Paris. 1967 was Centennial year and the year of de Gaulle's visit to Canada. So my period as Head of European Division must have been from 1966 to 1971. And in 1971 I became Assistant Under-Secretary. But it was during my time as Head of the European Division that the Foreign Policy Review took place.

 

[HILL] Also of course the cuts in Canadian troop levels in Europe.

 

[HALSTEAD] Indeed! Now, I was very directly and very actively involved in the Foreign Policy Review and the Defence Policy Review. In fact, as part of the Foreign Policy Review, a special task force was set up on Europe which became known as STAFEUR, that is the acronym for the Special Task Force on Europe. And I was appointed Deputy Chairman of that task force. The two Co-Chairmen were Paul Tremblay and Robert Ford, both of whom were Ambassadors abroad, Paul Tremblay in Brussels and Robert Ford in Moscow. So they were out of the country most of the time. They came only for the inauguration of the work of the Task Force, and I think once to review it and that was about all. So in practice I chaired the Task Force, which was the first comprehensive examination of Canada's relations with Europe, East and West. And the Task Force consisted of representatives from all government departments with any interest in relations with Europe. And we went systematically through the whole gammut, both geographically and functionally: geographically, country by country, assessing the relative importance of our relations; and functionally, department by department, field by field, political, economic, trade and so on. And again, we assessed the relative importance of our functional interests in each of these countries. We prepared a considerable report which was confidential and which has remained confidential - it has never been published - a report for the Minister, which as I recall the Minister passed on to the Prime Minister and also tabled, I think, in Cabinet. This report in general terms - it was, as I say, a very detailed report, so I couldn't possibly go through it in detail - but the general thrust was that although we had traditionally close and friendly relations, in particular with Britain, and of a rather different nature with France, our relations with the rest of Europe were for the most part relations that were conducted through multi-lateral channels, like NATO, like the United Nations, rather than through bi-lateral channels; and that our specific interests in individual countries had been rather neglected, had never been systematically pursued. And so our general thrust was that we should make a concerted effort to develop, to deepen, to broaden our relations with Europe, both bi-laterally with the various countries with particular priority to those of most importance to us, and multi-laterally with the European Community. And this was to be a parallel effort, the bi-lateral effort and the effort with the European Community. This was to be done not only to serve Canada's functional interests in these countries, political, trade, economic, cultural, scientific and so on, but also as a way of diversifying our relations, and, as some people said, of acting as a counterweight to our relations with the United States. As part of this review, of course, we looked at our defence relations with Europe and in particular at our NATO commitments. And our conclusion was that NATO had served and continued to serve Canadian security interests well, and indeed more general interests, broader political interests, and that we should maintain our membership in NATO and our participation in the defence of Europe. This recommendation of course flew in the face of what, by then, it was becoming clear, was a disposition on the part of the Trudeau Government, to, at the least reduce drastically our NATO commitment in Europe; and indeed to reduce our defence effort generally. And I think it is probably partly for this reason that the report was never released. What happened was, that when it became clear that that report was not going to recommend a radical change in our relationship with NATO, or in our commitment in Europe, the Prime Minister's office took steps to produce another report, and that report was presented to Cabinet and resulted, in fact, in the Government's decision to reduce our forces in Europe by half.

 

[HILL] This report that you were working on was in 1967-68.

 

[HALSTEAD] No, 1968-69. That task force was struck very shortly after the election of 1968. And was set up to anticipate the desire of the new Prime Minister to review foreign policy. And Europe was chosen as one of the priority areas of attention, where our NATO commitments were involved.

 

[HILL] Despite your report, then, in effect the PMO came up with its own report, and they had more political backing.

 

[HALSTEAD] Of course, I mean this was never said to me directly, but, I assume that our report, the STAFEUR report, did not satisfy the Prime Minister's own desire for radical change, with respect particularly to our participation in NATO. And so he took steps to have something prepared which corresponded more closely to his views.

 

[HILL] So in the end, in fact, this paved the way to the force cuts decisions early in 1969.

 

[HALSTEAD] I might point out that this decision on the reduction of our forces in Europe was taken before the defence policy review, as such, had really been completed. I think it had just barely been put in hand and had not actually been completed; and of course the defence policy white paper didn't come out until 1971, by which time the changes in our defence posture, including particularly those in Europe, were already a fait accompli.

 

[HILL] Could it be argued, on the other hand, that the work that you did and similar work inside External and elsewhere, at least helped keep Canada inside NATO, whereas perhaps there was a disposition initially, on the part of the Prime Minister, to pull out entirely?

 

[HALSTEAD] Well, I certainly had the impression at the time that all options were under consideration by the Government, literally all options, including neutrality, withdrawal from NATO while staying in NORAD or even withdrawal from both NATO and NORAD. Withdrawal from NATO, reduction of forces in NATO, withdrawal of all Canadian Forces from Europe back to North America - all these options were under consideration. The Prime Minister encouraged people, including his own Ministers, to debate all these options, and there was a time in fact when Ministers were speaking out with very divergent opinions until they realized that this was not conducive to the image of Cabinet solidarity. So I think you’re perfectly right that the STAFEUR report may well have been instrumental in at least establishing the rationale for maintaining and even reinforcing certain links with Europe. My own personal view is that, although the government's decision to cut our forces in Europe was an extremely important decision and had extremely important, and negative, repercussions on both the credibility of the Canadian defence effort and Canada's relations with its allies, the more important decision for the long-term was not that, but the decision to stay in NATO, and the decision to retain forces in Europe. Those decisions were far more important for the longer term than the decision to reduce our forces, and I think our report had a significant role to play in those decisions. Moreover, it became clear later, as it was clear to me at any rate at the time, that it was inconsistent to pursue closer political and cultural and trade relations with the countries of Europe, on the one hand, and to tell them in effect that we no longer shared their security concerns. And when, later. Prime Minister Trudeau made his several tours of the countries of Europe, in pursuit of what we called at the time a contractual link with the European Community, this became rather clear to him. This was 1974-75. So, it is my view, it's my strong view, that the way the decision to reduce our forces was taken was very harmful to longer-term Canadian interests. If we had said to our allies: "We have re-examined the relative capacity to support the collective defence effort and we feel that the European allies are in a position to bear a relatively larger share in relation to Canada's share than was the case in the past", and that we would like to see some adjustment of our commitments in light of that, I think the reaction would have been quite different. But to decide unilaterally that we were going to reduce, not only because we thought that we shouldn't bear a larger proportion of the collective defence burden, but also because we considered the threat had substantially diminished, was very badly received. So I am absolutely sure, in my own mind, that that had a very bad effect on our influence in the Alliance and on our efforts to develop close relations with Europe. Because, of course, we were not shifting defence resources, defence assets, from Western Europe to North America; we were reducing our total defence effort, and that was a mistake that successive governments have been paying for and that the Canadian people have been paying for.

 

[HILL] Do you feel that is really the case, that in fact there has been a continuing price to pay for this?

 

[HALSTEAD] Oh, indeed, indeed. What has happened is that the Canadian Armed Forces were so neglected for so long because of the freeze on defence expenditure, and therefore the steady reduction in real dollars devoted to the defence effort, that they were starved of equipment and indeed of manpower. This is responsible for the very serious gap between capability and commitment that developed over the years. And it has become extraordinarily difficult for successive governments to do two things at once, one to maintain and modernize equipment, and on top of that to catch up on the neglect that took place before. So that is why I say we have had to pay for this mistake over the years.

 

[HILL] There's one other question I'd like to ask about this period, concerning the troop cuts. My impression of Canada's attitude to NATO and the North Atlantic Treaty at the time the North Atlantic Treaty was first set up, when the discussions on it were going on, then in the late 40's, was that in a sense, what Canada found there was an almost perfect outlet for Canadian foreign policy, in that NATO encompassed all the traditional Canadian linkages poured into one multi-lateral framework. I mean there's a linkage to the United States, there's a linkage to the U.K., there's a linkage to France, there's a linkage to Western Europe - they were all pooled in there together in one framework, one pole of attraction, if you like. And I think the impression I have from talking to people about those early years is that it was seen as a kind of natural outlet, almost a perfect thing for Canada. Yet in 1969 you had Canada sort of turning its back on this natural arrangement. Of course the world had changed during those years, no question about that. Germany had come up again, Western Europe was no longer destitute, and so on. Nonetheless, in a way there was a turning away from the traditions of Canadian foreign policy, and one feels that by and large this was coming from the Prime Minister and some of the people closest to him. What do you think were the impulses driving him at that time, when he looked at foreign policy? What was he trying to do? What were the antecedents of his thinking?

 

[HALSTEAD] Well, if we’re talking about the Prime Minister now, I think the origins of his wish to introduce radical change into our role in NATO was, first of all, his desire to make his own impact on Canadian foreign policy.

 

I think Prime Minister Trudeau came to power with the idea that he would put his personal stamp on Canadian foreign policy; he had some prior convictions that he wanted to see made part of Canadian foreign policy. One was the emphasis on North/South-aid to the Third World, economic development, and so on; another was recognition of the People's Republic of China. I think another was probably improvement of East-West relations, including Canada's relations with the Soviet Union. And I think he felt that the continued stationing of substantial Canadian Forces in Europe was an anomaly in light of the conditions that had changed since the founding of NATO. More broadly, as far as NATO was concerned, there were people both in his cabinet and in the academic community, and more broadly in the public, who also thought that Canada was playing some kind of Boy Scout role in Europe that was expensive and that didn't any longer correspond to identifiable Canadian interests. I think one of the factors that played a role in this sort of view was some disillusionment with NATO. Because, you will recall that, when we participated enthusiastically in the creation of NATO, we were thinking of an organization that would be more than a military alliance, hence our famous Article II of the Treaty - of an organization that would be for the defence of both North America and Western Europe, of an organization that would promote a closer-knit Atlantic community and Canada's relations within that community. Now, that vision was not fully shared by our allies, either American or European, and became clouded over time. The political dimension of the Alliance, in some people’s view, at any rate, became subordinate to the military dimension. There was far more of that, certainly after the Korean War, and in the period of German rearmament. All these things were efforts to organize the military dimension of the Alliance and I think people began to feel - a lot of Canadians began to feel - that this was becoming predominantly a military alliance, and that the political objectives, political consultations, coordination of foreign policies, were not getting the priority that they should. As far as the defence of North America was concerned, in practice, of course - although in theory North America was a region of NATO - in practice it was from the very beginning treated separately, and my personal view was at the time, and is even more strongly now, that Canada made a serious mistake at the very beginning, in agreeing to purely bi-lateral arrangements for the defence of North Anerica, and particularly the air defence of North America. I don't think that we should have acquiesced, at any rate acquiesced so readily, in the formation of NORAD as a purely bilateral defence arrangement, in practice outside the NATO organization. It's got to the point now where people talk of Canada's two alliances. Canada has in fact only one alliance, and NORAD is not an alliance at all; it is an arrangement for a unified command structure for the air defence of one region of the North Atlantic Treaty area. But the way it's been run, it looks as if it is another alliance; and this has created, what I call, the fragmentation of NATO strategy. Because the strategy for the defence of North America is never discussed in NATO.

 

[HILL] I should say that it is a sentiment that you share with a number of other people.

 

[HALSTEAD] Good, I'm glad to hear that. I have made a point of publicizing my views on this in the last few years, since I left the service, since I retired, since I've been free to do so. And I feel very strongly about that, and I'm glad to hear that others share my views. As for the Atlantic community, instead of becoming more closely knit, it has in fact become what I call compartmentalized, and polarized. Compartmentalized as between those matters, defence matters, discussed in NATO, and those matters, primarily economic and trade matters, discussed in the European Community or as between the European Community and the United States.

 

[HILL] What about O.E.C.D. as well?

 

[HALSTEAD] Yes, but they have other actors. And polarized as between the United States on the one hand, and the major European powers on the other hand. So we don't have a more closely knit Atlantic community. And Canada increasingly finds difficulty in answering the question: where do we fit in? And so I think it is this kind of feeling that was already very evident in the late 60's, a sort of disillusionment with what was happening, a feeling that NATO perhaps didn't any longer respond to Canadian needs and that Canada had nothing really to gain any longer from being in NATO, a feeling that the Europeans weren't interested in us and that we had better look after our own affairs at home. And of course you must remember this came at a time when Canadians were more and more preoccupied with their internal affairs, preoccupied with national unity, preoccupied with regional disparities, poverty, unemployment and so on, all these things were coming together to attract attention.

 

[HILL] I'm glad you mentioned that. Some of the Prime Minister's staff were preoccupied with domestic concerns. That was their forte.

 

[HALSTEAD] And there was also a wide-spread feeling, against the background of what I have just described, that Canada would get more mileage by being a big frog in the Third World pond than by being a small frog in the NATO pond. And there were all sorts of voices to say that Canada should be devoting its resources and efforts to building up its relations with Third World countries rather than continue to bother with these old fogies in Europe. So that was the background to the government's approach to relations with Europe and to Canada's role in NATO. Nevertheless, this report on Europe did have a considerable impact, over time, and I think led directly to the initiative that Trudeau then took later, which is commonly referred to as the Third Option. In fact there are two - this is another case of popular confusion - there were in fact two policies or two initiatives. One was what I called the "Diversification Policy" and that was a foreign policy initiative, and that flowed directly from the STAFEUR report. The other was essentially a domestic policy initiative, and that was the Third Option. And that was the policy that was described in a special issue of International Perspectives. in an article signed by Mitchell Sharp, then Secretary of State for External Affairs, which was developed in the aftermath of Nixon's economic measures in 1971. That policy was properly speaking the Third Option. It was primarily a domestic policy; it was a policy primarily directed at strengthening Canada's domestic institutions and policy instruments in order to increase our ability to operate with some freedom of action, and to reduce our vulnerability to the United States. Unfortunately that Third Option, while it was adopted nominally, was never incorporated in any cabinet decision, was never translated into government directives to government departments, was never given any policy instruments and in effect remained a purely declaratory policy. And in my view the policy that the government eventually adopted was not the Third Option at all; it was the First Option, which was supposed to be the option of maintaining the status quo, which the government professedly rejected because it would be ineffective in preventing Canada from being increasingly drawn into the American orbit. So that is what we have seen. People say the Third Option was a failure, because it did not correspond to reality. My response to that is that the Third Option was not a failure because it was never tried. The policy that the government actually adopted had the effect that could have been foreseen for it.

 

[HILL] Was it partly a question of government method in the foreign policy review? Somebody once made this comment about Mr. Trudeau's way of proceeding on foreign affairs: when asked to describe what kind of a person he was, they said that he's ''an existentialist". What he does is that he gets involved in things for a while, tries out some policy, and then afterwards feels he's done what he can and then he goes on to something else. There might be a bit of truth in that, even in his treatment of North/South issues for example; there were various initiatives at various times and then somehow Canada didn't follow through on them. Maybe this was the same with respect to the Third Option. Maybe what happened was that it seemed like a good thing to do for a while, and then somehow it wasn't followed through on.

 

[HALSTEAD] Well, it is interesting that you should say that, because that corresponds entirely to my own impression. In fact, I have toyed with the idea of writing something, maybe a small book, on Trudeau's foreign policy. Because it is my feeling as a result of working with Trudeau, in some cases quite closely, on various aspects of his foreign policy over the years, that an enormous opportunity was in effect wasted. The opportunity was, that here was a man who was Prime Minister for longer, for a more continuous period of time, than any other Prime Minister in the Commonwealth and indeed in the free world I think, or as long as most. And yet his accomplishments in the foreign policy field, and I emphasize that, I'm not talking about domestic policies, but in the foreign policy field, are very difficult to find; they certainly don't correspond in any way to the length of time he was there. I think the reason for this is essentially what you just said. That he dabbled in foreign policy; which is not to say that he was not interested, he was, but he would get involved in one or another aspect for awhile, and getting involved for him was essentially making speeches or attending important conferences, high profile activities - it was not following, day-by-day, the implementation of a well-defined and articulated policy. That he was not good at. In fact I think one of the problems was that he had no personal experience of, and really did not understand, the operational side of international relations, the operation of diplomacy. He didn’t know anything about it at all, and never learned. I mean, you may remember some of the things he said shortly after he came to power about diplomats, about External Affairs. He wondered out loud whether we couldn't get along without these rather Elitist people in External Affairs. Because, after all, we could all read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal or what ever it was; they had perfectly adequate coverage of events all over the world. Well, you see this reflects a basic ignorance of what diplomacy is all about. It reflects a basic ignorance of how international relations are managed. It reflects an ignorance of the facts - he also suggested that we could handle negotiations quite adequately by sending the experts from Canada to whatever countries we wanted to negotiate with, and they would be experts in their field and they would negotiate, and that would be fine. Why bother with, why pay for, these expensive embassies and ambassadors? Well, you see that ignores the fact that negotiation is at least as dependent on a knowledge of the people you are negotiating with as it is on a knowledge of the subject matter of the negotiation. So I think you are absolutely right, it confirms my own impression, and I feel that Canada has been badly served in the foreign policy field as a result of this.

 

[HILL] If I could just take this one step further, and I do this simply because I think it says quite a lot about how Canada approached NATO amongst other foreign policy instruments and issues in this period, it seems to me that the core of Mr. Trudeau's whole government policy was really a domestic one, which is to say the area where he was continually interested and knowledgeable. The thing that really got his attention all the time was really the whole issue of the place of Quebec in Canada. And it was this constitutional issue which really drove him as a Prime Minister. The other things certainly interested him at times, but they were not of the same order as far as he was concerned. Now, even on the domestic side, with respect to Quebec and Confederation, of course he’s still a controversial figure, there are different views on what he achieved and didn't achieve, but it still seems to me that that is the real explanation of Pierre Trudeau. I don't know if you will agree with me or not.

 

[HALSTEAD] Yes, I would, I would. I think you are absolutely right there. I think the place of Quebec in Canada was his central and overriding concern and it is there that he made his most important contribution as Prime Minister. And that was an historic contribution. I mean Canada passed through the greatest crisis of its existence so far in that period, and I think Trudeau's contribution to the continued unity of Canada was historic. But in the foreign policy field, I feel, as I say, it's a matter of opportunities lost. And I think, as far as Europe is concerned, his interest in Europe was again a reflection of domestic pressures. I think he turned to Europe in the '70s as a result of a feeling, or an impression, that important constituencies, I don't mean that in a geographical concept, but important political constituencies, felt that he had neglected relations with Europe, and therefore he embarked on this initiative. But again, although he put in a tremendous amount of time and effort over a period of about a year, there was no real follow through. And this was the problem all the time.

 

[HILL] Could you say something about the treatment of Europe and NATO in the foreign policy booklet and in that exercise leading up to it, to Foreign Policy for Canadians?

 

[HALSTEAD] Well, yes, there was a direct connection between the report of STAFEUR, which I chaired, and the booklet on Europe in the publication. Foreign Policy for Canadians. That booklet came as a direct descendant of the STAFEUR Report, boiled down, of course, enormously boiled down, and without the NATO component.

 

[HILL] Although there is a NATO section.

 

[HALSTEAD] Yes, that is right, but, yes, I'm sorry, I shouldn't say without the NATO component, but with a very much trimmed down NATO component. I mean NATO was a far more important part of the STAFEUR Report than it was of the booklet on Europe. And I think that - I mean this is no pride of authorship at all because that was very much a joint effort - I think that was one of the best books in Foreign Policy for Canadians.

 

[HILL] What is interesting about the treatment of NATO in that booklet is that, prior to the Trudeau period if you like, NATO was seen as sort of a pole of Canadian foreign policy which was held up for its own sake. And one suspects, though I don't know, that in the report you prepared, it was probably that way too. But in Foreign Policy for Canadians, the distinct impression that I have is that NATO is portrayed there as a useful instrument "for the time being", untill such time as changes in world circumstances will have worked themselves out, whereupon alliances such as that will no longer be necessary. Now of course that might take a long time, but nonetheless there is that sense there that eventually these things will wither away, you know, NATO is something that we may belong to for the time being, so to speak.

 

[HALSTEAD] Yes, that's true. Well that reflects of course the political input from the Prime Minister's Office, that was considered essential to a justification, after the fact, for the decision to reduce the Canadian Forces in Europe. So it was a downgrading of NATO.

 

Part III - Acting Under-Secretary and Deputy Under-Secretary, 1974-75

 

[HILL] I wonder if we could go on to what we call Part III. It's actually part of a continuum in a sense, because you had been Assistant Under-Secretary for that period of 1971-74, but then in ‘74 and '75 you were both Acting Under-Secretary and Deputy Under-secretary. This was the period in which the Prime Minister made his famous tour of Europe and spoke with Chancellor Schmidt and other people, and in which in the Defence Department, there was a defence structure review carried through. It was a kind of a turning point in Canadian international security policy, because now Canada turned around again a little bit and focused a little bit more on NATO than it had in the immediately proceeding period, and started to begin the lengthy process of trying to rebuild the Armed Forces which is still going on. And as you mentioned, there is such a back-log that they're still running up hill. I just wondered if you could tell us a little bit about the main thrust of your work in that period, particularly in regards to NATO.

 

[HALSTEAD] Well, I should perhaps mention that going back to the time when I took over as Head of the European Division in 1966, through my time as Assistant Under-Secretary and now as Acting Under-Secretary and Deputy, NATO was very much a part of my interests, although I was not, of course, as Head of the European Division, I was not responsible for NATO policy. But I attended, again, all the Ministerial meetings that were held; and when I became Assistant Under-Secretary, my two fields of responsibility were relations with Europe and defence relations. So as Assistant Under-Secretary, and then later, I did have, again, responsibility for NATO. I think the government's effort to repair some of the damage that had been done earlier by the drastic reduction of the Canadian Forces, and the effort to re-build the Canadian Forces and to play a rather more positive role in NATO again, were all due to the realization, by the Prime Minister, that there was an inherent inconsistency between pursuing closer economic, political and cultural relations with Europe, and disassociating ourselves from the security of Europe. Some people have suggested that in fact the Europeans exercised blackmail over us; that when we came, when the Prime Minister came, and said we would like to have a contractual link with you, with the European Community, the Europeans said: "Well, you'd better do something about your defence if you want that." I was present at two tete-a-tete meetings between Trudeau and Schmidt and at numerous other meetings. I accompanied Trudeau on his visits to all the European capitals during that campaign, 1974-75, it started in the fall of '74 with visits to Paris and to Brussels and it went on in '75 with visits to all the other capitals. And not once was that said or anything near it, but never the less, you know, it was a sort of unstated assumption in the background, because it was obvious to everyone that we couldn't be credible in our professions of a desire to broaden and deepen our relations to Europe in some areas and leave security out of it. And so, in fact, as part of these visits, at one point Trudeau went himself to NATO, he paid a visit to NATO Headquarters, and addressed the North Atlantic Council, in order, so to speak, to reassure them that Canada was not contracting out of this. And I think that it was in an effort to redress, to counteract, that initially very negative impression that had been created by the unilateral decision to reduce our forces, that we owe the belated efforts to improve our defence posture and to play a more positive role in NATO. And this would then explain also why we took the initiative we did which resulted in the Atlantic Declaration. I mean that was the philosophy behind it. We also saw this as a way of re-asserting the primacy of the political role of NATO, re-asserting the political purpose of this Alliance in the management of East/West relations, not only for NATO as a whole, but I mean reasserting it here in Canada, so as to correct some of the public impressions that had grown up. So we took full advantage of the fact that it was our turn to host the NATO Ministerial meeting, to organize this declaration which was then adopted in Ottawa but signed later by Heads of Government in Brussels.

 

[HILL] Of course in Foreign Policy for Canadians, too, there is a section in there about political consultation in NATO, which I understand does praise the operation of NATO in that respect, I think referring to NATO as having a unique instrument for political consultation. Then, of course, in *73, I think it was, Dr. Kissinger had called for a new Atlantic Charter, and the Year of Europe; and in a way that all led up to the Atlantic Declaration.

 

[HALSTEAD] Yes, it's very interesting to compare Kissinger's Year of Europe Initiative to Canada’s Third Option Initiative, because they had very different motives and led to very different results. Kissinger's motives, the American motives - this is my appreciation, of course - the American motive was to get a foot in the European Community door. I think the Americans were getting increasingly concerned that Europe was getting increasingly united, was talking increasingly with one voice, as they like to say, was getting increasingly effective at coordinating its foreign policy. And the Americans were very nervous that this might indeed be a sort of nascent great power, which would start making foreign policy quite independent of the United States. And so the whole point of the Year of Europe, and the Atlantic Charter, was to give the Americans a chance to influence the formation of European foreign policy before it was set in concrete. And that's precisely what the Europeans didn't want. The Europeans were not prepared to give the United States, as they put it, a place at their table.

 

[HILL] Whereas the Atlantic Declaration was really a declaration about good consultative practices, essentially.

 

[HALSTEAD] That's right, and there the balance was quite reasonably set. And, of course, the Canadian initiative - it wasn't our purpose to have any privileged position in the policy making, policy formation process of the European Community - it was to forge a link which would enable us to discuss conflicts of interest before they became serious, and secondly to develop new forms of co-operation, industrial co-operation, which would hopefully result in an expansion of our trade. And I think that explains why the Americans failed, and Kissinger's initiatives failed, because it was an attempt to get inside the European Community. Our initiative succeeded because the Europeans saw a political usefulness in encouraging us if we were serious. That was really the essence of the question. If we were serious, they saw an advantage, a political advantage, from their point of view, in developing closer relations with us.

 

Part IV - Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany, 1975-80

 

[HILL] Ambassador Halstead, I think there are two main issues I'd like to ask you about in this period. The first one is what was the state of Canadian-German relations in that period and in particular how did the German cabinet and senior officials and people regard Canada and regard Canada's role in NATO?

 

[HALSTEAD] Well, I think that when I went to Bonn in 1975 I went at a very propitious and favorable time; the timing was just right. My intention in going there, my own personal intention, was to develop this bilateral relation to the maximum extent possible. I went with the conviction that there was tremendous potential there, that Canada and West Germany had almost complementary economies, that they had a very similar way of looking at international affairs, strangely enough. One could take a lot of time to go into this, but I won't because I know time is limited, but suffice it to say that for a variety of reasons that perhaps don't come immediately to mind, Canadians and Germans find it remarkably easy to get on to the same wave length. I think both talk rather directly, rather frankly, they don't beat around the bush and they are of a size that is comparable, I mean of course West Germany is far more populated than Canada is, and has a bigger economy, but the disparity of the size and power is nothing like that between Canada and the United States, or between Germany and the United States. And I think the Germans find it easy to talk to Canadians. There's also something in the German psyche that makes Canada an extremely attractive country, the wide open spaces here which they don't have in Germany, the idea of a new frontier and so on - all these things appeal to the Germans. So I went to Bonn with the conviction that there was tremendous potential here to develop, and that it would be in Canada's interest to develop this relationship, indeed that it could become a key relationship in Europe for Canada. I mean it was already obvious then that Germany was the strongest member of the European Community, not only in military terms - well, of course if one excludes nuclear weapons - but more particularly in economic terms, and was adopting an increasingly leading role within the European Community. So it seemed to me that if Canada could establish a close and mutually beneficial relationship in as many fields as possible, not only trade but industrial co-operation and so on, it would be a good underpinning to our general relationship with Europe and a good complement to our more traditional relationships with Great Britain and with France. And I think I went, as I say, at an extremely favorable time, because the Germans were just beginning to become conscious themselves of this other country in North America. They had emerged, of course, several years before, twenty years before, from the occupation period; they had become recognized and accepted as respected members of the international community; they had been preoccupied for most of those twenty years with their relations with the United States on the one hand, and with their European partners on the other. But they were just beginning in the seventies to take cognizance of the rest of the world: on the one hand of the developing countries - they were just beginning to construct a development aid programme and to cultivate actively their relations with the countries of Africa and Asia and Latin America. And they were just beginning, as I said, to see, to realize, that there was another country in North America. So what I found was the greatest need was to make Canada better known in Germany. And I tried to do this by targeting key figures in the various fields where I wanted to develop relations, not only in the Government of course but in the business communities, the banking communities, the academic community, the cultural community; and we embarked on a very intensive program of selling Canada in all these fields. Now in this effort it was of immense importance that the Chancellor of the Federal Republic, Helmut Schmidt, had a soft spot in his heart for Canada. He had in fact a brother-in-law who lived in Canada. So he knew something through his personal network about Canada. He saw something of the same vision I think of our relationship that I've described. And he felt it would be of benefit to the Federal Republic to develop a closer relationship with Canada as well as to complement the relations with the United States. And equally important was the fact that, after an initially rocky start, Trudeau and Schmidt were able to establish a very happy personal relationship, a personal relationship of mutual respect, first of all. They respected each other's intellect. They were very different people, very different. And it was a funny match, I mean I don't think of it funny as in ha, ha; it was a curious match. But it worked and they were both highly intelligent, quick on the uptake, and as I say they respected each other's intellect. They were able to talk on an equal footing, and as you undoubtedly know, Schmidt tolerated fools badly. But equally he admired people to whom he could talk man to man and in Trudeau he found such a person. Trudeau was very impressed with Schmidt not only personally but also because Schmidt was a Social Democrat, so that politically they considered themselves very close, if not on the same wave length. And this was enormous - you could imagine - this set the tone for the relationship at the top. Now there was still an enormous problem in translating this good will at the top into concrete action down below. The more so in view of the characteristic that we have already discussed of Trudeau who was in and out of this and found it very difficult to follow through. Schmidt was far more consistent, I mean because he understood the diplomatic process and the international system far better than Trudeau did. But nevertheless, the atmosphere was favorable to this kind of operation. So that, in broad terms, was the climate of relations during my five years in Bonn.

 

[HILL] Could you say something about the German attitude towards the nuclear problem? This was a hot issue in that period, if I'm not mistaken. The Soviets were building up the SS20's. If I'm not mistaken, that was the period when there was talk of the Window of Opportunity and the Nuclear Equation in that the Soviets would have a period in which they might get an edge over the Americans by being able, perhaps, to take out American land-based ICBMs. This was also the period in which there was the first of the episodes of the so-called Neutron bomb, which was rather an odd one from the consultative point of view, I think.

 

[HALSTEAD] Yes, well I'd be glad to comment on those. Perhaps I should say a word before I do that about the impact of this Trudeau/Schmidt relationship on our defence relations, because there's an important point there, that may not be well known, and which I witnessed personally. As I told you earlier, I was present at two tete-a-tete meetings between Schmidt and Trudeau, and it was Schmidt personally who was responsible for convincing Trudeau, as none of his Canadian officials were able to do, that Canada should re-equip its forces in Europe with tanks. At the time there was an enormous debate in Canada as to what the equipment of the smaller Canadian Force should be, when the Centurion tanks broke down, as they were doing increasingly, when they finally collapsed. And there was at one point great enthusiasm in Ottawa and in the Prime Minister's Office, for a more mobile force equipped with light tanks which were in fact little more than Armored Personnel Carriers, but highly mobile, lightly armored and highly mobile, until they found, as a result of feasibility studies, that this was going to cost more than re-equipping the brigade group with a new generation of tanks. And then they were really flummoxed; I mean what were they going to do and should we really continue. I mean the question was broached again, not publicly but within the government, whether we should continue to maintain this brigade group in Germany. And it was Schmidt who really, single-handed, made the argument for the continuation of the Canadian contribution. He convinced Trudeau. First of all he explained to Trudeau, in intellectually satisfying terms, what the raison d'etre was for the conventional defence of Western Europe. And then within that framework he convinced Trudeau that Canada had a symbolically important role to play and then he convinced Trudeau that that role, to remain credible, had to involve a new generation of tanks.

 

[HILL] So, as you said earlier, it was in no sense a threat.

 

[HALSTEAD] No, never a hint of that, but Trudeau found that this sort of argumentation from a Social Democrat was more convincing than anything he had heard from his own officials. I thought that was important, because there were not too many witnesses to that. Now, to go to the nuclear question. This also, I heard Schmidt and Trudeau discuss, because this was very much a problem for Trudeau and he used to question Schmidt about this. "What is your attitude toward the nuclear deterrent? I mean don’t you realize that nuclear war would be the end of all of us?" And Schmidt explained the rationale from his point of view of the nuclear deterrent, and said it was designed to prevent war, not to fight it. Of course he knew that nuclear war would be the end of all of us, but so would any kind of war, any major war, would be the end of Germany. So it was not a case of just preventing a nuclear war; it was a case of preventing any war from occurring. And for this it was necessary to have a credible combination, a balanced, and credible combination, of strategic nuclear, theatre, nuclear and conventional forces. And he became very concerned when it appeared that the Soviets were developing their intermediate range nuclear forces in such a way as to threaten the credibility of that leg of the NATO triad. He saw NATO's theatre nuclear forces as very vulnerable and he made the speech in London, as you know, to the USS, back in whatever it was - I think it was 1977 or '78 - in which he raised this question of the implications of the Soviet SS-20s, and whether it would not be necessary for NATO to counter that threat. I remember thinking at the time, when I heard that report of the speech in London, that this obviously had serious implications for NATO and would lead to a review of NATO strategy. And it did lead to the December ‘79 decision on INF. Of course, there have since then been many arguments about who was responsible for the December '79 decision. And I think Schmidt himself has come to regret that decision.

 

[HILL] Really?

 

[HALSTEAD] I think so. It was - or let me put it this way- the aftermath of that decision, the political fallout of that decision in Germany, can be said to have led to his downfall. He became increasingly isolated in his own party, in defence of the deployment of Pershing II and cruise missiles. And I think you could make an argument that his downfall could be traced to that decision, and he has spoken and written since then in such a way as to confirm that. I mean he hasn't said that, but he has backed away from accepting responsibility for the December '79 decision. And it is, I think, still an open question whether that was an entirely wise decision. I myself thought it was at the time, and of course once it had been taken it was absolutely essential that, regardless of what the Soviets were able to do in mounting propaganda campaign against it and in helping to arouse - they weren't responsible of course, for the massive public demonstrations, in Western Europe but they certainly did everything they could do to stimulate and encourage them - but once that decision was taken, it was essential for the credibility of NATO to carry it through. But I think that it is an open question whether that was the best decision to make. Because in fact we are not talking here about the military significance of these weapons. It is really the political significance and I think the political utility of Persing II and cruise missiles is very doubtful. And I think that is demonstrated by the reaction, the problems we now have, NATO now has, in facing up to the possibility of an INF agreement. These difficulties are not military difficulties at all, although people are talking in military terms, that we can’t afford to give up these, and if we give up these we have to compensate with those. It isn't military at all, the whole thing is political, it's all got to do, really, with the political solidarity of the Alliance. The reasons the Europeans are nervous about the possibility of going back to the status quo ante deployment of SS-20s, when they weren't nervous, why should they be nervous now about going back to that situation?; well, they are nervous now because of what has happened in the meantime, which has shaken their confidence in US leadership and which has shaken US confidence in what they like to call European steadfastness. And that's what it's all about, and so I think that the jury is still out on the December '79 decision; but that was the German part in that decision. The other thing you mentioned was the neutron bomb, which of course predated that.

 

[HILL] Could I just ask you first of all, on the INF decision, the two-track decision, was it mainly a German initiative or did that mainly come from the US, it's one of those things which I know is hard to pinpoint?

 

[HALSTEAD] Well, for what it's worth, my impression is that it was indeed a German initiative, and specifically a Schmidt initiative. But that initiative was in the form of proposing that counter measures be taken to offset the advantage that the Soviet's were gaining for themselves through the deployment of SS-20s. Where the Americans came in was in the designation of the weapons that should do this job. The Germans I don't believe had any part in that, or at least they left it to the Americans, as did the Alliance as a whole. I mean the Germans said, these SS-20s worry us, we regard them as destabilizing, and they may possibly give the Soviets a blackmail potential, because of their ability to cancel the NATO theatre nuclear weapons. We think something needs to be done about this, and that's where they left it. The Americans said, and I don't know, I must say, with how much reluctance the Americans said this - some Americans will tell you that they responded finally to this German and European initiative with great reluctance. I don't know - but anyway, when they did respond, they said, "Okay, we see your point, we agree something needs to be done, and what we are prepared to do to meet this is to deploy Pershing II and cruise missiles." And as far as I know there was no real debate. Nobody on the European side said, "Oh well, we don't want Pershing Ils, because there would be only a five-minute warning time for the Soviets and that would be provocative or destabilizing". I mean, I think this sort of went through the NATO military planning structure without much debate, the Americans said, "This is what you can have", and the Europeans said, "Thank you very much." It depends on what you are talking about when you're talking about responsibility. I think the initiative was certainly the responsibility of the Europeans and, in the first instance, the Germans. The weapons systems that were actually deployed, and how many and where, was the responsibility of the Americans.

 

Part V - Ambassador to the North Atlantic Council, 1980-82

 

[HILL] I wonder if we might go on to the next section. Part V, which is your period as Ambassador to the North Atlantic Council, from 1980 to 1982. I'd like to follow on from what we've been talking about, not so much the neutron bomb, but rather the two- track decision of INF. I was speaking to Ambassador Taylor recently who succeeded you at NATO I think. He said that, in his period of NATO, that year the question of the implementation of the two-track decision was such an enormous question that it took up a very large proportion of his time and of his counterparts, to the point where other things although they were dealt with, were very secondary issues. Was this such a big issue in your period then?

 

[HALSTEAD] No, it wasn't. The big issue in my period, the biggest single issue in my period there, was the Polish Crisis. And perhaps because of that, the INF deployment question did not rank so high in attention. It did, of course, figure frequently in our discussions, if for no other reason than that public demonstrations were obviously causing difficulty for our European allies. But throughout the sessions in the NATO Council, I don't remember any serious suggestion that the deployment should be cancelled or changed substantially. I think the general feeling was that, having taken this decision, NATO had to carry through with it, in terms of its own credibility. The main question during my time there, in connection with the INF deployment issue, was the ability of Belgium and the Netherlands, in particular, to go through with the deployments that were expected of them. And this of course was a very difficult domestic issue for both of them. The most difficult problem was in fact in the Netherlands, where not only was it an issue that split the political parties, but where it also involved the churches very actively; and the churches are more actively involved in politics in the Netherlands than in most of the European countries. And the churches by and large were opposed to the deployment; and the Government, the governing coalition, was badly split, and the dominant party in the governing coalition was also split. So there was a long period of temporizing by the Netherlands government which caused the Americans a lot of annoyance, but which, as I say, never seriously put in doubt the determination to go through with it. The country that was in fact most, apart from the United States, that was most directly affected by this, was of course Germany. Because it has been the initial position of the West German government that they would accept their share only if three other countries, I think it was, accepted a share, and that was the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy. Well, amazingly enough, there was no problem in Italy at all, the Communist party in Italy made practically no objection. But the main problem was in the Netherlands. Belgium was interesting, because the Belgians have their own way of handling these things. Although it was a divisive question for the governing coalition, the Prime Minister at the time was very skillful in keeping this out of public debate; there was I think only one base involved, and he decided to locate it in the area of the country, the Walloon area of the country, where unemployment was high, and where they could see economic benefits from this. And it was the Flemish population, because of the spill-over from the Netherlands, that was most vocally against it. So, he was able to play internal politics in favour of the acceptance of cruise missiles, but it took him a little time to work this out. So, it was debated in NATO, but never in a way that would put in question the basic decision, really, and my impression is that it didn't have, or occupy, as much time, as the Polish Crisis, because the Polish Crisis pushed it down the agenda. And that's what we spent most of the time on, during those two years.

 

[HILL] I'd like to ask you a little bit more about that, because when you went to NATO it was a sort of a turning point in East/West relations. At the end of the 70's they'd had the Salt II agreement which was signed but was never ratified, that was in fact withdrawn from Congress. Then, also there was the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, which in my dealings, my own dealings with international affairs in that period, which was mainly in the Inter-Parliamentary Union, constituted a turning point, because very clearly this was a kind of a divide. The last remnants of detente went down the drain in that period. The world went back to a confrontational atmosphere. I wonder if you'd say something about the atmosphere in NATO during that period.

 

[HALSTEAD] Yes, indeed. I arrived at NATO in October 1980; the organization had just been through the Afghanistan crisis, had been very badly shaken by it, not because the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had all that direct implications for security of the NATO area, but because it put very seriously in doubt the capacity of the Alliance to take decisions quickly and smoothly. The divisions in NATO were laid wide open by this first use of Soviet forces in the Third World, and the allies had a terrible time putting together a united front on it. And it was as you say a mortal blow to detente, and this was very difficult for the Europeans to accept, and more particularly for Chancellor Schmidt, because the whole German position in support of NATO was based very much on the two-track approach, military and political. Detente was an integral part of that, and of course meant an enormous amount to West Germany in particular, because of its relevance to the division of Germany. Detente was the thing of primary significance for them. Detente meant completely different things to the United States, on the one hand, and to West Germany on the other. To the United States it was a way of managing superpower relations. To West Germany it was a way of easing the division of Germany. That was the be-all-and-end-all of detente for West Germany. So anything that put that in danger was a terrible blow, I mean it threatened to undermine the underpinnings of the German role in NATO. And Schmidt found himself in an awful dilemma as a result of Afghanistan.

 

[HILL] Where did the other European allies, and where did Canada, stand?

 

[HALSTEAD] Well, I think most of the European allies were greatly in favor of detente. I mean Germany more particularly because of the division of Germany but the other European allies because of the division of Europe. Britain perhaps less than the others. I think Canada shared this European perception of détente and by and large wanted to salvage what could be salvaged of the East/West dialogue in spite of Afghanistan. I mean we acknowledged that NATO could not remain indifferent to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but we didn't think that the price should be the death of detente and the end of all dialogue, a new Cold War. So when I went to Brussels all this was still simmering. The Alliance had just put together an agreed position and taken sanctions against the Soviet Union over Afghanistan, but was still very much debating the implications of all this for the management of East/West relations, for the future of detente and so on. And then came the Polish Crisis. It really began to hot up in the following summer, I think it was 1980, I'm sorry I can't be precise about the dates. The first summer I was there was 1981. Apart from the dates, the important thing here was that, as a result of the Afghan experience the Alliance was determined not to be caught with its pants down again, in terms of preparing to deal with a critical situation, in other words, in terms of crisis management. And for the first time, I think, in the history of NATO, the organization engaged in contingency planning in advance of an anticipated crisis. And this contingency planning took place in great secrecy, largely in what were called Restricted Sessions of the North Atlantic Council, where only Ambassadors and note-takers were allowed. And what we did was to work out, first a policy framework for our approach to a possible Polish Crisis; secondly, measures, positive incentives for the Poles, to handle the situation without calling the Soviets in; and finally, negative deterrents, in other words, sanctions to deter the Poles, on the one hand, and the Soviets on the other hand, from resorting to intervention. And I think this was a remarkably successful exercise. It went on for about six months and we drew up a kind of blue print of a policy framework and of a shopping list of measures that foreign ministers could choose from, when and if they had to meet in an emergency session following some Soviet action. Now all this was based on what we called the "worst case scenario", which was overt Soviet military intervention in Poland. We recognized that this might not be what actually happened, and indeed there was a greater probability of something short of that, some form of "grey scenario", as we put it. But we also thought that the infinite number of permutations and combinations of what might come to be a grey scenario were so many, that we couldn't provide for all of them, and that all we could do in practice was draw up the shopping list of measures designed for the worst case, and leave it to the foreign ministers in case of a "grey scenario" to pick and choose among them as they saw fit. So when, then in December 1981, the Polish government introduced martial law, the NATO foreign ministers were convened, they met in January, they had the results of this contingency planning in front of them, and I think it helped them enormously to take decisions quickly, and more or less in unison. The trouble was that, in spite of all this contingency planning, in spite of all these prior consultations, in spite of all NATO's principles of political consultations - that members should consult together on matters of common interest affecting their security before decisions are taken, so that policy and action can be concerted, or at the very least so that members will take decisions in light of these consultations - in spite of all that, the pressure in individual countries, and in particular of course in the United States, but not only there, to be seen to be doing something, was such that the United States and a number of other governments took action before the foreign ministers could meet. They took action and made statements before the foreign ministers could gather in Brussels, and as a result we were faced with a series of faits accomplis once more, which obviously put constraints on what we could or could not do. We could not do less than any member government already said we were going to do. We had the task of papering over cracks, divergencies that appeared because of different approaches that had already been proclaimed. There was the crucial question of whether the Soviet Union was directly involved in the proclamation of martial law by the Polish Government. Was it a Polish measure or was it a Soviet measure? And the Americans were particularly intent on NATO taking actions against the Soviet Union and not just Poland. And to me that was illogical, because clearly in our contingency planning our primary preoccupation was to avoid, to prevent, an overt Soviet intervention in Poland. And if we took sanctions against the Soviet Union when they had not intervened militarily in Poland, what did we have left to stop them intervening militarily? In other words, we would have been throwing away our deterrent. And yet politically, it was unacceptable to the United States to have sanctions taken only against Poland. So that's the kind of thing that happens in practice, in spite of all the fine professions of solidarity and the principles of consultation. The overwhelming sentiment of the foreign ministers, as they gathered together, was to maintain solidarity, because it had been so badly disrupted over Afghanistan.

 

[HILL] When you say maintain solidarity, you mean solidarity among the western countries.

 

[HALSTEAD] Oh yes, to maintain their own unity and cohesion. And this was the overwhelming sentiment, and they managed to do that, but only in the short term, because they did not deal with the longer term problem of a strategy for managing relations with the Soviet Union, and it was not very long after that that the very serious division of opinion appeared over the question of the Soviet gas pipeline. This had already figured, incidentally, in the consultations in the preparation of the contingency plans. The Americans had pressed, during those consultations, very hard, for a commitment from the Europeans to terminate the gas pipeline deal in case of sanctions against the Soviet Union. The Europeans had resisted this successfully, and they continued to resist, but the Americans continued to press, and it took a special meeting of NATO Foreign Ministers held in Canada in September 1982, to finally resolve this divergence. In doing so the Americans had to decide whether it was counter productive to continue insisting on their policy.

 

[HILL] Of course in this period in 1980, at the end of the year, you had the election of President Reagan in the United States, so when you started with NATO, it was in a US pre-election period. The advent of the Reagan Administration, with its quite different views, in many ways, on US military power, and the use of US military power, compared with those of his predecessor, must have had quite an impact on the consultative process of NATO. For example, when you mentioned actions taken in response to this Polish situation, I presume you had a sense of there being a new administration in the US with new views?

 

[HALSTEAD] Well, in that respect, I have to say that the impact of the change of the Administration was only gradual. It was not an overnight thing at all. First of all, I have to say that the Carter Administration, in its dying days, in its last year, was already taking a far firmer line towards the Soviet Union, was already beginning the arms build-up that was then accelerated by the Reagan Administration. So it wasn't a cut-off like that. Carter was already taking a much tougher line and was emphasizing the importance of rearmament before the change of administration. The impact of the new Reagan Administration was not immediate, and indeed I can remember discussions with my colleagues at NATO about the true significance of the change of administration, what it was going to mean in practice, because there were aspects of it that seemed to be favorable. The Europeans liked the idea of the possibility of firmer American leadership, and some of the statements of the Reagan Administration in the early days seemed to emphasize the importance of consultations with the Allies, the importance of Alliance unity and so on. And of course the first Secretary of the State was Al Haig, who was very well regarded in Europe, having been a very successful Supreme Allied Commander. And the Europeans' view of the early years of the Reagan administration was very coloured by their opinion of Al Haig. So it was not something that changed overnight at all. It was only gradually that what we might call the true intentions and the real method of operation of the Reagan Administration became clear.

 

[HILL] Was there a lot of discussion about arms control and disarmament in NATO? This was prevalent in Canada, it was sort of a run up to the 1982 Special Session on Disarmament in the United Nations. Of course this was the period in which the peace movement really took off, I think; we had a lot of public debate. There were these great peace marches: in New York; Vancouver had the same sort of thing.

 

[HALSTEAD] I'm glad you mentioned that, because I think I was defective in my answer to your earlier question about how NATO dealt with the INF deployment during this period. I talked about the problems of completing the deployment, but I should have mentioned the other side of this coin, namely the arms control negotiation going on in Geneva. Because of course the more the public in Europe demonstrated against these missiles, the more the European governments were anxious to put the best possible gloss on their efforts to negotiate with the Soviets in Geneva. I mean that was an obvious tactic. To people who were demonstrating against the acceptance of these American missiles in Europe, the European governments were saying, "But you see we are leaving no stone unturned in Geneva to reach an agreement that will make it possible to get rid of all these weapons on both sides. We are doing everything possible." So there was a lot of discussion on that in NATO, a lot of discussion of the tactics in Geneva. Incidentally, one of the things that made this whole operation more difficult was the scuttling of SALT II by the Reagan Administration. That was something that had an immediate impact, because it was an integral part of NATO's policy decision, and one that the Germans in particular attached enormous importance to i.e. that this whole INF operation - the deployment and the arms control negotiation - should take place, as NATO said, within the SALT framework. What Reagan did on coming into power was to destroy that SALT framework, and that complicated the task of presenting a public posture that was convincing and credible.

 

[HILL] But, of course, prior to 1982, prior to the UN Special Session, the START talks got underway, if I'm not mistaken, in Geneva.

 

[HALSTEAD] Well, there was then tremendous pressure on the Reagan Administration by the European allies to get something going. But it took the Reagan Administration a long time to work out its position on what then became known as START.

 

[HILL] And the INF negotiations too?

 

[HALSTEAD] Yes, well, the INF negotiations started first, as you will recall, because the Americans were able to sort out their position on that more easily. They had a lot of trouble setting up, fixing a position on strategic weapons. I think there was about a six-month or nine-month delay between the convening of the INF negotiations and the beginning of the START negotiations. But eventually the two got underway, and then it became a question of how you demonstrate to your public through the actions, the positions, in Geneva, that you are doing everything that you possibly can to avoid the necessity of going through with the deployment decision to counteract the SS-20s already deployed by the Soviets. And there were some very delicate questions to be solved, and NATO was in a very difficult position tactically, because all the Soviets had to do was to spin out those negotiations in Geneva indefinitely and then say to us: "But you have no reason to deploy these weapons, you said you were going to negotiate with us." So it was a very difficult tactical position. So NATO had to put a time limit on these negotiations, had to say, "But these have to be serious negotiations. We are not going to allow you to just spin them out indefinitely while you keep your SS-20s". On the other hand, we had to demonstrate to the satisfaction of the public that we weren't just going through the motions at Geneva in order to deploy as soon as we could. It was a very delicate thing, and at one point there was serious discussion in the NATO Council of a proposal which would in fact have turned the NATO tactic on its head by saying that "we will not deploy until", instead of saying "we will deploy unless." But fortunately - I think that would have been a tremendous mistake - we avoided that, and as you know, when the deadline then arrived for deployment of the missiles and deployment began, the Soviets obliged us, by breaking off the negotiations.

 

[HILL] What about the modalities of consultation on disarmament questions and related issues in NATO in the period you were there? There were consultations on the CSCE follow up conference underway in Madrid. Despite the Afghanistan business they continued. There were the MBFR discussions still underway in Vienna. And NATO takes interest also in what goes on in the Committee on Disarmament in Geneva.

 

[HALSTEAD] Well, each of these negotiations was in a slightly different category. Let me begin with the START negotiations. Those negotiations were of course bilateral between the US and the Soviet Union. On our side they were the sole responsibility of the United States, because the weapons under negotiation were American weapons. The Americans, I must say, were entirely engaged in consultations in NATO, and kept NATO fully informed, but they clearly reserved to themselves all decisions about the negotiating position, and negotiating tactics, because they had sole responsibility for these negotiations. The INF was slightly different because, although they were again bilateral US-Soviet negotiations and the weapons were American, they were going to be based in Allied countries with various kinds of dual key arrangements, and so the Americans not only informed the Allies, but also consulted, in the sense of getting their views and taking their views into account, in the decisions on negotiating positions, policy and tactics. Of course, they reserved the final decisions for themselves; but they were extremely good in taking the Allies' views into account. We worked out, in fact. Allied positions for US negotiators. The MBFR was different again. There they were Allied positions for Allied negotiators, and it was in fact NATO negotiating in Vienna. So those negotiating positions were worked out in a collegial sort of fashion in Brussels. CSCE was different again, because there the European Community considered it their prerogative to work out a European position before there was any consultation in NATO. CSCE was not regarded - and the French were very insistent upon this - was not regarded as a bloc-to-bloc negotiation, the way that MBFR was. And the European Political Co-operation group, (EPC), which was not exactly the same as the European Community, insisted that it should have the first kick at the ball in working out a policy before it came to the NATO Council for further working over. And this created, and continues to create, serious problems, particularly for Canada, but also for the United States, because there is a tendency, of course, when the Europeans have reached a delicately balanced package, for them not to want anybody else to undo it or tinker with it at all. But subject to those qualifications, I would say that NATO consultations worked remarkably well and that the Americans cooperated, were punctilious in the consultations. Where the position is far less clear and far less satisfactory, in my view - but this was not the case, at the time, this is since I left NATO - is with regard to defensive strategic systems and space systems, SDI in other words. The Americans, I understand, have never agreed to any really substantive discussions, in NATO, on the place of defensive systems in the Geneva negotiations, or, still less, on the question of development and deployment of SDI weapons systems.

 

[HILL]    Another question I’d like to touch on - it is a broad one - is that, in 1980, Mr. Trudeau was re-elected as Prime Minister. That was the year of the election that was the last Trudeau government starting in '80 and going up to '84. How do you characterize that government's participation in the work of NATO? What role did NATO play for the Canadian government in the years when you were Ambassador? Were there any particular difficulties, for example in respect to the European Community now being active in NATO and having a voice in working out its views on many things as you just mentioned. Had this created increasing difficulties for Canada in finding a place within the system? I'm trying to get an overview of what NATO means for Canada these days, and what it meant for us in the period you were there.

 

[HALSTEAD] During the period I was there I felt there were two major difficulties for Canada in the Alliance. One was the legacy of that decision back in 1968-69 to reduce our forces. I felt that that had a continuing impact on our credibility in the Alliance. I felt that it was the unspoken assumption of our allies that we were not pulling our weight in the Alliance. Our defence budget as a proportion of GNP was one of the smallest in the Alliance and well below the Alliance average. It wasn't a public issue or something that was debated in the Council, but it was, I think, an unstated assumption of our Allies, and it occasionally surfaced in the form of rather gratuitous remarks by the then Secretary General of NATO, Joseph Luns. I had, on a couple of occasions, to speak very sharply to him, and warn him that I wouldn't tolerate remarks of that kind. They were never made in the Council but they were made on social occasions and I considered them out of place. But they reflected the reality.

 

So that was one real obstacle to people listening to what Canada had to say, to any real influence that Canada may have had. The other is the problem that you have referred to, the problem created by the presence of, and role of, the United States on the one hand, and the European Community on the other. Between them they exercised such an overwhelming influence over Alliance policy, Alliance strategy, that it's very hard for any other country to have much influence, to have a say. And of course Canada is not alone in that. There's Norway, there's Turkey, but those countries have some advantage over Canada, in this respect, that, when they talk about their defence, people listen because nobody else can talk with the same authority about their defence. The disadvantage for Canada is, that Canada can practically never talk about its defence in the Alliance because we have already contracted out our defence, out of NATO. It goes back to the point I made earlier, the fragmentation of NATO strategy. So we are in a very difficult position, and you know we have to compensate for these disadvantages with what diplomatic skill we can muster and with what intellectual input we can make into these consultations, and we do our best. I mean I did my best in those days and I was well supported by the Department. But it wasn't easy.

 

[HILL] Are there any other particular aspects of your work at NATO in that period that you'd like to mention?

 

[HALSTEAD] It's hard for me to think of anything right off the bat like that.

 

[HILL] Good morning. This is a further session with Ambassador Halstead. In the last one we were dealing partly with his period as Ambassador to NATO from 1980 to 1982, and this is the period we'd like to continue with today. However, before we go into some of those questions again, I wonder, Ambassador Halstead, if there is any small item that you think you'd like to mention with respect to earlier periods, having reflected on our conversations about them.

 

[HALSTEAD] Well, yes, thank you, that does remind me of a small but quite significant incident during my time between 1952 and 1955 when I was NATO Desk Officer in the Department in Ottawa. I had a conversation the other day which reminded me of an incident which came after the Lisbon Ministerial Meeting of NATO, where the famous force goals were established, which later proved quite unrealistic in terms of the capacity of the European allies to raise forces of that order. I remember accompanying Mr. Pearson to a subsequent Ministerial meeting held in Paris - unfortunately I can't remember the date, but it was at a later date, when it had become clear that the Lisbon force goals had become unrealistic and when the Americans were pressing for German rearmament. At about the same time the Americans decided to extend their nuclear umbrella over the European allies in order, of course, to reassure them and to make up for the shortfall in conventional forces. And I can remember that on the eve of our setting off for this ministerial meeting in Paris, Mr. Pearson had been informed by the Americans that this extension of the nuclear deterrent to cover western Europe was going to be announced at that ministerial meeting and he asked me what I thought of this. My first reaction was to think that this was of course a good thing, in that it would enhance the security of the European allies. But my second thought, perhaps the more important, was how on earth are we going to control these things; and when I put that question to Mr. Pearson, I remember him saying that the Americans had not said anything about that, and that he assumed that their control would remain exclusively in the hands of the President of the United States, which of course was the correct assumption. But it did leave totally unanswered the broader question of how that decision would be reached and how that now crucial element of nuclear weapons and the nuclear deterrence was to be factored into NATO strategy. So that's the problem which of course remains with us today. NATO's been grappling with it ever since - the nuclear dilemma.

 

[HILL] Well, if we go on then to your period as Ambassador to NATO. I think one of the things which we were beginning to touch on last time was the question of NATO's consultations and policies towards those areas, or those issues, lying outside the central core of Alliance and NATO concerns. For example, there was a lot of movement on the international scene in this period in the Middle East, Central America, Asia, and Africa; and I wonder if you could say something about how you felt about NATO consultations about issues in those areas. For example, I'm thinking, at that point Zimbabwe obtained its independence. Was there much discussion about Southern Africa, what about Central America, and so on?

 

[HALSTEAD] Yes, this is the famous out-of-area problem. And it certainly did occupy a lot of the NATO Council's time during my period in Brussels. And this was stimulated by the invasion of Afghanistan, of course, which highlighted out-of-area as a problem for NATO. It had drawn attention to the lack of any concerted or agreed policy or even strategy to deal with out-of-area questions. There was, of course, never any idea that it would be politically feasible or even desirable to extend the NATO area as such; the NATO area had been defined at the time of the signing of the Treaty, and that remained; but what was equally clear was that events in parts of the world outside of the NATO area could affect the security of the NATO allies and were therefore a legitimate subject for discussion and consultations in NATO. And that principle had been laid down some years before in the course of the development of the process of NATO consultations in which Canada had quite an important role to play.

 

[HILL] Are you thinking in particular of the Atlantic Declaration signed in Ottawa in 1974?

 

[HALSTEAD] I am. And earlier contributions like the report of the Three Wise Men, which Mike Pearson participated in. So Canada had traditionally taken the attitude that it was desirable for NATO to consult on the problems even though it could not as an Alliance act outside the NATO area, but that it was desirable for the Alliance to, if possible, anticipate problems and crises so as to be in a position to concert the attitude of the allies and so that they were working from the same basis of agreed assessments and if possible agreed objectives, and not arguing in public about what the importance of this or that area was, and arguing about what was at issue and arguing about how best to deal with this problem.

 

[HILL] And more particularly not pursuing policies which were at odds with each other.

 

[HALSTEAD] Right - not pursuing policies which were at odds with each other. And now you referred to Zimbabwe and my recollection is that that was already a fait accompli before I got to Brussels, so I can't speak from personal experience about that. But problems did arise like Central America - Nicaragua and El Salvador - problems like the Persian Gulf following the invasion of Afghanistan, (when, incidentally, it was the view of some observers, particularly of the American observers, that the Soviet objective, the longer term objective in invading Afghanistan, had been to push on to a warm water outlet on the Persian Gulf. I never personally shared that assessment.) This meant that following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan there were repeated consultations about the situation in the Persian Gulf, the threat to the Persian Gulf and how to deal with it. There were consultations about various places in Africa, Southern Africa including Angola, of course, the Horn of Africa, Soviet intentions in Ethiopia, and the implications for other countries in that part of the world and so on.

 

[HILL] What about Namibia?

 

[HALSTEAD] My recollection is that Namibia was not much discussed in the NATO Council as such, but during my time Namibia was the subject of a five power group who were in fact all members of NATO, and this five-power group met on the fringes of NATO meetings so that's the way it was handled, that's my recollection. Now the five, were, let's see, the U.S., U.K., FRG, Canada and France. So those were the five, and I can remember going to meetings of the five with the Canadian Foreign Minister held on the fringes of ministerial meetings. But that was the way that was handled. Now, I felt rather strongly that it was very bad for Alliance unity to make no serious effort to arrive at some shared assessment of these problems: that it wasn't good enough just to talk about them. Incidently, in this connection I should mention, and I'm jumping around here, but I should mention the existence of a series of regional experts' groups, which met and as far as I know still meet twice a year, in principle, to discuss, among the middle ranking officers from capitals who deal with these specific regions, discuss the state of play in these various regions with particular reference to the dangers of Soviet infiltration or internal subversion. And there is one for Latin America, one for Africa, one for the Middle East, one for Asia, one for the Mediterranean, so the world is more or less covered by these regional experts groups. But their reports are not intended to be the basis for action by the Council; they are just brought to the attention of the Council to note, and there is some pressure of course to reach a consensus, but no necessity. So, although these are very useful in bringing evolving situations to the attention of the Council, they don't provide any kind of basis for action in the Council or for decisions by the Council. But what I tried to do while I was there, was to bring the Council to agree on a procedure for dealing with out-of-area problems, and this procedure was in three stages, really. One was just the circulation of information, and there should be some obligation on NATO members to circulate all the information that they could on problems that might affect NATO security. Then the next stage is the sharing of assessments and the arriving, if possible, at agreed assessments. And then the final stage, and of course the most difficult, is to arrive at, to establish what we call common objectives, that is to agree on what it is that it is desirable to do about that problem - the action of course being left to member governments because, as I said before, NATO as an alliance as such could not operate in these out-of-area places. And the Canadian delegation managed to get this kind of procedure outlined in the Defence Planning Committee, but when that came to the attention of the Council (of course France was not on the Defence Planning Committee) , when it came to the attention of the Council, the French spotted it immediately, and expressed grave concern that this might lead NATO into the taking of positions on out-of-area problems, and this they were basically very opposed to. So our efforts to get a similar sort of procedure agreed in the Council itself, at the NATO Ministerial meeting, were not entirely successful: the wording became very watered down. In the Defence Planning Committee the decision read that it was desireable to do these things and arrive at common objectives, particularly if there was any question of some members of NATO taking action singly or in concert, in response to a request for assistance from a country outside the NATO area, and that sort of language. But we couldn't get anything that precise in the Council. Now you might think that this was going rather far for a country like Canada, which, after all, has not any particular axe to grind or fish to fry in relation to Africa, or Latin America, or some of these other places, but we proceeded on the basis of two considerations. One was that the most important implication for NATO of any of these situations was not only security but also solidarity - that NATO itself could be very severely split or fractured because of arguments and still worse, as you said a moment ago, mutually conflicting actions and statements about a problem like Central America. And we, I think, Canada has traditionally been very conscious of the need to care for Alliance coherence and unity. And the second consideration, which perhaps was a consideration in my mind more than in Ottawa's mind, was that the world has been changing and the Alliance has to change too if it's going to keep up with events. We can't look at NATO security as one thing and security in the rest of the world as something totally different. One is going to impinge on the other, and it is also bad for NATO cohesion for the United States to be left, so to speak, totally, I mean, solely responsible for global security, with the rest of the Allies focussing sort of inwardly on NATO security. This doesn’t imply that the rest of us like Canada are prepared to take on concrete commitments in the rest of the world. But unless we are prepared at least to acknowledge that there is a problem there, that we shouldn't leave it exclusively to the United States to deal with out-of-area issues, in terms of policy, in terms of objectives and so on, then the United States is going to go its own way quite irrespective of the views of the rest of the allies, and those actions in other parts of the world are going to have an impact also on NATO.

 

[HILL] Well, I think that that's very much borne out by, for example, the situation in the Middle East, where there's never been a possibility of establishing this neat division of labour between the global responsibility and the regional one (I mean that of the European region, the NATO region). One recalls particularly the Suez Crisis and the '73 Middle East Crisis which in my opinion came close to splitting NATO apart. It was those issues, rather than any differences in assessments about Soviet behaviour, which were the most dangerous.

 

[HALSTEAD] Quite so. And the Middle East was, and will probably continue to be, the most difficult region for NATO to deal with, because of this overlap between NATO interests and the interests of individual allies.

 

[HILL] While you were there, this is sort of going on to a rather detailed point following your general comments about consultative requirements, but while you were there, I think the Israel invasion of Lebanon occurred, which certainly made an impact where I was. Was there much consultation on that in NATO?

 

[HALSTEAD] Not as much as I think there should have been. Of course the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, like so many of the problems in the Middle East, is complicated by the relationship of the United States to Israel, which in turn is very much complicated by domestic political circumstances in the United States. So it is an extraordinarily difficult subject to discuss with any degree of frankness and openness in NATO. The European allies, particularly the members of the European Community, which have probably the major interests in the Middle East, they have tried over the years to develop a European approach to the Middle East which they would like to see more balanced than the US approach. They regard the US approach as too unquestioningly pro-Israel, and by the same token alienating unnecessarily moderate Arab governments. The Europeans have tried for some time to establish what they would regard as a more balanced approach, that cultivates moderate Arab governments as well as Israel. And they were placed in a very difficult position by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon because it put them between a rock and a hard place. Even the moderate Arab governments that they were trying to cultivate were of course strongly critical of the Israeli move, but there was little or no criticism in Washington of that move. So where do you go, where is a balanced policy in a situation where the Israelis have undertaken a move that is censored throughout the Arab world but supported by Washington? What does that do for consultations in NATO? So my recollection is that although obviously the situation was discussed, there was more or less agreement to disagree and just to see the drama played out and try, then, to reconstruct something after Lebanon. But there was always a problem with the Middle East during my time in. NATO, apart from the invasion of Lebanon, and that was that, first of all, it was difficult to talk of one US policy towards the Middle East, because there were factions in Washington; and secondly I guess the US official policy was based on the so called strategic consensus with Israel. That is a consensus that assumes that the major threat to the security and stability of the Middle East comes from the Soviet Union. Whereas, I think most, if not all, of the allies of the United States considered that the major threat to the security of the Middle East came from the Arab-Israeli conflict. And so for too much of the time these consultations consisted really of talking past each other.

 

[HILL] Where did the Iran-Iraq war fit into this?

 

[HALSTEAD] Well, it was and is a terribly complex question. I have to say here right away that I am no Middle East expert, I never have been; I've never had to deal directly with Middle East affairs. I'm an interested observer, certainly, and had to be informed to the extent that I participated in these NATO consultations, but I don't feel that I'm a Middle East expert.

 

[HILL] But how did NATO perceive it? How was it perceived within NATO? This is where you do have the expertise.

 

[HALSTEAD] Well, Iran-Iraq complicated an already complex picture still more. Because I think if there was a NATO position on Iran-Iraq, it was that it would be bad for NATO interests if either Iran or Iraq emerged from the war clearly victorious. If Iran was the clear victor it would strengthen Iranian efforts to establish its dominance in that area, and would be of course a boost to Islamic fundamentalists. If Iraq emerged clearly victorious, and that didn't seem to be a very high probability, then it would probably provide a vehicle for greater Soviet penetration of the area. So the strange thing is that NATO's position, and this was pretty well shared I think in NATO, its position was that the war itself did not, was not, a threat to NATO security interests, I mean the war itself. But the problem was how to get any kind of handle on the outcome of the war. And during my time there, I don't recall any particularly bright ideas about this. But the war as such was not a divisive issue in NATO. It didn't divide the allies the way the Israeli invasion of Lebanon or the Arab/Israeli conflict did.

 

[HILL] Another issue which was discussed by NATO quite a lot while you were there, and which in some degree links into the Middle East issue, is the question of terrorism. I think there was a fair amount of discussion about that at that time in NATO?

 

[HALSTEAD] Well, when I was in Germany, there was an Economic Summit in Bonn at which Prime Minister Trudeau took the initiative to raise the terrorism issue. It came after some dramatic hijacking, I forget which one it was now, but Trudeau was able to produce, under those circumstances - I mean his timing was perfect - a fairly straightforward and practical approach which everybody agreed to; and that was a basis, in fact, for the later approach to the terrorist problem. I can't remember NATO contributing anything very substantial to that basic approach. But there were certainly discussions in NATO whenever there was ever a terrorist attack; and talk, of course, about reinforcing anti-terrorist measures. But the problem was not to find a new approach; the approach that had already been established earlier at this Bonn economic summit was a valid one. The question was whether all the allies were prepared to do what they said they were going to do. Because there was always a conflict of interest. One airline, you know, didn't want to go as far as another airline, another national airline, in cutting off routes to countries that engaged in terrorist activities. And of course another element that was very present in our discussions in NATO of terrorism was the US anathema to Colonel Gadafi. That very much skewed the US approach to terrorism: they were always blaming Gadafi for things that he may well have been involved in, but that was a running sore with them, Gadafi. That episode in the Gulf of Sidra took place then, when the US shot down a couple of Libyan planes; and of course the feud with Gadafi was complicated by the question of international law because Gadafi claimed the whole of the Gulf of Sidra, and the Americans, consistent with their approach throughout the world, regarded those as international waters.

 

[HILL] On a quite different question, I think that this was the period, while you were there, that the Falklands War broke out. Was that a divisive issue?

 

[HALSTEAD] Well, it was a delicate issue. I think in the end the divisive elements were contained and, as a whole, I think NATO took a fairly unified stand. The British were careful not to bring the Falklands issue into the NATO Council. They did not want it to be considered an out-of-area issue for NATO. Their position was that it was their problem and they were going to look after it, and the implications for NATO were implications that they would let NATO know about but were not asking for any assistance on. The implications for NATO, the main implications, were the reassignment of naval and other British forces which had been assigned to NATO. The British drew down, to quite an extent, forces assigned to NATO, in order to pursue the Falklands War. The European Community was much more actively seized of the Falklands crisis than NATO was. It was to the European Community that the British went for the sanctions that they wanted against Argentina. They didn't come to NATO for that; they informed NATO of what they were doing in the European Community.

 

[HILL] It's an interesting case, because they were looking for support to some of the allies, or perhaps all of the allies, in one form or another, but not to NATO.

 

[HALSTEAD] And that was very deliberately done that way. They of course went to the Americans and asked and received enormous support from the Americans. They went to their European partners and after a certain amount of toing and froing got most of what they wanted by way of sanctions against Argentina. They came to Canada bilaterally, and asked us to support them in the United Nations and elsewhere, but they never came to NATO for any of this.

 

[HILL] Again on a quite different issue, how much interest was there in NATO among the other allies, in this whole issue of cruise missile testing in Canada? It is an issue which in 1982, if I remember, 1981 also, caused a great deal of furor at home here. But one wonders sometimes how much interest anyone else took in it.

 

[HALSTEAD] Next to none, I would have to say, and this I'm afraid is typical of NATO's attitude towards North America, the North American region of NATO. The fact of the matter is, even to this day, that NATO is regarded both by the Americans and by the European allies as an organization for the defence of Western Europe, by, principally, the United States. In that respect it is something of a one-way street. The Europeans do not contribute to North American defence and the Europeans don't really show, have never shown, much if any interest in North American defence, or in Canada's contribution to that defence. Which is why I have, particularly since my retirement, made a point on every occasion I can get, of drawing attention to the anomaly of this, and emphasizing the desirability of Canada advocating a more reciprocal relationship within the Alliance. But the cruise missile testing in Canada, to the extent that it was noticed at all by my European colleagues, it was just taken for granted as a bilateral arrangement with the United States; and I guess they wondered what all the fuss was about.

 

[HILL] I link this a little bit in my own mind with some other disarmament issues, and similar things, which were around at that time* We had a parliamentary study here in Ottawa at that time on Canada's security and disarmament policies, and were discussing such things as the nuclear freeze, no-first-use of nuclear weapons, and so on. Those were some of the big things that were around at that time, partly linked into preparations for the UN Special Session on Disarmament in the summer of 1982. How much discussion was there inside NATO on the no-first-use issue and the nuclear freeze?

 

[HALSTEAD] Quite a lot. Because, of course, those two questions were very much brought to the fore by the whole agitation that accompanied the NATO decision to deploy Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe. And there was a parallel movement in the United States in favour of no-first-use. They got quite respectable and important backing in Congress, as a matter of fact, and there was an article by MacNamara and company in Foreign Affairs: and the peace movement in the United States mounted a considerable campaign in favour also of a nuclear moratorium. So there were repeated discussions of these questions in NATO, but I wouldn’t say there was any disposition on the part of the NATO Council to modify NATO policy on either of these questions. And of course the US government, the US representative in the NATO Council, representing the official position in Washington, discounted these moves in the United States in favour of no-first- use. I think it was clear that no- first-use would effectively kill the NATO doctrine of flexible response, and by the same token destroy the power of the nuclear deterrent. You couldn’t have a deterrent and say that you weren't going to use it. The deterrent effect of nuclear weapons could not be reconciled with an undertaking not to use them. And as I said, I can remember saying during one of these debates in the NATO Council, that the problem is not the first use of nuclear weapons, the problem is the first use of force by either side, and we should focus on that. It's a false debate to talk about who's going to use nuclear weapons first. What we should focus on is the prevention of the use of force on either side. And it is the side which first uses force that will be responsible for anything that happens after that. And you cannot realistically expect an armed conflict between nuclear powers to be limited to conventional forces.

 

[HILL] There was a certain amount of talk about building up conventional forces in this period. What was the impulse behind that?

 

[HALSTEAD] Well, as to the impulse, this came very much from an American concern that the nuclear deterrent was losing its credibility (in a situation where there was nuclear parity between the United States and Soviet Union, rough nuclear parity, but a continuing conventional imbalance which favored the Soviet Union). In those circumstances the Americans were afraid, and not only the Americans, that the threat to use nuclear weapons in case of a Soviet attack would no longer be credible because the ensuing exchange would hurt the West as much as the East. So, in other words, what was supposed to be a deterrent to Soviet aggression could, under those circumstances, become a self deterrent.

 

[HILL] But there has been a long long history, going back to the Lisbon force goals, of allied commanders or the NATO Council calling for more effort on the conventional side. But it seems a very difficult proposition, partly because it's a very expensive one.

 

[HALSTEAD] Yes, it's always been a difficult proposition. But this situation that I've tried to describe caused the Americans to mount a new effort to raise the level of conventional forces, the level of NATO conventional forces. And I can remember the first time that General Rogers, then SACEUR, called on me after my appointment, my arrival in Brussels. It was the practice for the major NATO commanders to call on each new Ambassador, new Permanent Representative. And I remember very clearly General Rogers' call. Because we got into this very question, and he said that what he wanted, as Supreme Allied Commander Europe, was sufficient conventional force to halt the initial, any initial, Soviet attack and to break up any follow-on forces, and thereby to put the onus for the first use of nuclear weapons on the Soviets' back rather than upon the Western back. He had very clearly in his mind what he wanted to do; he did not want to see NATO put in the position of having to use nuclear forces first. He thought the decision for the first use of nuclear forces was in itself a deterrent. The man, the President, the Commander, the side that had to make that decision on the first use of nuclear weapons, was going to be under enormous deterrence. So he wanted the conventional situation to be such that we would force the Soviets to bear that responsibility, we would put that monkey on the Soviets' back. I think this was very sound. And out of that reasoning came General Rogers' proposal for what later became known as FOFA. This was variously described as Follow on Forces Attack, also known as Deep Strike, but then dropped because Deep Strike was misrepresented by some European countries as a drive for Leningrad or Moscow or wherever. But the strategy, General Rogers' strategy, was to be able to hold the first line of attack, which he felt reasonably confident in doing, with some strengthening, and then have the new technological means necessary to stop that second echelon, when all those reserves coming in from the western military districts of the Soviet Union would hit an already depleted and exhausted front line. His idea was to stop those before they ever got to the NATO front line with this FOFA. And that, I think, was the origin of this new drive for greater conventional forces. And I think it has really been happening since I left. The impression I have is that it's been largely successful in strengthening conventional defence, to a point where the net deterrent, the combined deterrent effect, is credible again.

 

[HILL] In the circumstances, how much attention was paid to MBFR at this time? Of course, that is one other way out of this dilemma.

 

[HALSTEAD] A lot of attention in terms of quantity and the allocation of time. Perhaps I could explain briefly the relationship between NATO and the various arms control negotiations. The relationship is different in each case. Only MBFR was a NATO negotiation as such. And in the case of MBFR, NATO discussed and drew up the instructions for all the Western Ambassadors in MBFR. Their instructions came not from their individual governments, but from NATO.

 

[HILL] But they did get some instructions direct?

 

[HALSTEAD] Oh, obviously, each government would suggest, would add its own gloss, but the basic instructions were established in NATO. I mean it's a rather unusual thing for an organization like this to be issuing the instructions for a multilateral negotiation like MBFR. In the case of the INF negotiations, in Geneva, only the United States negotiated on behalf of NATO; but the United States consulted the NATO allies and took account of their comments in the instructions that went from Washington to the US negotiator in Geneva. In the case of the START negotiations (and also the space "non-negotiations", because they never really got anywhere), the United States is negotiating about weapons under its exclusive control, unlike INF where it's negotiating about weapons under dual control. START is exclusively about US weapons and therefore entails exclusively bilateral negotiations with the Soviet Union. What the US does is to inform NATO, and of course listen to anything people in NATO have to say, but the instructions that go from Washington to the US negotiator in START are not formally subject to any alteration by NATO.

 

[HILL] But certainly, as you say, there obviously was a lot of attention to MBFR, because NATO was deeply involved in this whole issue. Was there any expectation, as you can recall, at the time, of any breakthroughs on MBFR at all?

 

[HALSTEAD] No, I wouldn't say so, but perhaps my opinion is rather colored by my own assessment. I never expected anything to come out of MBFR. And I said so from the beginning and for one very simple reason: we had no leverage over the Soviets in MBFR. Why should the Soviets, trying to see it from their point of view, why should the Soviets agree to a disproportionate reduction of their forces, and thereby abandon voluntarily their conventional superiority, when they had nothing to lose, absolutely nothing, by retaining that superiority. The only way, the only leverage, we could possibly have obtained or used would have been the threat, which we would have had to back up, of course, to re-establish the conventional balance unilaterally. But of course we were unable to do that, so I always thought that MBFR was a sham. And of course it originated not in order to obtain concessions from the Soviets, it originated in order to counter the Mansfield Amendment in the US Congress, so the NATO MBFR proposal was not aimed at Moscow originally, it was aimed at Washington. And everybody knew that.

 

[HILL] Well, I'd like to argue this point, but I think we’d better not do that now. This does bring us to perhaps the last major question I'd like to ask you. While you were in Brussels, there was a major review of East/West relations launched within NATO. Could you tell us something about the origins of that? For example, it included the notion that NATO would be prepared to foreswear the notion of military superiority, and also to recognize the legitimate security interests of the Soviet Union. I just wondered what this whole process was all about.

 

[HALSTEAD] Why was it felt necessary to do that? It was felt necessary to do that because there was increasing evidence of a gap between the US approach and the approach of most, if not all, of the NATO Allies, on how to deal with the Soviet Union. And of course this gap first became evident, I suppose, with President Reagan's various pronouncements on the Soviet Union including the "Evil Empire" speech. As the Reagan era dawned, it became more and more clear that the approach of the US administration under Reagan was appreciably different from what had been taken for granted, in the Alliance, as the Alliance strategy towards the Soviet Union. And this was a matter of discussion in the Alliance, not out and out between the United States and the rest, but with respect to specific policy questions on how to deal with them, how to reply to this Soviet proposal or how to deal with that Soviet action. And it became clear to a number of us that this was not only a debate between the US and its allies but it was also a debate internally in the United States. This debate was illustrated in such questions as whether NATO should be aiming at military supremacy or at military equality with the Soviet Union; whether NATO should be basing its plans on nuclear deterrence or on nuclear war fighting; whether it should be the purpose of the West to make life as difficult as possible for the Soviet Union, (should we support policies that might destabilize or weaken the Soviet Union?) or whether the Western purpose should be to seek a reasonable modus vivendi with the Soviet Union. These were the sorts of questions that were being discussed both internally in the United States, and in a less open way, but implicitly, in NATO, in the NATO Council, in relation to policy questions that came up there. And these differences, as I say, became more evident over time, as the Reagan Administration took a harder and harder, hawkish line. Now a lot of people would say, "Yes, it talked, it took a very hawkish line talking but was very restrained in action." Well, that is partly true, I would grant that that is true to some extent, but not entirely. But it opened up some serious rifts between the United States and the Allies in relation to such questions as the Soviet gas pipeline, because some American opinion, at any rate, or some opinion in the US Administration, was against the pipeline, not for the ostensible reason that it would create a dependency of the Western Europeans on Soviet gas. That was never, really, an argument that held any water in my view. Their real reason was that it would give the Soviets valuable foreign currency. For somebody whose approach was to do anything possible to weaken the Soviet Union, that was something to stop; and there were a lot of other things, the question of credits, trade credits to the Soviet Union were also very much to the fore. In fact, a lot of time in the NATO Council was spent, during my period, on economic questions, but economic questions that had either a strategic background or had some security spinoff. And I think we made a fair amount of progress in reaching procedures that would enable these questions to be more effectively dealt with, because one of the problems was, and I'm digressing here a little bit, of course, that from the beginning, economic aspects of defence tended to be played down in NATO. Economic questions were handled in other organizations, and there was really nowhere where the strategic implications of economic policy, the security implications, could be discussed; and I think, during the time I'm talking about, it became evident that something had to be done about it, and so some procedures were worked out involving COCOM as well, which I think enabled us to fill this gap. But also what became apparent was that what was really behind all these disagreements on credits and gas pipelines and a number of other policy questions that came up, was this basic lack of a consensus on what Western strategy towards the Soviet Union should be. Based on what premises, based on what objectives, based on what sort of an assessment of Soviet intentions. There was no agreement on these questions, and so some of us began to urge that NATO engage in a thorough-going review of these issues, another look at the whole thing, in an effort at least to bring some of the things out in the open, to talk about them as issues, and if possible of course, narrow this gap. And I think it was a useful exercise. In a sense it was re-inventing the wheel, because NATO had done a similar exercise back while I was still in Bonn, shortly before I got to Brussels. And Robert Ford was a member of a task force that did another review of NATO policy towards the Soviet Union. But this one was more thorough-going, the one I'm talking about, which started just shortly after I left NATO, as I recall. The preparations for it, I mean the talk of its necessity and so on, was very much on during my time there, but the study itself was launched just after I left and was brought to a conclusion the following spring at the spring ministerial meeting in 1983 (I think the ministerial meeting was held in Washington, if my recollection is right); and the NATO ministers at that meeting adopted a new sort of statement or declaration of NATO policy towards the Soviet Union which came down, on balance, on the side of equality, modus vivendi, accommodation, and the strictly defensive side of the question, as I mentioned earlier.

 

[HILL] Just one last, specific question. Can you say something briefly about the state of relations between France and the other Allies in the period while you were there? I'm not sure when President Mitterand was elected to office, but of course he was a Socialist and not a Gaullist, the first non-Gaullist for a long time. I wondered how much impact this had?

 

[HALSTEAD] Well, it's an interesting question, because while Mitterand is certainly a Socialist, there is an enormously powerful and influential body of bureaucracy in the Quai d'Orsay and perhaps in other government departments, which maintains a degree of continuity, no matter who the President is and no matter who the Prime Minister is. It gives, it adapts and it modifies, but it strives to maintain a degree of continuity, so that even under Mitterand, what I would call Gaullist ideals, about limitations on NATO political consultations, what is proper for NATO to discuss and decide on and what is not, remain very restrictive. But the fact is that, regardless of the Ambassador at NATO and regardless of the President in Paris, France plays a role which allows NATO, as an organization, a very short leash in the field of political consultation, and essentially of course France is involved in NATO only in that field of political consultation. It is something of an anomaly that France takes no part in the military side of NATO, remains in the political side, but is constantly reining in the political side. Of course, on the military side, it is true that, in practice, France has been moving, in recent years, into a position of closer and closer practical co-operation with NATO. But I think the main difficulty that NATO faces with France is not on the military side, it is in fact on the political side, where the French time and time again refuse to allow political consultation to go as far as establishing something called an Alliance position. They have an aversion to Alliance positions on things. This is a nationalist approach.

 

[HILL] One very last question, which is a very general one, how valuable do you think that membership in NATO is for Canada?

 

[HALSTEAD] Well, I think it is extraordinarily valuable. I think it is the keystone to our defence policy, in the sense that we would not have, in my view, would not have a coherent defence policy without NATO. We would have bilateral arrangements with the United States, we will always have to have those. But they would place us in a situation of permanent inferiority in the sense that because of the discrepancy, the disparity of power between us, we would simply be tagging along in such an arrangement, and tagging along moreover without really any coherent defence policy of our own, because if we were limited to contributing to the defence of North America we would be dealing with only one aspect of Canada's security problems. The other aspect is in Europe, and only by contributing to that can we have any sort of say in the policy that affects East/West stability, and it is East/West stability really that is the most important factor in Canadian security, in the security of Canada. So that's the defence side. I would say, moreover, politically, NATO provides us with a multilateral forum which we would not otherwise have, where we can discuss the most important questions of war and peace, and global security, with our closest friends and allies. And in that multilateral forum, of course, again the disparity of power between Canada and the United States alone is diluted. That's of enormous importance for Canada.

 

And, finally, I think that it adds an important dimension to Canada's relations with the countries of Western Europe. Our membership in NATO is a way of saying to the countries of Western Europe that we share with them, not only interests in trade and scientific co-operation and cultural exchanges and all that, but also the most basic interest any country can have, that is its interest in its own security. And our participation in NATO, backed by the stationing of our forces in Europe, is a way of saying to the Europeans: "You and we have the same view of international security: we share with you an interest in defending our values and this is the bedrock of our co-operation."

 

[HILL] Thank you very much indeed.