Ross Campbell

ROSS CAMPBELL

*Interviewers: Hill, Cox, Pawelek

 

 

[HILL]* Good morning, our guest today is Ambassador Ross Campbell, former Permanent Representative to the North Atlantic Council. We are delighted you can be with us this morning, Ambassador Campbell, to give us your insights into Canadian policy in NATO.

 

[CAMPBELL] Thank you. I hope you don’t expect me to be too up-to-date because it is now 15 years since I left NATO, so you will have to accept some gaps in my knowledge.

 

[HILL] Well, we will do our best to jog your memory. Ambassador Campbell, as you know, the project we are engaged in here is an oral history. We are examining the development of Canadian foreign policy since 1945, and trying to see how well membership in NATO has fitted Canada's short term and long term interests. For example, the kind of things we are looking at are Canada's contributions to NATO, at the impact of various initiatives or Canadian policies within NATO, and at the ways in which membership in NATO helped Canada to pursue its goals of international peace and security.

 

[CAMPBELL] Indeed, I look back on those days with fondness. From a career point of view, everything that happened to me after NATO was an anti-climax.

 

[HILL] It is interesting that you should say that, because in my career too it was a fascinating period of time.

 

[CAMPBELL] Extraordinary. If anybody thinks that any bilateral post can match in career satisfaction working in a central policy area like the NATO Council, then they are wrong, or at least for my tastes. That was the apex of my career, those six years in NATO.

 

 

[HILL] The number of issues that arose in that period was remarkable.

 

[CAMPBELL]   Unbe1ievab1e.

 

[HILL] Yes.

 

[CAMPBELL] I am proud of my time at NATO, even though I had a difficult time there. I think it was far and a way the most useful part of my career.

 

[HILL] Ambassador Campbell, we are particularly pleased that you are willing to participate in this project because of your extensive connection with NATO affairs. Of course, I am thinking particularly of your period as Ambassador to the North Atlantic Council between 1967 and 1972, which we have just mentioned. In addition, there were many other parts of your career that were related to NATO in one way or another, which I am sure provided very valuable insights into the role of the North Atlantic Alliance, of the NATO organization, and Canadian and world affairs.

 

[CAMPBELL] It's true. NATO seemed to impinge on my career from its formative time. I'm starting right back in the Scandinavian countries when we were trying to get them into NATO in the '40s.

 

[HILL] Right.

 

[CAMPBELL] And, oh, subsequently you know, I served mainly in NATO countries from my first time abroad. Then I came back here and worked in the Middle East Division, which was then a mixture of Middle East and European; it was all one in those days. Very much involved in the early days. I attended almost every NATO meeting from 1951 and on - until 1970 something, that is 20 odd years, all the ministerial meetings even when then I wasn't Ambassador to NATO.

 

[HILL] Right!

 

[CAMPBELL] Well before.

 

[HILL] Well, I think those are some of those points we want to get at, as well as we can. We don’t want to miss them.

 

[CAMPBELL] I am sorry that was a digression, I shouldn’t have.

 

[HILL] No, not at all. I think that simply emphasizes a point that we are trying to follow, that this interview is not simply to look at strictly the NATO period, in NATO headquarters, but it really is at Canadian foreign policy related to NATO and there are really many facets to the NATO experience. I mean we are not just going to trying to dig out here, what happened to this or that particular NATO document or whatever. So I think your period in Scandinavia is of interest, and then Ankara and so forth. Very much. I think they are very germane to the inquiry. In light of that, I think I should mention how we'd like to approach these two interviews - to examine your career in a series of phases. In Part One we will deal briefly with the early period, that's to say up to 1944, including your time at university, and your service in the Royal Canadian Navy during the war. Part Two will focus on the first seven years of your career in the Department of External Affairs, firstly in Ottawa and then at the embassies in Oslo and Copenhagen, and then in the European Division in Ottawa. Part Three will consider the *52 to ’56 phase when you were with the Embassy in Ankara and then, from '57, head of the Middle East Division in Ottawa. Part Four might be termed "Senior positions in Ottawa", that is to say from '59 to '64, when you were firstly special assistant to the Secretary of State for External Affairs, and then Assistant Under-Secretary of State yourself. Part Five will focus on your years as Ambassador in Yugoslavia, and Algeria, in 1965-1967. Part Six will be the largest segment and will deal with your service as Ambassador to the North Atlantic Council, between May 1967 and October 1972. Part Seven will deal with your years as Ambassador to Japan and Korea between 1972 and 1975. That covers an awful lot of ground; and, as you just indicated, most of your career, certainly up until the time you left the North Atlantic Council, was in fact connected with NATO in one way or another. So you have plenty of room for reflection about NATO.

 

[CAMPBELL] Interestingly enough, the Japanese also were very interested in trying to follow what was happening in NATO, and I was swamped with offers to speak to their institutes out there, and I did indeed as much of it as I could; but their interest in European affairs is profound. They know its there and that what makes the world tick is what happens in the North Atlantic sphere.

 

[HILL] Right, I think that we will be very interested to hear about that period too.

 

[CAMPBELL] Okay.

 

Part I. Early Years, to 1944

 

[HILL] Ambassador Campbell, you were born in Toronto and educated in that city, including Trinity College at the University of Toronto. You obtained a B.A. in the Law Faculty in 1940. Could you tell us a little of your background and your experiences up to 1940? Particularly, how do you think they have coloured your outlook on world affairs, including the question of international peace and security?

 

[CAMPBELL] Well, it is true that it was my period at the University of Toronto that prompted me to go into External Affairs as a career, even though I was studying law at the University. I was at the University from 1936-40 in the faculty of law, and in those days they ran a very interesting course in international law. Larry (Norman) MacKenzie, who eventually became president of the University of British Columbia, was the professor of international law, and we were living through an intensely interesting period, the prelude to World War II in fact. The Spanish Civil War and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, all these things took place from 1935-40, when I was in university. You knew that World War II was coming, you knew roughly what the broad lines of the struggle where going to be. I tried to get into External, I first wrote in 1937 saying I wanted to join; they wrote back and said finish your degree and then come along. Of course the war came instead, and I had to defer the thing until the war was nearly over.

 

[HILL] John Holmes said there was a sense in that period that the war was coming, and people were very conscious of that.

 

[CAMPBELL] Sure as could be. I don't know why I knew it so certainly, but there was no doubt in my mind that we were heading into a war.

 

[HILL] Well, then, during the war you served from 1940 to 1944 with the Royal Canadian Navy.

 

[CAMPBELL] Actually, it was longer than that - to September of ‘45.

 

[HILL] I did notice that there was a little article in the paper recently, in The Citizen, I think it was, with a photograph of you and some former shipmates.

 

[CAMPBELL] They weren't exactly shipmates, only to the extent that navies use ship's names for shore establishments. What that was, was a picture of a group of university students of 1940 vintage, university graduates, who were recruited by the Royal Navy to go straight over into the RN and serve there, because Canada did not have any ships but lots of people and they had lots of ships and not enough people over there. I was one of those recruited by the Royal Navy in 1940, early in 1940, right after graduating. They accelerated graduation in 1940 incidentally, so we could all get shot at early. There it is, I went over with that group and I remained with the Royal Navy and I never served a day in a Canadian ship. I was paid by Canada, thank god, but I was on loan to the Royal Navy.

 

[HILL] What field were you in?

 

[CAMPBELL] Torpedo boats, right almost from the beginning except for a brief training period when I was in the North Atlantic. Watching all the ships being sunk around me, I decided then it would be better to be sinking than to be sunk by them. So I went into an offensive job and stayed in that.

 

[HILL] Where were you serving?

 

[CAMPBELL] Started out in the English Channel, in the desperate days in 1940-41. Three years in the Mediterranean and I was in every campaign out there, from Greece through the western desert, North Africa, Sicily, Italy and the Aegean. And then just back in time to get in on the invasion of Normandy from in the UK. So I did not miss anything except the Far East.

 

[HILL] So, a very active war time career?

 

[CAMPBELL] Yes, I guess so; probably I had as much active service and combat service as anybody in the Canadian Navy.

 

[HILL] And did that leave you with any sort of particular view of foreign affairs, other than the fact that you were trying to stay afloat and alive.

 

[CAMPBELL] You didn't worry too much about that when you were twenty-five years old. Yes, it did. It did help confirm me in my decision that I would like to do something in foreign affairs - partly because I was on loan to the Royal Navy and was appalled at the ignorance of the average Englishman about Canada. Really, it used to just gall me, their dismal ignorance; even if they had been through university and had umpteen degrees, they knew nothing about Canada. You know, an antiquated idea, a colony they thought we were; imagine in 1940!

 

[HILL] It is probably not much better now.

 

[CAMPBELL] Then they just don't want to learn. But it made me realize that there was a need, a job to be done there, trying to get Canada a bit better known. And of course with the turmoil that we had been through, it was perfectly obvious that it was reshaping the political world, that the colonies would never survive that upheaval. That was quite clear to me, especially as regards the French ones in North Africa. And of course it went all the way to decolonization; that I guess was the major characteristic of the post war period, from 1945 to 1960. It was a wholesale shedding of colonial dependencies. That was all becoming evident to me, even in 1943-44.

 

[HILL] Well, I believe it was very clear, by the end of the war, that that was bound to come.

 

[CAMPBELL] One interesting thing is that I got into External, eventually, by a kind of funny circumstance. After I came back to England after being in the Middle East for so long, we went straight into the landings at Arromanches (Normandy). We were in action practically every night, for about 18 nights in a row, and eventually I absorbed so many big bricks that my boat was virtually a write off. So I was on the beach for about two weeks waiting for a new boat, after having been nearly sunk off Normandy, by being set on fire, very badly on fire, by a shore battery - and they were running a competition for External Affairs in London. So just for something to do I wrote the exam, and to my horror, about three months later, I was in Ostend, Belgium, with a new flotilla and everything, and External said "You're in; you're relieved of your command; you are to report immediately to Ottawa." I was just appalled. I had no intention of quitting, so I went over and I dramatically tore up the signal.

 

[HILL] Like Nelson's blind eye.

 

[CAMPBELL] Yes. The Navy people were delighted with this, but External - Norman Robertson - and I have still got the letter that he wrote, the nastiest, coldest letter you could imagine - telling me that really, I did not realize what a flattering thing it was to have been accepted into External. Only three out of umpteen had got in, and that, no they would not keep the job as I had asked till after the war. You come now, or you do not come at all. I thought it was all over. But, they came through right after the VE Day. They were still interested, grudgingly.

 

Part II - Early Career at External Affairs. 1945-52

 

[HILL] Well, that leads us into Part Two of our interview. By which I mean the period of 1945 to 1952. You joined the Department, and initially went into the Legal Division.

 

[CAMPBELL] Yes, that's right.

 

[HILL] Then, after a brief time in Ottawa, you went to the embassy in Oslo and then to the embassy in Copenhagen. In fact you were in Scandinavia at the time the North Atlantic Treaty was being worked out in Washington.

 

[CAMPBELL] As I look back on that period, it was a very important period in trying to persuade those two countries to come into NATO. And because Canada was taking a fairly forward position on that, I did a lot of that work. I don’t think it is apparent in the reports that came in. That was a rotten embassy in Copenhagen. I am not supposed to say nasty things about ambassadors, am I? There was a fellow called Henry Laureys, a Belgian by birth and one of Mackenzie King's friends, who had been appointed to Copenhagen when the NATO issue was really heating up, around 1947. This man was such an obstacle to our really doing a job there. He never came to the chancery, he must have thought that ambassadors were appointed just to go and have dinner every night with royalty. He had no idea why he was appointed there; I found it extremely difficult to do everything in the embassy, run the consulate, run the political side and everything. I was the only officer.

 

[HILL] You were the only political officer there?

 

[CAMPBELL] Yes, the only officer. And the Ambassador never set foot in the place; for one year he never came in to the chancery.

 

[HILL] Well, what about Oslo?

 

[CAMPBELL] That was better, but I was so new. In Oslo the Germans had only just left when I arrived. I came at the end of 1945. I guess it was January 1 or 2, 1946 when I arrived in Oslo, somewhere around there. The Germans had been only 5 or 6 months out of the country, and the people were still starving in Norway. So really, it was a kind of rescue operation, more than anything. We were helping reunite families. Norwegians that had trained in Canada and were trying to find their own families and accommodating all their Canadian wives that they had married in Toronto, in "Little Norway" where they had taken their training.

 

[HILL] So really the Norwegian period was the post-war phase in your life?

 

[CAMPBELL]   Absolutely.

 

[HILL] Whereas Copenhagen....

 

[CAMPBELL]   Copenhagen was the beginning of the political goal, the formation of the NATO Alliance, as I have said. I think that such reporting as I managed to do was accurate but my god, I resented the circumstances in which I had to do it. There was a wonderful job to be done there, and it did succeed. I suppose I helped to get Denmark into NATO. And interestingly, the wartime experience of those three countries is what dictated their attitude toward joining the North Atlantic Alliance. The Swedes, who were the most important of the three, had managed to keep their neutrality at the expense of allowing the rape of Norway. They let the Germans go through, but they at least escaped war by doing so. So they were smugly content with neutrality as a successful policy, even though everybody hated their guts in that part of the world for what they did. The Norwegians had been totally raped by the Germans. You know they even practiced a scorched earth policy as they left. They burnt every village and all the crops. It was awful. So the Norwegians had no hesitation, they wanted into NATO and the faster the better, and the bigger the grouping the better. They were not interested in a Scandinavian Alliance, which was what the Swedes wanted - and the Danes. The Danes had been treated like German cousins; it was a very gentle occupation. The Danish Army was mobilized until 1943, under German command, not fighting, but it was there. They were totally ambivalent; they did not know whether they wanted to be in NATO or not; and that was the hard one, to persuade the Danes, pleasure-loving Danes, that really they had had enough of a brush with fate that they ought to see the virtues of collective security. But it was not easy to persuade them.

 

[HILL] I was struck by the number of telegrammes on this question when I was looking through the records at External. You must have got some things through the ambassador in the end.

 

[CAMPBELL] Which is significant.

 

[HILL] I was quite struck by the fact that getting some of the Scandinavians into NATO was obviously quite important to Canada. And the other thing that I was struck by was that clearly the Scandinavians, if they came in, they did not want to be part of the Brussels Treaty Organization. They did not want to be dependent solely on the British. They did not want to be ’’liberated", they wanted to be "protected". So, I suppose having the United States in there, and Canada, was crucial.

 

[CAMPBELL] They knew that Britain was economically weakened by the war, which indeed it was, and incapable of really extending even the degree of protection they had in the pre-war period, which had been ineffective anyway. They were all let down in a way, by the ease of the invasion of Norway and Denmark. Nobody was there to oppose, and they did not oppose themselves. The Danes did not, the Norwegians did a bit.

 

[HILL] So, in that whole period then, there must have been quite a lot of interest in Copenhagen and in Oslo in what was going on in Washington?

 

[CAMPBELL] It was all a massive, semi-organized lobby, amongst those who were actively interested in promoting the idea of a North Atlantic region, if you like, or alliance; it wasn't all that clear in 1947-48 exactly where we were heading. It became clearer, but the Americans and ourselves and the British, and to a certain extent the French at the time, we were all trying to persuade the Scandinavians to come in.

 

[HILL] Was there an attempt to persuade the Swedes to come in initially?

 

[CAMPBELL] Oh yes, and it failed, for the reasons that I said. They were smugly content with neutrality as a viable policy, which they have persisted in to this day, of course.

 

[HILL] Right. Looking back, from today, at the association of Norway and Denmark, and then Iceland, with NATO, would you say it has been pretty much of a success story, on the whole?

 

[CAMPBELL] Oh, in a modest way. You may remember, we had to put the Icelanders in escrow, in the ice box for a while, because they had a semi-communist or a partially communist government. They're in only faute de mieux. I do not think there is any conviction in the hearts of Icelanders that being in NATO is an ideal situation; it is just inevitable, so they might as well relax; they are not going to be allowed to leave the Alliance, that's really it. No, I would say as far as Norway is concerned, and Denmark, they seem reasonably content with the thing. But really they have had to, and have had to be, but they have made their own arrangements with the Soviets. Norwegians have an understanding of some sort with them, about never taking troops in peace time. The Danes, I don't know if they have any special arrangements. I think they do as far as the Baltic is concerned, some special arrangements with the Soviets that they don't interfere with each other. It's what I call the politics of the periphery of NATO. It's a kind of pragmatic accommodation with the big person next door. They will do nothing to provoke the Soviets, those two.

 

[HILL] You mention the word periphery. I did a little study once for the Defence Department on the Southern Flank. I was struck very much by how the Southern Flank of NATO is a series of bilateral relationships, more with the Americans than with anybody else, rather than NATO as a collectivity as it is on the Central front. The collective aspect is really quite lacking.

 

[CAMPBELL] Absolutely, and incidentally that leads nicely into that period that I was at home and then in Ankara. Because again, for my sins, I was in charge of the Middle East desk of what was then the European Division, when Greece and Turkey were admitted to NATO. It was at the meeting of 1951 and it was here in Ottawa. We held out, and rightly so, against admitting Greece and Turkey, we and the Danes, and we became isolated. I remember 10:30 or 11:00 at night on the last day of that meeting, Mike Pearson said to me, "You are in charge of the Middle East, you go back over to the East bloc and in ten minutes I want a statement reversing our position". I remember the opening words, (may God strike me dead), it starts out by saying we had never been opposed to the entry of Greece and Turkey, but simply that we had had misgivings about the compatibility. Eating crow! Yes, of the worst kind. I was ashamed of myself, but we ate crow and backed down, under great American pressure. They wanted them in, and they were not prepared to look at the obvious difficulties that were going to ensue. All they wanted was to make sure that leaning up against the Soviets was a NATO member.

 

[HILL] Of course they had earlier announced the Truman Doctrine, which may be the key to that whole period.

 

[CAMPBELL] Oh sure it was.

 

[HILL] So in a way. Parts Two and Three of your career overlap, because when you came back to Ottawa, you were already working on Middle Eastern Affairs. Then afterwards you went to Ankara.

 

[CAMPBELL] That was an interesting period, because it was the period of John Foster Dulles and pactomania. There was a regional effort at that time - not only were these two brought into NATO in 1952, I guess it was the meeting of 1952 that they were finally admitted, the spring meeting - but there was a move at that time to form a Balkan alliance, with Yugoslavia and Greece, Turkey and even Iran; to form a kind of southern containment against the Soviets was the idea. It came to almost nothing, but again, it reflected the tensions of the time. Already it was apparent the Soviets were going to be a real problem. Really from the invasion, the putsch in Czechoslovakia, in 1948, that's what caused all these things to happen, for NATO to be created and for all these other pacts to be contemplated. It was all part of a containment policy against the Soviet Union.

 

[HILL] You had Czechoslovakia, leading up to the formation of NATO itself. And then after NATO was established you have the Korean War, of course.

 

[CAMPBELL] A whole series of crises, in fact starting in 1948 with the Czech putsch, to the Berlin crises and failures of summits. I have got somewhere in these papers a checklist of the dreadful things that were happening from 1948 onwards with monotonous regularity about once a year to 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Just one critical situation with the Soviets after another. No matter what we did on our side always it ended up in failure and renewed tension.

 

[HILL] Before you went to Ankara, when you were still in part two of your career, you were at the European Desk in Ottawa?

 

[CAMPBELL] Right, doing Middle East things.

 

[HILL] Doing Middle East things. But this was also the phase when Turkey and Greece were joining the Alliance. It was the period when the Korean War was going on and the NATO command systems had been set up and defence planning was getting under way. Curiously enough, I came across references in the files and in publications such as the Canada in World Affairs series, about the period 1952-53, talking about the "malaise" in NATO. The thing had no sooner been set up and here was the first of the crises of the Alliance. I wonder if you could just comment on that.

 

[CAMPBELL] Yes, I can. I believe the reason that it had a rather hesitant beginning was because of the Brussels Treaty, which was created first, as you know. I think it came into being in 1948. And it was this incipient Europeanism that almost caused NATO to be still-born, in my judgment. And it is a trend that you can see recurring; it happened when you were there, Roger; it's happening again now with the Eurogroup within NATO. There has always been an instinct amongst the Europeans to cut the umbilical cord to the USA. On the one hand they want to cut it politically, and in a security sense they want to maintain it; and you have these incompatible objectives, both present, all the time. I think that the early part, the weak beginning in NATO was partly that, partly it was the Korean War itself, which showed really the limitations of regional alliances. Here we were, all preoccupied with trying to contain the Soviets or Communism if you want, in Europe, and what happened was that it broke out in a military sense elsewhere - the same challenge, as it would seem then, by Communism in the Far East, where there was no NATO involvement. And in the Middle East we were having similar tensions too, with no theoretical obligation on the part of NATO to do anything about it. This was the problem - that NATO seemed irrelevant to the crises that were developing, one in the Far East and one in the Middle East. But, of course, the Americans were more far-seeing on this and I think to an extent the British as well. They saw that ultimately the challenge would be in Europe, and it was indeed. With all these recurring crises, which I mentioned, from '48, Czechoslovakia, right on through, they had an annual reminder somewhere that the Soviet Union was a potential threat.

 

[HILL] You touch on two very interesting points, there. It seems to me that there has always been this relationship between NATO and Europe, in the sense that the ideal of an Atlantic community has always run head on into the ideal of the European community.

 

[CAMPBELL] Of course.

 

[HILL] And that has never been reconciled.

 

[CAMPBELL] No, this is an uneasy marriage too, as I see it, politically and militarily conflicting. Politically, there is no doubt where they want to go, and they are going there, through the Community and through the gradual evolution now of a European military cooperation within NATO, which I believe - I fought against it - is dangerous for NATO. I think they may wake up some morning to find that they may indeed have cut the umbilical cord to Washington and they'll live to regret it. That's what I think will happen.

 

[HILL] What struck me about the files on 1952, or around then, is that every two or three years you get a new spate of articles about the "crisis of the Alliance". They have got the Alliance as falling apart. But somehow NATO always lasts, despite these so- called crises.

 

[CAMPBELL] They weren't really crises. The truth is the absence of external crises does tend to set up centrifugal forces within NATO. It can't stand prosperity, the Alliance, this is what is wrong. In that period after Cuba when the Soviets slunk away with their tails between their legs and backed away in the face of a challenge, it was so calm that the Alliance nearly fell apart between 1962 and 1967. What brought us all back together again? The invasion of Czechoslovakia! But for those five years of total detente, the apparent acceptance by the Soviets of peaceful coexistence and absence of military challenge after Khrushchev disappeared, I tell you it was deadly maintaining the Alliance. It can't stand prosperity.

 

[HILL] So a lot of it, you think, is all sort of cooked up by the press or by the....

 

[CAMPBELL] Absolutely, absolutely. But it is true to the extent that the less the external tension the more they indulge internal differences. You know they are like Greece and Turkey. Every time NATO isn't engaged in an East-West confrontation - they go fighting each other. That's the problem.

 

Part III - Ankara and the Middle East, 1952-59

 

[HILL] Well, that leads us on very nicely into Part Three. In 1952 you went to Ankara, Turkey, to the Embassy there, and then in 1957 you returned to Ottawa to serve as head of the Middle East Division of the Department for two years.

 

[CAMPBELL] Through the Suez Crisis.

 

[HILL] Exactly.

 

[CAMPBELL] That really had quite a profound effect on Canadian policy. It nearly tore NATO apart, because there were the British and French on one side, and the Americans and Canadians on the other, in the Middle East dispute, the only time. It helped Canada grow up, and that is one of the things that I was determined about. My own experience with the British helped me to make up my mind which way we should go with Suez. They were so out of touch with what was happening, and they thought they could just command us to come with them.

 

[HILL] Of course, British opinion itself was very bitterly divided about Suez.

 

[CAMPBELL] Yes, but they were pretty well in support of, you know, "teach the wogs a lesson; Suez is ours and it has been ours for a long time". That was the attitude at the time. Certainly the British Government had no hesitation, they were going to fight anybody to keep their hold on the Canal. It is interesting in retrospect, again, that the argument was that the Egyptians could never run that Canal, never regulate the traffic properly. But in one year they learned how to operate the Canal and make it make more money than it had ever made under the Suez Canal Company.

 

[HILL] Right. Interestingly, you mentioned that Suez tore NATO apart, and that is precisely the word that I have here in my notes. Exactly the very same word.

 

[CAMPBELL] Of course, you had the big three: two together, France and the British, against the United States. Our role was probably more important than we think simply because of Mike's enormous influence at the time. I mean he was making up for our physical weakness in a way which we have never enjoyed since. That man was Mr. Canada in the world. We should know it, we never have had it, even Pierre Trudeau, with all his high profile and high intellect, never in international affairs, had influence the like of Mike's.

 

[HILL] I think a number of people have described that period as being the Golden Age of Canadian Diplomacy; partly, I think, because Canada had good solid forces within NATO, a good solid contribution. And at the same time you had Pearson's own personality and capability and that of the Department behind him. That's the impression I have anyway.

 

[CAMPBELL] If I can leap ahead, if I'm permitted to do so, I had a very interesting conversation with Mike in 1967. It was not all that long after I had taken up the NATO job, and things were moving in a way that he had always wanted - for the Alliance to be principally a political organization, not just military. We got into it because we weren't strong; we got lost when it was purely military. But things were moving in the direction in which we wanted in 1967. By then the Council had become the workshop of the West for dealing with many, many major political problems. Yet, we were not getting much attention back here in Ottawa. So I came back on a trip and went to see him and I said I can't understand why you, who more or less inspired this organization, aren't making sure I get more support for policies that accent the political function of NATO because that is what you always wanted. He said you're right it is exactly what I have always wanted; but, he said, let me tell you something, I have got bigger problems here at home. Then he described to me what was beginning to happen in Quebec. And he said I have no more time for international affairs, this is Canada's crisis. It was absolutely perceptive, prescient, what he was saying.

 

[HILL] It is also quite interesting that even before that, earlier on as Prime Minister, he was much more focused on domestic issues. That was the period of the institution of all the social programmes, that we still have. And then there was the start of the Quebec....

 

[CAMPBELL] Mike was a foreign political analyst, and a good one, but he had grasped the Quebec movement which eventually turned into the Quebec Crisis, the FLQ. He had enough exposure to the beginnings of that trouble that he switched priorities. Sorry about the digression.

 

[HILL] No, no, that was very interesting. As regards the Suez Crisis, this is one of these out-of-area problems that affect NATO. What sort of particular lessons would you draw from the Suez Crisis, as far as NATO is concerned, and also as far as Canada is concerned?

 

[CAMPBELL] Well, they are mainly negative, I am afraid. One has to admit that when the chips are down affecting the key, great players in NATO, the three top, or perhaps the four now including Germany, will go their own way, regardless of others - they won't even inform the Alliance. We have seen that phenomenon over the Vietnam War, with the Americans. We had it in the Suez, with the French and the British members of the Council obliged on paper to consult their Allies before they took any action of that kind, but in the event ignoring the organization. Just as the Americans ignored it at the beginning in Korea, they ignored it again throughout the Vietnam War.

 

[HILL] There is very clearly a sense that things which happen outside the NATO area are handled in a different kind of way.

 

[CAMPBELL] Even though - and this is where I am trying to answer your question - you can hardly call the Mediterranean, despite the map that says this is NATO and this isn't, with Cyprus left out, and so on, Malta left out, you can't really divorce the Mediterranean lake from North Atlantic security. It's our southern border, that lake. Maybe there is something wrong with the regional restrictions on the responsibility of NATO. Because it is absurd to argue that you can have events happening in Egypt, Iran and Iraq and the Middle East, Lebanon and not affect NATO; or anywhere in the Mediterranean.

 

[HILL] Well, I think the Atlantic Declaration of 1974 tried to deal with that.

 

[CAMPBELL] It didn't succeed.

 

[HILL] I think they used the formula, "of things which affect the allies as members of the Alliance", or something of that kind.

 

[CAMPBELL] It is still a nice distinction between affecting "you as you", and "you as a member of the Alliance". Well, as I say my conclusion is negative, that given the compulsion of events, the larger members will act in their own self-interest regardless of the Alliance. That's a weakness in NATO.

 

[HILL] Something that NATO has just got to keep working at.

 

[CAMPBELL] It has improved over the years. Even in the Vietnam War eventually, the Americans, almost after the fact, were at least informing their allies. When they invaded Cambodia they even gave us twenty-four hours' advance notice!

 

[HILL] If we go back a little bit further, what about you period in Ankara? You were there two years, I think?

 

[CAMPBELL] Four.

 

[HILL] Four. With regard to NATO, what impressions did that leave you with?

 

[CAMPBELL] Well, you know, I have a mixed impression. It was right after those countries, Greece and Turkey, had been admitted to NATO, and they were weak physically. It gave Canada an opportunity to play, for once, a major military role; we gave them their first real air force, one hundred and twenty-five F8s and thirty odd T-33 training planes. We gave them their entire Air Force. It gave us a lot of prestige in Turkey and in the Alliance generally. It then enabled us to equip ourselves with a more modern aircraft. Well, that is from a strictly Canadian point of view. My four years there in Turkey were all trying to cope with the phenomenon that was happening in Turkey; it was in desperate economic plight at the time, awful conditions, and they were getting worse all the time, and they were being constantly bailed out. We were always contributing aid to them, Canada was contributing both economic and military assistance. I think the same thing was happening more or less in Greece, but my experience was confined to Turkey. It was a matter of taking this sick man of Europe and trying to make it healthy enough to be a constructive member of the Alliance and to, you know, bolster them. That was a weak region, and the Soviets were in a very aggressive mood after Czechoslovakia. So those years, from 1952 to 1956, were rather dicey ones, while the Alliance was trying to strengthen its south east corner of the Alliance. Bases were being created, and the Americans had a huge military mission there, 4000 men and a big programme of re-arming the Turks. Turkey was the key, not Greece, as it is today, because they lean against the Soviet Union along the Black Sea.

 

[HILL] And the Caucasus too.

 

[CAMPBELL] Yes, and because Turkey touches on other sensitive spots like Iran, Iraq and Lebanon; they all have common borders. Well, the other thing about this, from a Canadian point of view, was that in 1951, it was the Middle East side of things rather than the Turkey side that I was always trying to see - the bigger picture. In 1951, Farouk was dethroned by Nasser, and there was nearly a Suez Crisis, at that time. We were involved in a very funny way, I must tell you, even though it is only an anecdote. The Canadian aircraft carrier Magnificent at that time was on a joint exercise with the British in the Mediterranean, the only Canadian ship in company with a large contingent of British ships which was visiting Istanbul; it was an almost pre-war, festive occasion, with everybody in their whites and a big ball at the British Consulate General, which is the old British Embassy from Ottoman times - a huge vast thing, a most elegant affair. Midnight, a signal comes through saying that there has been a revolution in Egypt, the British are to sail immediately, to drop this ceremonial nonsense they are going through in Turkey, and to sail operationally to take whatever action that was needed to stop this trouble in Egypt. Here we were with an aircraft carrier as part of the British visiting fleet. I had General Odium as the Ambassador at that time, who knew absolutely nothing about Canadian policy in the Middle East. So the British Admiral who was in charge of this fleet said, "Ambassador, we are all sorry we have to break off this wonderful party and so on. We are all sailing operationally". Odium said "Good show, you give these Egyptians hell." I said: "Ambassador, not the Canadian aircraft carrier. What is happening in Egypt is not our quarrel". "What?" he said to me, "We are going to stand by while they overthrow the King of Egypt?", and so on, and I said "Yup, unless we get instructions to the contrary from Ottawa". I had the biggest row that you can imagine, in front of the British Ambassador, the Head of the Fleet, against our own Commanding Officer of the Magnificent, Admiral Kenny Dyer, who said: "Of course I am going to go, I am going to shoot the Egyptians too". I can’t tell you how awkward a situation it was - and I was a First Secretary; but I had been in charge of Canadian policy on the Middle East until then and had a clear idea of its limits. Anyway, in the end I had my way. Ottawa, of course, said: "We do not associate with this action." But it was a lesson in the difficulty of segregating the great powers' individual policy in the Middle East from NATO commitments. This was a NATO thing that was going on, this naval visit, but the operational action was strictly British. You can get into that kind of a dicey situation all too easily.

 

Part Four - Senior Positions, Ottawa - 1959 to 1964

 

[HILL] Ambassador Campbell, in 1959 you were named special assistant to the Secretary of State for External Affairs, and three years later you were promoted to Assistant Under Secretary of State for External Affairs.

 

[CAMPBELL] Are you sure about those dates? It would seem to me that it was 1958, I was appointed to...

 

[HILL] Ah, it may have been.

 

[CAMPBELL] Because I was with Sidney Smith, you see, to start with, and I think he died in 1958.

 

[HILL] But it still was to 1964, was it?

 

[CAMPBELL] I was appointed Assistant Under-Secretary in 1962.

 

[HILL] Anyway, I was a bit tempted to call these "The Diefenbaker years," but I know civil servants don't have political alignments.

 

[CAMPBELL] I think that’s what you should call them. After all, he called us Pearsonalities!

 

[HILL] And another thing is, of course, in 1963 the Liberal Party came back to power, so it wasn't entirely a Diefenbaker period. Nonetheless, this was a period which was marked by a good deal of controversy about Canada's nuclear policy and also Canada's relations with the United States. I don't know whether those were issues which you were dealing with.

 

[CAMPBELL] Oh, very much so, especially the nuclear question - the issue of whether we were going to remain a user of nuclear weapons in this country. I mean, we were into the whole business of the Bomarc at that time. The arming of the Bomarc. I handled the negotiations from our side, towards the end of that period.

 

[HILL] Up to 1963.

 

[CAMPBELL] Between 1963 and 1964. That year, that was my main task. No, it was before that. I started it in 1962, before the elections.

 

[HILL] Right.

 

[CAMPBELL] And it was an impossible task. I have never been so unhappy in my life. I had a DND delegation of about 12 officers who were totally sceptical about this, as I was myself. I remember opening the negotiations by saying we had a difficult mandate. Well eventually, as we all know, those negotiations indirectly led to the defeat of the Diefenbaker government. I think that the Americans overthrew the Diefenbaker government by means of the press release that they issued which said that they were not going to go for any contrived solution to the nuclear weapons dilemma. You may remember that. We had had General Norstad, SACEUR, over here, also making statements; Miller (Frank Miller) was backing him; it was the beginning of the crisis. But the thing that tipped it was the press release, rejecting the negotiations that were going on. They (the American Embassy) made a public declaration here in Ottawa that led very rapidly to the disintegration of the Diefenbaker Cabinet, because we were in the position of having defaulted on our NATO obligations. We had said we would take these weapon systems; it made no sense to take the system without the warhead.

 

[HILL] Of course this was also the period right after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

 

[CAMPBELL] All the more reason for us to have taken a more, shall we say, Alliance position on this issue. I am one of those, I am sorry to say, who believes that we should never have dropped our obligation to share in the dirty business of holding nuclear weapons. I don’t think you can be a member of an alliance that relies to a certain extent on those weapons and refuse individually to hold them, that just drops the burden on to somebody else.

 

[HILL] This was also at the beginning, when you were working for Sidney Smith. Wasn't it just after NORAD was set up?

 

[CAMPBELL] It was right after NORAD had been set up, with no thought whatsoever given to the terms on which it was set up. There again I fault the Diefenbaker regime, that they didn't consult with anybody, they didn't research what was at issue in NORAD. I am not against their having developed NORAD but they went into it unthinkingly.

 

[HILL] Well, apparently, the Prime Minister more or less signed a draft text without really thinking about it. What struck me was that, in one interpretation I heard, is that up to the time of the establishment of NORAD, most of what Canada did in relation to the United States was to some degree within a larger framework, that is to say within the NATO framework.

 

[CAMPBELL] And it was one of the virtues of being in NATO, that is to dilute that relationship with the United States by putting it into the collectivity.

 

[HILL] But when the agreement was drawn up over NORAD, in fact a slice was taken off the wider policy and simply adopted without too much thought as to what the implications were.

 

[CAMPBELL] Let me give you a modern parallel outside of the realm of military activity. I think that is what is happening in this free trade quest. We are ignoring the wider situation of GATT and all the international trappings that exist for conducting international economic relations. We are doing the very dangerous thing of trying to enter into a bilateral arrangement with the United States. Ignoring that wider range, we will pay severely for this in the long run in my judgement. We shouldn't do it in military questions; we shouldn't do it in economic questions, ever. We should not try to take on the largest country on earth alone. We can only lose.

 

[HILL] One of the questions on NORAD is that in fact it doesn’t provide satisfactory consultative mechanisms, so there isn't any way in which you can....

 

[CAMPBELL] The command arrangements are a farce. The Canadians are figureheads in NORAD. Whoever is the senior Canadian and Deputy, he has no power whatsoever to activate the thing. We had an example of their trying, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, you may remember. A Canadian tried to activate the Canadian side of things, indeed did on the naval side by bypassing the government. But, there was a row about that. It was outside of anybody's terms of reference to do that. I find the command arrangements insulting to Canada, they are not real at all, even in respect of our own territory. That agreement, instead of just being blindly renewed, as it was, with an aerospace rather than a air connotation, ought to have been very thoroughly looked at again, not with an idea of scrapping it but at least getting Canadian control over the Canadian part of it. I think we could have done it if we had taken this moment when it had to be renewed for another five years to raise all these issues. In the context of our sovereignty, I find that we're making mistake after mistake. If we don't want anybody to lay claim to our northern shore, our northern part, we had better learn to protect it properly. I don't say nuclear submarines. I think that is wildly too expensive. For the same price we could have one hell of a presence at sea; we could make the North warning defence real. Position it further north, as somebody suggested. That was a good idea.

 

[COX] The irony of that is that DND said it was too expensive.

 

[HILL] In the 1959-1964 period, you went on a number of missions to the North Atlantic Council, I think. Did you have the impression, at that time, that the problems with the decision over the nuclear equipment of the Canadian Forces, over the command in NORAD, and so on, had a significant impact on the perception of Canada in NATO?

 

[CAMPBELL] Not what was happening in NORAD. That was not really very well known to NATO, although NORAD in theory is a regional command of NATO. In fact they do not report at all to the North Atlantic Council on what happens. So the details of that were not known in NATO. What was known was that, at the same time as we were doing that, we were also pulling away from arming our 104s or whatever we had at that time.

 

[HILL] They were 104s.

 

[CAMPBELL] All right, we were pulling back on that commitment. That was well known in NATO, and it added to our weakened position. It was around about 1968-1969 that we got into real trouble. But it was all beginning, right back in the early '60s when we started to make it clear that we were wobbling on nuclear weapons. All of it was compounded to create a weaker Canadian presence in NATO. I am again jumping ahead, but don't believe for one minute that we are as influential in that Alliance as we used to be; we are not. The cutting of our forces in 1968 and the throwing away of the nuclear responsibility, unilaterally, not in concert with our allies, has very severely undermined our voice in NATO. We never really recovered from those actions.

 

[HILL] Another point that strikes me very forcefully is that, when NATO was set up in the first place, one had the impression that here was a natural focus for Canadian foreign policy. Canadians played quite a role in setting it up, but also it provided a nice psychological home for Canada. Instead of just a bilateral relationship with the USA, the North Atlantic Treaty also covered the old relationship with the British and the French. Everything was all wrapped into one envelope.

 

[CAMPBELL] Subsumed even economically, in a sense. We had tried to make it more important in an economic sense. All of what you say is true, in a way NATO was the ideal home and still is for a major element of Canadian external policy. Simply because we do not have to face the Americans, British or French bilaterally in a large area of activity. Almost all of our foreign policy is in some measure aired in the NATO forum. I think it is an ideal one. We should never weaken it for that reason, politically or militarily. Militarily of course it has saved us a lot of money.

 

[HILL] And yet, in fact, Canadian governments may have unilaterally weakened that relationship, for example in the period we are talking about, because of the indecision over the nuclear weapons issue, because of NORAD perhaps.

 

[CAMPBELL] They have weakened it, and it started long before Pierre Trudeau. He more or less gave it the coup de grace. with his reduction in the armed forces in 1968. Add that to the pull back on the nuclear weapons and you can see that we began to be discounted, as a voice in the Alliance, as early as 1960-61. But, I know that I am running ahead of...

 

Part V - Ambassador to Yugoslavia and Algeria. 1965-67

 

[HILL] I think that fits very much into this period. But still we will go on to the next period, Part V, just a very brief question about the period when you were the Ambassador to Yugoslavia and Algeria, which was from 1965 to 1967. It is interesting because here you were Ambassador to two Non-aligned countries which were quite active in the Non-aligned movement. Did they have close links between themselves?

 

[CAMPBELL] Yes, they did, it spanned both Ben Bella and Boumedienne of Algeria, in that period. It was the Yugoslavs who had more or less lent the largest amount of military support, oddly enough even weapons support, to the Algerian Revolution. The Yugoslavs were in those days a lot more militant than they are today, and under Tito were very active in using this Egyptian (which meant Arab), Indian, Yugoslav, triumvirate, to try to push the notion of the Third World as a force - and they went a long way. The Algerian Revolution was partly bankrolled by Yugoslavia, so they were pleased that I, as Ambassador to them, had this link with Algeria.

 

[HILL] There is also a quite interesting link with the French. The French had just pulled out of Algeria and were pushing at this point for what they called the dismantling of the blocs in Europe.

 

[CAMPBELL] It coincided.

 

[HILL] It fitted in nicely with the Yugoslav policy of neutrality in a way.

 

[CAMPBELL] Actually, I believe what precipitated De Gaulle's break with the allied forces, the integrated forces of NATO, was not Algeria, although it severely altered French foreign policy, the outcome there. I think it was the aftermath of Cuba. I think de Gaulle decided that there was not going to be any real conflict between the Soviets and the West on nuclear weapons. Cuba proved that when they were nose to nose, eyeball to eyeball, they both backed off; and they both did. Make no mistake about it, it wasn't just the Soviets that backed off. Kennedy gave away bases in Turkey to get that crisis settled. So they both backed off. De Gaulle read into that that it is was a safe world; that we didn't really need to worry anymore about the Soviets making a move in Europe.

 

[HILL] Because they cancelled each other out.

 

[CAMPBELL] They cancelled each other out. He said, since I don't like this tie-in with "les anglo-saxons" anyway, I will just pull out, now that it's safe to do so. That is what he did in 1966.

 

[HILL] So in effect that was over. Do you recall that time as being the first great period of detente?

 

[CAMPBELL] Well, it started in 1962. From Cuba on, it was all sweetness and light until the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact in 1968, six years later. As I told you earlier, I was worried that the Alliance was going to fall apart at that time. Because the one thing they don't seem to be able to stand is peace - total, comfortable, absence of tension. Neither can the Warsaw Pact, of course. That's what led to Czechoslovakia. Because there was such an air of detente around, Mr. Dubcek thought he would try his luck, going a bit too far with it. So these are the realities of that period. Both sides were in some danger of disintegrating. Of course the Soviets played a little more hard ball than our side would ever play. That's why they arrested the rot in 1968 with armed repression of the Prague Spring.

 

[HILL] It must have been quite gratifying for the Yugoslav government to see a decline in the domination of the two blocs.

 

[CAMPBELL] It justified their having expelled the Soviets in 1948. Although, Tito, whom I knew very well - he lived just down the street from me, and we had quite an extraordinary relationship - he was never comfortable unless things were going rather smoothly with the Soviet Union. That old pirate never got over his early years as a Moscow-trained subversive; that's where he started life. He was captured in World War I, fighting for the Austrians, and he was carted off to the Soviet Union, brainwashed and became one of the most active saboteurs in Europe in that period prior to World War II. He was in and out of Yugoslavia organizing cells and revolutions against the monarchy. In the post-War period, first of all he brutally handed the Soviets the entry into Yugoslavia in 1945 - which he had no right to do; all his support had come from the Western allies not from the Soviet Union, in the war against the Germans. Nevertheless he let the Soviets in because he was Moscow-trained. It was three years later that he kicked them all out when he found they were subverting his country. But from then on Tito was never comfortable when he was at odds with the Soviets. He tried to strike a balance, but he was never happy unless things were going reasonably well with Moscow. That's how deeply that man's addiction to the international Communist movement had been inculcated, when he was a young man. Very interesting. He was a patriot, a Yugoslavian patriot, and everything was fine as long as these two things didn't come into collision. But when they did in the end, very reluctantly he would come down on the side of Yugoslavia. But what he really wanted it to be was a reasonably independent, but awfully good member of, the Warsaw Pact grouping. He couldn't have it both ways.

 

[HILL] Well....

 

[CAMPBELL] But that period, incidentally, was dominated a great deal by the Vietnam War. Even a lot of my reporting there was on Yugoslav attitudes and the information that they were getting from the Soviets and God knows who else, maybe the Chinese for all I know, about the course of the Vietnam War. He was quite a source of information, the Yugoslav, and I know that Paul Martin, who was the Minister for External Affairs at the time, valued this route in to another point of view, through the Yugoslavs.

 

[COX] Did they have a direct interest in that war?

 

[CAMPBELL] Only an ideological one. They were very much opposed to what they considered an imperial American war. They just looked upon the Americans as a colonial successor to the French in those days. Yugoslavia still was a very active member of the liberationist school of thought.

 

[HILL] Well, that brings us to part six, which I hope will be the largest part of the interview. I think that we are getting along quite nicely.

 

Part VI - Ambassador to the North Atlantic Council, 1967-72

 

[HILL] Ambassador Campbell, from May 1967 to October 1972, you were Canada's Permanent Representative and Ambassador to the North Atlantic Council. I believe this was first in Paris and shortly afterwards in Brussels.

 

[CAMPBELL] A half year later.

 

[HILL] This period included some very significant developments in world affairs and in Canadian policy towards NATO, including such things as the establishment of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the adoption of the Harmel Report, the Prague Spring, the Soviet invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia, the re-birth of detente at the outset of the 1970s, the SALT I Agreement, the Ostpolitik, the Berlin Agreement, the launching of the CSCE and MBFR negotiations, and so on. This was also the time of Mr. Trudeau's rise to power, and his election as Prime Minister, and of such events in Canadian foreign policy as the publishing of Foreign Policy for Canadians and then in 1971 the Defence White Paper. Also in 1969 there were the Canadian troop cuts in NATO, in Europe, as we mentioned earlier. Altogether, quite a lot of things to keep you busy during that period. So I wonder if we could ask some questions about them. I would like to start with NATO's role in East-West relations in Europe. How well do you think NATO policies on East-West issues were carried out? For example I am thinking here of the Ostpolitik, the Berlin Accord, the response to the Czechoslovak crisis, and so on.

 

[CAMPBELL] I am very happy to answer that because I don’t think that the world at large, or our government of the day, really grasped that the whole of the detente process was developed and unfolded in NATO. You can't really analyze what was happening during the period that you just discussed, that is from 1967 forward, without taking fully into account what had happened in the preceding five years. That is why I keep coming back to Cuba, which, with the back-down on both sides, introduced a prolonged period of detente in East-West relations. I said a moment ago that, to some extent, I wasn't sure that the Alliance was going to survive this thing. But, certainly we were conscious of this in the Alliance from the day I arrived there - even though there was a Middle East crisis on - the Six-day War. There was a consciousness that in the European theatre there was a calm atmosphere. So much so that we began to plan for a prolonged period of peaceful relations where the accent would shift from military preparedness to political accommodation with the East, and that is what gave rise to the so-called Harmel Report of 1967. We spent a year analyzing where we had come from, from 1962 to 1967. The total consensus was that we were on the eve of true peace. We had seen the Soviet Empire not only back away from a challenge, but eroding; the Chinese had broken off from them, there was a kind of flowering of liberalism within the East bloc; unheard of developments in places like Czechoslovakia; much more relaxed all around. It looked as if  there was going be          a convergence        of the systems, that they could     coexist relatively well. And so we had the Harmel Report, and I think it said all these things,    if you wish to check. I think it is well worth reading to this day. It was the product of a full year of intensive study by the entire Alliance. I worked on it, and fully enjoyed that time. You remember the period.

 

[HILL] I came a bit later.

 

[CAMPBELL] We had Sonnenfeldt, Larry Eagleburger, and very interesting and bright guys such as Rostow working on this exercise, and it was a very interesting report. Well, it all came to an abrupt end when the very things that we had identified, the gradual liberalization that seemed to be taking place in the Communist world, went too far in Czechoslovakia, and provoked a violent reaction - the invasion by the entire Warsaw Pact. It put the genii back in the bottle. It didn’t disprove that we were on the edge of an era of more easy relations with the Soviet Union, but it did prove that if you let things run ahead too fast, they can be upset by developments within the East bloc. In other words, detente was more mortal to their system than it was to ours. We had been worried about ours, about total detente, but the Soviets cannot tolerate total liberalization within their system or it will cease to exist. So it became a matter of containing this process; it had to be a well-thought-out long-term accommodation with the Soviet bloc, not to provoke things like Czechoslovakia. If you can believe it, this was the kind of thinking that we put down in that report, in the Harmel Report, and adopted in the aftermath of Czechoslovakia. That is what gave rise to a sort of highly structured approach to creating a durable detente, and it started with the settling of what I call the border issues, and the Berlin regime.

 

[HILL] You are referring now to the post-Czechoslovakia period?

 

[CAMPBELL] Yes, post, getting-into, 1969, 1968-69. Berlin, the Polish borders, the Czech borders, all the physical interface between East and West, that was still unresolved. We decided that those things had to be decided, that those things had to be dealt with first. Then the plan was that, having got that in place, we would then insist upon some reduction in the conventional forces. MBFR was the main concept, and if we got anywhere with MBFR and with these border issues, we would then respond to the Soviet initiative that there be a European Security Conference. It was their idea, the original CSCE, or whatever - it was not called what it eventually was called, because they did not want Canadians and Americans there at all. This was meant to be European, for the Europeans, with just the Soviet Union and their colleagues there, not the United States and Canada. And we had a big battle about that in the beginning. What I am trying to tell you is that the entire structured approach to creating detente, and the detente that flowered from 1970 right through the 1970's really, was planned in great detail in NATO. It's the greatest peace organization on earth, and that fact is not known. And certainly Mr. Trudeau didn't understand it when he first came to power. Because he just about robbed us of our voice in the Alliance by considering, seriously, withdrawal, and a totally neutral posture for Canada, which can not be a reality for Canada. That is a little glimpse of the situation.

 

[HILL] How effective was NATO in dealing with things like the promotion of detente? Would you like to amplify a bit with regard to CSCE and MBFR?

 

[CAMPBELL] I think where we left off, was that I was saying that your question should have really been put in a different context, an earlier one, where NATO had been in some danger of unravelling, simply because we had been through such a long period of being totally relaxed following Cuba, that we had all come to the conclusion, by 1967, that we were in a permanent peace situation with the Soviet bloc. That's what led to the review study in NATO in 1967, the so-called Harmel Exercise, which I still think was one of the most timely and effective analyses of the state of relations between the Soviet bloc and the West that has ever been done. And it is the basis upon which the whole detente process that began in 1969, and really persisted throughout the 1970s, was based. We had the phenomenon in between of the Czech crisis in 1968, August of 1968, when the Dubcek experiment was abruptly ended by the Warsaw Pact invasion, a sort of reminder of the limits of Soviet tolerance in the world. And notwithstanding that episode, we had the common sense as an Alliance to sit down and say, okay, this is a blip in the sweep of things, but the basic premises that we have been analyzing are the right ones, namely, that we do have to come to a political accommodation with the Soviet Union, and that probably involves dealing with a number of border issues first and then step by step the disarmament issues. MBFR, and the SALT talks, the CSCE, all of this was planned. This was what I deplored - the fact that most analysts don’t seem to know that all of this was thought out and planned for a full year, two years, before it was implemented. And it was all done in NATO, every last bit of it, from the Berlin talks, the Czech talks, the Polish borders, MBFR, CSCE, SALT, were all planned, thought out in advance and implemented as a structured policy of the West. Who knows, among present-day historians, that that was all developed in NATO? Damned few. In fact, they would say the opposite - that NATO was there just to wave armaments in the face of the other side. All of this detente planning was done in NATO. You were there.

 

[HILL] Yes.

 

[CAMPBELL] I think the problem is that people don't have access to NATO discussions, and they have a blind concept of NATO as a military alliance, interested only in, sort of, disaster control in case of crisis. It’s not so. Ninety percent of the activities of NATO are political, 10 percent are military, and it has always been so.

 

[HILL] I think a point worth bringing up here is that NATO consultations are not just what takes place in NATO headquarters, but there is a whole network, they draw on the input from capitals.

 

[CAMPBELL] Yes, they do, although our own contribution to that process is not all that active, as you may know. Yes, it doesn't matter what the issue, is, be it inside or outside the NATO sphere, there is a large chunk of political consultation that goes on that is not germane to the theatre of responsibility of NATO. I mean there are consultations about Cambodia, Afghanistan and Cuba, and Nicaragua no doubt today; and all those things are aired in NATO as a political exchange of information exercise. But there are, in addition, the issues that are germane to the NATO theatre and everybody has his input into it. Canada's has not been wildly good. We were quite good in the early parts of the Middle East crisis of '67 and no doubt '72 when there was another occurrence of fighting in the Middle East -'73, yes '73 - because we had a special role in the Middle East as part of UNEF and certain other peacekeeping operations. But on the whole, our input has not been particularly brilliant, I would say. It was quite good when we were on the Vietnam commissions. We were inside a process there and you could make a certain input that was different from anybody else's. But we've become parochial here in Canada, and we do not now have a huge amount of expertise in various areas of the world. I would say it is a declining capability we've shown.

 

[COX] In the case of NATO, why wouldn't our people open up when they have a viewpoint?

 

(CAMPBELL] It isn't that they don't have a viewpoint, it's - I really don't know, I will become rude if I say what I really think about this issue. Actually, we have a good foreign service, we had or perhaps have still a very good information system. What we did not have in my day, and I don't know whether we have now, was very good direction from External Affairs as to what you should or should not be saying in the North Atlantic Council. I free-wheeled a hell of a lot, just on the basis of the wealth of information that was coming in from all corners of the globe. We were on the information list of practically every mission in the world. So you were on your own a good deal as to what you contributed to a political debate. Every now and then you'd get a direction, a directive to pursue a certain line, but on the whole you didn’t; you were left on your own to do it as best as you could. I personally decided, and you may remember that this was a directive that I issued in writing, that from the day we reduced our forces we had to redouble our political commitment. That was the only way I could see of making up for the very serious loss of face, prestige, influence, etc. that we suffered from the reduction of forces, which saved us nothing and cost us dear. But it was done, and my way of answering it was to redouble the political effort to make a constructive input into everything that was discussed there. I drove my people crazy to make a useful contribution, and it was all to try to make up for what we had lost.

 

[HILL] I think there is also one thing I noticed when I was there, that for example in areas like in MBFR, what you need is a fair-sized analytical capability in the capital if you're going to make a real input at NATO headquarters. And of course, it tends to be the case that people like, say, the Americans, and the Germans and so on, are really in that sort of business, and more directly affected too.

 

[CAMPBELL] This has been the problem. I think our problem, in Canada, is that we don't have enough interests in the world. And we confuse "doing good" with interests.

 

[HILL] Still, you know, even so, what struck me when I was there, seeing the Canadian delegation operating from my location, which was in the Secretariat, I think there were a fair number of instances where the delegation was fairly effective, I mean at times on things like MBFR and CSCE.

 

[CAMPBELL] Absolutely, we were effective in those things - they did catch the Canadian imagination, because they fitted in with a kind of policy, an extension of the detente policy that we have been pursuing for a long time. I'm not saying, and I hope I didn't say, that things like MBFR, and CSCE and SALT didn't command our attention. They did. They were aligned with the main thrust of Canadian policy. But, when it came to all the other political consultations that go on about regional situations, we were not all that good.

 

[HILL] One thing that strikes me from what you said, is that the maker of foreign policy is to some degree the ambassador on the spot and the delegation on the spot, i.e., if your instructions are broad. This is what the whole process is about, because the people we were talking to were those on the spot, who are making policy as it goes along, within a general framework.

 

[CAMPBELL] Well, you know what it's like in that Council. You can't be instructed in detail as to what you are going to say. Your interventions are all ad hoc. And it would be easy if you want to just sit silent; you don't have to say a damn word. So in a way you're right; it's up to the man on the spot within very vaguely defined instructions, to make the degree of influence we exert there, big or small.

 

[COX] Have you ever received instructions saying: "Say nothing!"?

 

[CAMPBELL] Oh, yes. Sometimes I ignored them, or I had one that said: "Say so and so"; and I would know it was so wrong that I wouldn't. And the way that you cope with that, is on the very day when it's supposed to come up, you send a message saying, "Don't you think you should think about this again". And by the time they have answered, it's too late. There are many ways of skinning that cat. It's not easy when you find yourself in a situation where you think you know more about it than either the Prime Minister or someone on the NATO desk in Ottawa. And so you do what your conscience tells you to do, or your political instinct; you don't do exactly what you are instructed to do. And of course that irritates all the people down the line.

 

[HILL] There is always a danger of getting carried away with the NATO sense of things. Whenever you are in a situation like that, you become part of the collectivity to some degree, and as an ambassador, you have to stay with the middle ground.

 

[CAMPBELL] I'm being a bit frivolous about it, but it is not easy at all. You cannot just flout the instructions of your government or the main thrust of their policy. Even though you may be dead sure they are wrong. You can't just, you know, mouth something the diametric opposite. So you find ways in between. You find language that is slightly ambiguous, interpret instructions in a way that's understood by the people who know more about it than the people who gave you your instructions, and who therefore understand that Canada's position isn't quite as bad as Ottawa had said it should be; just that it's not the 100 percent thing they might be seeking. So my views are always coloured by the fact that my period in NATO covered this dreadful hesitation on the part of Canada. Canada, which had helped set up the Alliance, been instrumental in bringing it into being, for good and valid reasons - they are as valid today as they ever were - suddenly had doubts about it, public doubts, and it really made for a very difficult time.

 

[HILL] I just wanted to go on to that actually. When did that start? Did that precede the troops cuts?

 

[CAMPBELL] Yes, it did.

 

[HILL] Yes?

 

[CAMPBELL] It coincided with Pierre Trudeau's arrival as Prime Minister, who suddenly decided, with Jim Eayrs advising him, to reopen all of these issues, to question the various fundamentals of Canada's security policy and foreign policy. And it started from the moment he came to power, more or less in '68.

 

[HILL] Yes. How did the Czech crisis affect this?

 

[CAMPBELL]   That made it even worse. You know it had started before that. Pierre Trudeau came to power after June '67. I think he became Prime Minister in '68, but it was before the Czech crisis. He was already Prime Minister and had already started this process of trying to pull us out of NATO, prior to the Czech crisis, and the thing that galled me was that he went ahead after having been confronted with the Czech crisis, which proved that he was wrong, that you could not by unilateral example, by pulling back, cause Czechs to pull back, for example, in an equal amount. That was his theory. Jim Eayrs convinced him that all he had to do was to make the unilateral move and one of the weak sisters of the Warsaw Pact would be free to do the same thing. What nonsense! That shows a total misunderstanding of the Warsaw Pact, or its difference from the NATO Alliance. You can do that in the NATO Alliance. You can withdraw if you want. You can't from the Warsaw Pact. Trudeau thought you could. And one of his main theories was that, by example, we will set the pace for mutual withdrawals of forces and commitments in the military alliances.

 

[HILL] Just before going on to that, could you tell us whether were you there in NATO in '67 when De Gaulle came here to Canada and made the famous " Vive Le Quebec Libre" speech?

 

(CAMPBELL] I was already in NATO then.

 

[HILL] What was the reaction in NATO to all that?

 

[CAMPBELL] The French had already done the dirty by then, the year before, pulling their forces out of NATO. Nobody was surprised.

 

[HILL] There must have been quite a bit of sympathy for Canada?

 

[CAMPBELL] Oh yes, there was, total sympathy, because everybody disliked De Gaulle for what he did to NATO and to the NATO forces.

 

[HILL] So it must have also been a shock to find that Canada was then rethinking. The Europeans must have been concerned.

 

[CAMPBELL] The two things, together, you know: some thought we were following France. A lot of them thought that it was the French influence that was causing Canada to rethink things. You know, they had a pretty vague notion of us as a sort of bicultural country, equally affected by British and French policy. This is their classic view, but nobody seems to realize we're affected only by American policy and not by the other two. That's the classical view in Europe of this funny country of ours. So they thought we were just doing what France had told us to do. Well, between the two, of being thought to be slavishly following De Gaulle and to be totally insensitive to the lessons of Czechoslovakia, the two things together compounded this felony that we did in pulling back, announcing the pull back of our forces, in the face of both those events.

 

[HILL] I think that one point you mentioned that I would like to pick up on is this, that there seems to be very little understanding of Canada in Europe, amongst Europeans. I mean they really don’t know much about Canada, and what they do know tends to be rather, shall we say, romanticized.

 

[CAMPBELL] They don't, you know. I don't know which way you want to be misunderstood, as being a satellite of France, of the UK, or of the United States, but nobody, nobody thinks of us as being anything on our own. You know that's a pretty sobering thought. How many years have we been a country? I don't know, we've been around for 400, we've been legitimate for about 125. How long does it take before people start to take you seriously? Nobody does.

 

[HILL] I was always struck by the fact that most of the people I knew when I was in NATO, I mean the Europeans, they had no idea of Canada having a great industrial centre like Toronto, and Hamilton, and so forth. You know, you look at the automobiles on the roads there, and the industrial production. It never occurs to them that this sort of thing is here in Canada.

 

[CAMPBELL] No, they don't know anything about Canada. It is, well it's our own fault in a way. Because we don't seem to be able - our history doesn't show that we are able - to forge a niche for ourselves without being part of somebody else. Isn't that so? Is that a false observation on my part?

 

We have not shown ourselves capable of using our enormous God-given benefits of this country to create something that is unique. We seem to be automatically a dependent of somebody else.

 

[HILL] I think certainly in the European case, the largest part of the problem is simply the sheer lack of information.

 

[CAMPBELL] Roger that's not fair, that's not fair. I mean sure they are ignorant as all hell about us. But our record doesn't tend to correct that, does it? We haven't done well. I've watched this country go from the immediately post-war period when we were a somebody, to again a nobody. We have blown it since 1950. We emerged from World War II as a major power, we had the fourth largest navy on earth, we had an industrial base that had to be created during the war that was formidable. The rest of the world was on its back. Europe was in ruins and the Far East was in ruins. But what did we do with this God-given opportunity? We blew it. Our whole economy has been in decline since about 1955. And we are worse off; we have less manufacturing, less independence economically today than we had 30 years ago. That's a hell of a record. That's mismanagement by various Canadian governments, in my judgment, who failed to regulate to the extent that governments may regulate economic policy. It's an economic failure, not a political one.

 

[HILL] I ask these questions partly for their own sake, but also as a kind of lead up to asking you if you could tell us what the reaction was in NATO to the '69 troop-cut decision? And what happened then?

 

[CAMPBELL] Well, I have said this before, publicly, and I am only too happy to tell you again. I have never in six years of sitting on that Council and many more years of attending ministerial meetings, been at anything as dramatic. I, on instructions, gave prior notice to Brosio that we were going to make the announcement of an intention to reduce the forces. Brosio said, if you do that in the Council - in the full Council- you risk tearing this whole Alliance apart, especially in the wake of the Czech crisis. He advised me to advise our government not to do it in the Council. Do it anywhere, hire a room, go anywhere, but not to make this part of the official record of NATO. And so, instead of doing it in the Council, you may remember that it was done in my so-called residence. All the defence ministers came and Leo Cadieux was our Defence Minister at the time and we made the announcement of our intention to cut our forces by this huge amount in the wake of the Czech crisis. Two defence ministers, one Dutch, one Belgian, wept, burst into tears if you can imagine, grown men who were politicians, with tears running down their faces saying, how could this country, this Canada to which they twice owed their liberation, be so insensitive to the lessons of history, of World Wars I and II, not to mention the Czech crisis that had just passed. They said that we could undo the Alliance by this action, that they couldn't credit that we would do so and if we went ahead with it they would never forgive us. And they never have. The beginning of Canada's decline in Europe dates precisely from that day. We said to Europe, we don't care about you in the area that is most vital to you, your security when you are in danger. They said back to us, in effect, therefore, we don't give a damn about you when you come knocking economically on our door. Buzz off! You've had it with us. To me that's coloured the whole period since 1968 in our relations with Europe, and its twenty years now. And I think we are still paying for it. All these efforts later, you know, to get the special relationship or whatever it was called in Europe - what was it called. The Third Option, No not the Third Option, the Contractual Relationship - came to nothing. It was an effort, ex post facto, to remedy the wrong that had been done; it was ineffective because we had hurt them too vitally. We hit them where it hurt most. I still say, David, that we are still paying today in economic terms and in our bad relations with the Economic Community, who have given us no consideration at all. I think we are paying for that mistake in 1969.

 

[COX] Were there any more indications as opposed to indifference and neglect? Was there any active act of punishment?

 

[CAMPBELL] No, I don't think so. We have been punished by neglect and indifference. A deaf ear to our special pleadings, and when we found ourselves in trouble with the United States, Europe said: "To hell with you". I think that's been the attitude ever since, and I believe you could document this if you went back and traced all the major issues where we wanted something from Europe and they haven't given it to us. I date it from 1969.

 

[HILL] That must have been very, very difficult for you. I mean, as you were sort of pro-NATO yourself.

 

[CAMPBELL] Please, I don't want it put on that basis. You can document this. You can go to the archives today and find my messages in which I have said repeatedly to the Prime Minister, you are misjudging this situation. You are about to pay an indefinite penalty in our economic and political relations with Europe for savings in peanuts on the military side. You have got the balance of this thing all wrong. Sure we can't save NATO with our contribution, or change the balance with the Soviet bloc with our little contribution to the Armed Forces, but make no mistake, they are of vital consequence to the coherence of this thing, to the solidarity of NATO. You undermine that, you’re hurting the rest. And you're North American. You're starting the rot that could lead to the rot that could lead to the Americans pulling out of the Alliance, the ultimate disaster for Europe. Make no mistake, you're taking a huge step over a tiny amount of money to do with forces, and you are going to pay. That's what I resented, that it was all written down what would be the consequence, and they paid no attention. He paid no attention. I even phoned, I phoned when I knew that Cabinet was meeting on this issue of reducing the forces. I got Basil to tell me exactly when the cabinet was meeting. I pulled Mitchell Sharp, who was the Minister at the time, out of Cabinet, and I said you can't let this thing go through. The consequences will be untold for Canada. We'll never stop paying the bill. "What do you want me to do", he said. "I've said all that. You want me to resign." I said, "Yes, if you have to, to make the point".

 

[COX] Isn't that because...

 

[CAMPBELL] ...because I went public — You can't do that. I remember that.

 

[COX] I would suspect that there are few people who would disagree with you now. The diplomatic cost that was paid was huge in relation to the trivial gain. OK, but I suppose that the decision, the final decision, was itself not a true decision, but was a compromise. In other words, it was not a calculated decision, it was simply...

 

[CAMPBELL] No, it was. That's not true, David. No, No, unfortunately, we have to come back to Trudeau and his personality, for this. He wanted to make a positive step away from alliances. He did not believe, he does not, today, believe that alliances, military alliances, do anything for stability in this world. It's just his view, that's all and nothing will ever change that view of Pierre Trudeau. It was a calculated thing - he knew that the savings were peanuts. How could he not know? What were we saving, for God's sake? The price of 10,000 men in the field is zilch in terms of Canadian modern budgets. No, he wanted to make a step away, and he also wanted to make a step towards the Soviet bloc. He believed in mutual example as a means of bringing about detente, and he has never given these ideas up.

 

[COX] Would he have gone whole hog and pulled us right out?

 

[CAMPBELL] Oh yes. He was constrained by the review process that he himself launched, but I know from my personal conversations with him that the optimum as far as he was concerned would have been to come right out of NATO and turn Canada into a neutral country and it was not until he started confronting what was involved in neutrality that he began to see that maybe it might be a bit too expensive. Or if you were not prepared to pay a high financial bill for armed neutrality, then of course you lost your total sovereignty vis-a-vis the United States. They wouldn't sit by and let us spend nothing on defence without more or less taking over the country.

 

[COX] I suppose that's when the current discussions about neutrality originated with the Trudeau government.

 

[CAMPBELL] Absolutely, they haven't changed. The premises haven't changed, and there are considerations now again of that kind. But believe me, if we're not prepared to foot a reasonable proportion of the bill to be a member of a collective organization, we sure as hell are not ready to pay the bill for an independent military policy. And I don't think, given our situation, given our location, that we can expect anything but American occupation of this country, virtually, if we default too much on our so-called military obligations. You can argue all you like that there isn't any threat, you know; but as long as there is one perceived by those south of the border, it's irrelevant whether there is a real threat or not.

 

[COX] Do you think that the European NATO members could have been, or could be, persuaded that a different kind of equipment would be equally valuable. I am particularly thinking of that, if you put it in a geo-political sense, our apparent advantage is in naval forces. Could you ever sell that to the Europeans?

 

[CAMPBELL] No, you can't, because, after all, the fact is that if we look at the map of the world, we can see that we're, well, in a sandwich. We're the ones who physically lie between the Soviet Union and the United States. Not Europe. No, they won't buy that. And indeed they are in a sense right. If there is a political prize in this world, it's western Europe. And that's where the challenge will come, not through our Arctic. So the answer is no, you cannot convince them that we have any special role to play, either in a naval or northern sense. They won't buy it.

 

[COX] Not even in a convoying role?

 

[CAMPBELL] No. Well, we do that anyway. We've got that obligation. But what they want from us, as they want from the United States, is a hostage to fortune in terms of a few professional forces not wholly negligible in their military role because they are pros, in our case anyway. Ours are professional forces where theirs are not, they are conscript forces. Ours are significant militarily, small but a significant military element. Even if they weren't, they'd want them there as a trip-wire. So that theory of the mid '60s hasn't really gone away. Americans and Canadians are hostages to fortune. They are the commitment to the trans-Atlantic link. And for that reason, they can never be pulled out as long as there isn't a dove in the Kremlin.

 

[HILL] I was struck by the fact that all the Europeans I knew, their view of the centre of the world was somewhere north of Paris, and that is actually the centre of the world for them. Whereas I think for Americans and Canadians the centre of the world is somewhere in North America, and you've got Japan over there and Europe on that side. But it is quite a different perception of the world on the two sides of the Atlantic.

 

[CAMPBELL] It is. But I think that it's not invalid, even though in strategic terms you can see it in another perspective. I believe that politically, Europe is right, that no one is going to launch a war across the North Polar regions and ignore western Europe, that western Europe is in a sense the prize of the Soviet Union.

 

[COX] Could I just pursue the question of Canadian involvement a minute. I mean the families are hostages too in a sense. So we stick where we are with a small professional army - we put them and their families in and say there we are?

 

[CAMPBELL] Oh well, I don't attach the same importance to the families. I think we could save money by rotating them more often and leaving the families at home.

 

[HILL] Keeping the Canadian forces there is also linked into the fact that the Americans are there. If Canada pulls out, it just starts the ball rolling.

 

[CAMPBELL] You start to rock the boat. I would rotate our forces much faster. I think I would give them a six-month stint.

 

[HILL] Could you tell us a bit more about what the European reaction was. You mentioned the Belgian minister and the Dutch minister. I understand that there was a particular luncheon given by the Secretary General where you got hammered over the head.

 

[CAMPBELL] It was the same lunch, it was held at my place. And, oh yes, we were soundly condemned by the British, which I resented because the British are loose in the observance of their own commitments to NATO. You know they promise X and they deliver Y and they go on talking as though it were X. Denis Healey was the UK Defence Minister at the time. He was a friend of mine. But I was mad as hell at him for being so sanctimonious and condemnatory of what we had done.

 

[HILL] What about the others?

 

[CAMPBELL] The Belgian and the Dutch were the most vocal because they thought they had a special link with us. The French were just grinning in their soup over this whole thing. They didn't mind if we did what they had done. The Americans were curiously silent, they let the others say the obvious. And what pleased them, in a way, was that it was Europeans who were opposing the withdrawal, which meant that it was Europeans who wanted the trans-Atlantic connection. It proved something for the Americans and they need constant proof of this. They are always accused of using NATO as a hegemonistic instrument in Europe. It's not so, as you know; it's the other way around; it's Europe that wants the security link to North America. We're going through it right - now. We're * watching Gorbachev advocating an almost total withdrawal of nuclear weapons of medium range today. Who's going to oppose it? The French and the British? They want that connection. They want the nuclear umbrella in one form or another. They’re dismayed that this may sever the link with the United States.

 

[COX] Gorbachev has called their bluff.

 

[CAMPBELL] Absolutely, it's the zero option and it's coming to haunt Mr. Reagan. It really is. David, I'll make a bet with you that it doesn't happen for that very reason. In the last analysis we'd rather have these horrendous weapons and preserve the link between western Europe and North America. However fatuous and unusable these weapons may be, they are the essential security link, and I bet you we don't cut it off.

 

[HILL] In 1971 there was the Defence White Paper, and just before that there was Foreign Policy for Canadians; and there's a section there which, in the pamphlet on Europe, starts with the immortal phrase, "Pending the dissolution of the alliances on two sides", or something like that. What was the impact of all this on the allies? Or did they take much notice?

 

[CAMPBELL] Oh, they didn't take it terribly seriously because by then they had written us off. We'd already reduced the forces, the White Paper of 1971 was regarded as a sort of post facto justification of what we had done. We had invented a new policy, a foreign policy to justify an otherwise unjustifiable act. That was basically the attitude of the Europeans and therefore one of indifference to this famous piece of paper. That whole period was one big agony.

 

[HILL] Well, there was a high tide of international relations theory at work in Ottawa.

 

[CAMPBELL] Ah, the whole thing was an agony. I spent half that year in Ottawa, you know, testifying before this and that committee and it was an absurdity to find that people didn't know what they were talking about. And the net result was a policy document, a 1971 Defence White Paper that had about only one thing that was commonsensical in it, and that was the fact that we were in for a period of trouble with terrorists in this world. And it did recognize that as an upcoming event. The rest of it wasn't worth a damn.

 

[COX] They had to take the framework from the 1969 statement. The Defence White Paper of '71 begins with the speech made in Calgary by Trudeau in April '69.

 

[CAMPBELL] That's right. I know this is exactly the way it was set up. It established the whole tone of the White Paper of 1971. It was a two year process and it was meant to call into question every precept of our defence policy, and of our alliance policy up to that time. And believe me, Pierre Trudeau did not get the outcome that he had at that time wanted. He wanted the outcome to be that we would become a neutral nation. You may remember in the '69 speech he envisaged that as one option, and that's where I think he wanted it to come out. And it didn't come out that way because that's not the instinct of most Canadians.

 

[COX] I'd like to ask you another question about this, which is to some extent an interest I've had for some time. Although I agree that some of these political requirements are basically unchanging, it does seem to me that when you put them all together, then, given that in any circumstances the defence budget is going to be a huge one, what you get is a weakened military organization. And by that I mean that we end up in this country buying three tanks, two destroyers, four aircraft and so on....

 

[CAMPBELL] None of them is significant in quantity in itself.

 

[COX] Now, from a point of view of military organization, we don't do very well in my view. Is that a consequence of trying to meet these political objectives?

 

[CAMPBELL] No. No, it's a consequence of being 25 million people trying to settle on half a continent. The trouble is that we have three oceans and a huge air space and a huge land mass and we're members of an alliance, and the reason we're members of the alliance is that that's the only safe way of engaging others in our defence. And I say safe, because if you try to do it bilaterally, only with the United States, you're gone as a political entity. Sure we could do that, pull out of NATO and give ourselves to the United States, and they'll look after us. They won't let the Soviets in here, they'll just let themselves in, and that's worse. You know that's the truth of the matter. It's the consequence of our being too big, too many territorial obligations, trying to solve them by going into an alliance, and just adding yet another dimension to our obligations. There isn't any answer. There's no way that we can get a nice answer, put it all in one basket, one significant basket, and look after our defence needs. No way it can be done.

 

[COX] Because, in addition to all these other factors, isn't it the case that by 1968 or 1969 there were serious problems from a purely military point of view in our commitment to NATO, aging equipment, etc.

 

[CAMPBELL] No. No more than is normal, No. No. The problems about the aging equipment have come since 1968 because....

 

[COX] Of the freeze?

 

[CAMPBELL] The freeze. Pierre Trudeau, in his entire regime, for the reasons I've repeatedly stated in these interviews, because he doesn't like military solutions, refused to give the priority to an even normal modernization and renewal of our equipment. So we've ended up 16 or 18 years later with an enormous deficit in modern equipment. If you are going to have any defences, you'd better have them at least up to date. And we're so far behind that it's now a 150 billion dollar job to modernize. It need never have been so. And it was not so in 1968. No. We had reasonably modern forces at that time. It's since then that they have become antiquated.

 

[COX] Let's try one more question which I sometimes kind of worry about. Is it also possible that by being there year after year, we have produced a military command which is encrusted, which is more, let me put it this way, more a social club than a fighting force.

 

[CAMPBELL] No, I don't think so. Again, I think that probably would happen if you were using time-serving conscript forces. We aren't. We have professional forces. They're rotated regularly and they are, to a man, pros; they're good pros too. Have you ever talked to a SACEUR about the Canadian forces? He will tell you, value, man for man, about 10 to 1, Americans included. Now Americans are all volunteer as well, but compared to British, plus Dutch, Belgian, all these people who have national service and rotate them through, our forces are worth a hell of a lot in military terms. For the same reason, I don't think they can fall prey to the things you are worried about. No, they're pros and they're thinking about their role all the time and they're always trying to improve it. I think they're good armed forces. Very good. And I think that the people in DND are very serious thinkers on the whole. We've got some pretty bright people over there. Paul Manson himself is not at all your normal conception of a fire¬eating, nuke-'em-all, type. He's not like that. He's not like his counterparts in the United States.

 

[HILL] Just one other question, which is on the Canadian aspect of this period of NATO. In '72, Mitchell Sharp wrote this article in International Perspectives on the Third Option, which led eventually to the Framework Agreement, the Contractual Link and so on. Was there any attention paid to this in NATO at the time?

 

[CAMPBELL] No, not really. It affected me personally because I was brought back for those discussions here in Ottawa and Hull that we had endlessly about the Third Option. But the Third Option was essentially an economic concept, not a political or military one. I think it was almost irrelevant to our relations with the Alliance or with Europe, except to the extent that it made, and makes to me still, common sense. I think we made a mistake in not seriously pursuing the Third Option, and the Third Option did not mean doing anything excessive about our existing economic relations with the United States. It merely said, let's put a little bit of cap on that and see whether we can't augment our economic and commercial relations with the rest of the world, in Europe and the Far East. All of which made good sense. And I think today it would make good sense, but we're off on a diametrically opposed kick.

 

[HILL] Of course the linkage was made by Chancellor Schmidt and others in, I think it was '74 or '75, but that was long after. That was three years after the article, this article in International Perspectives.

 

[CAMPBELL] Yes, you know Trudeau and Schmidt were trying to put something together there that would have built up a kind of Canada-German power centre, as an element in this shift of emphasis towards Europe. And a good idea it was. I don't know what's gone wrong with it. Partly I blame the Europeans, they've been so introspective, so selfish in trying to erect a wall around themselves, and to do everything within the confines of the Common Market. They have almost no time for people like us. And in the areas in which we would have liked to be enlarging the relations, in high tech and so on, that's all selfishly guarded within the European context. In all, I would say the policy has been a failure in respect of Europe. To try to make the opening to Europe with a contractual relationship was a bust, and the Third Option is non-existent. And yet, we're in a bind. Here we are, faced with the nasty option of tying ourselves now even more tightly to a giant in decline. And it is in decline. I find this illogical.

 

[COX] Could I again put that question about the opening in relation to the presence or withdrawal of troops. If we had not withdrawn the forces, would be have been more successful?

 

[CAMPBELL] Who knows, David? I like to say, yes. I believe that we have fallen between two stools in our relations with Europe and within the Alliance. The Alliance has developed a European power Eurogroup. We tend to be dismissed by Europe and relegated to the North American context, where we don't really want to be, exclusively. So we've dropped in the middle. Part of the reason we've dropped is that Europeans lost patience with us and sympathy with us over the troop-withdrawal episode. When we needed them the most as a counter weight, they weren't there. That's my view of it.

 

[COX] Are there any examples pre-'69 in which one could say there's an example where, because we were good, loyal members of NATO, with our forces in Europe, we got a benefit from this? Now I know its rather stacking the question putting it that way.

 

[CAMPBELL] I've often pondered exactly what you're saying. I have to confess that I would not be able to document this. My hunch, my feelings about what influenced American and European attitudes towards us - I can't say there would have been a huge contract that we would have got - you just know, somehow that one day you were regarded as a member of that family and the next day you were out. That's what my view is, Roger, and you were there and you saw what was happening.

 

[HILL] Yes.

 

[CAMPBELL] We were put out of this family, David, it was a palpable thing. And yet I can't document it; I wish I could. I still believe that if we had not done what we did, the whole course of the post-'69 relationship would have been different. I spoke, at our last meeting, about this inevitable trend of Europe toward more autonomy in military affairs, to match their political and economic striving for a self-sustaining policy. It's a factor now in Europe that this Eurogroup has arisen. We didn't know where to go up to 1969; they didn't want us after 1969. They would have welcomed us before that date, but we had done them in. We had shown ourselves basically indifferent to something very important to them. And when they get around the table, I don't think Canada counts anymore. There's been a slight amelioration of that, in the last couple of years. We are beginning to forge, in particular sectors, better relations with Europe - right now in space, for example, through ESA (European Space Agency).

 

[HILL] I think one of the things Canadians find hard to understand is the fact that while Canada has a contractual link with the European Community, in fact the Community has contractual links with about half the world. I mean there's the Lome Convention and all kinds of things.

 

[CAMPBELL] We don't have contractual links really.

 

[HILL] The fact is, what we have, others have too. So for the Europeans, this isn't a very special thing for them.

 

[CAMPBELL] Well, you know, that's generally true, that we tend to think that we loom a bit larger on the international horizon than we really do. It's like Pierre Trudeau's famous initiative, Peace Initiative, just before he didn't run again. Nobody in the world had ever heard of his Peace Initiative. Our papers were full of it.

 

[HILL] Yes.

 

[CAMPBELL] It didn't exist anywhere else. There was no crisis for one thing. He invented the crisis to invent the policy. But we get carried away with these illusions in this country. We're terribly parochial. Our newspapers are useless. Nobody here knows anything about the world at large and they in turn hardly know anything about Canada; maybe a bit, a lot more, about the United States than they do about Canada. Otherwise, the world doesn't exist. I'm in despair as you can see about this country.

 

[HILL] Well, to get you off that pessimistic streak, and to restore your faith in Canada, we will talk about NATO again.

 

[CAMPBELL] Oh yes, back to that.

 

[HILL] On a quite different question, going back now to the Czechoslovak crisis again; how well do you think that NATO performed in terms of crisis management at that time?

 

[CAMPBELL] Well, really rather well. It was about the best that I have seen. We had been through a number of crises before, the endless Berlin crises and border crises at various times, Cuba, etc. I thought that the handling of the Czech thing was superb. We even got a consensus, if you can believe it, that was never publicized, to warn the Soviet Union that it should stop where it was in Czechoslovakia; that if it made one move towards Romania or Yugoslavia, there was war. And that was something; that is the way you have to use the collective power of an alliance. The message, admittedly, was conveyed by Americans, but they did not convey it until they had the consensus in NATO.

 

[HILL] Do you feel that you and your fellow ambassadors in the Council had adequate information on those crises as they developed?

 

[CAMPBELL] I think so, as much as you can have in a situation like that. Everybody was pooling what they had, including us. Yes, I think so. I think that it worked well. The tragedy of the thing was that by drawing a line as we were around the Warsaw Pact, the full members of the Warsaw Pact, we were inadvertently or indirectly acknowledging that they could do what they liked within the Warsaw Pact. And that to me was a great tragedy, because I think what was happening inside Czechoslovakia (prior to the invasion) was, by and large, the sort of thing we had rather hoped would happen, perhaps not quite so precipitately as it did. But it was in line with our notion that these regimes are not fixed and permanent. And what we were obliged to acknowledge in Czechoslovakia was that it was within the Warsaw Pact area, therefore, within what we acknowledged to be the Soviet sphere of influence. And as long as they didn’t carry their repression and their hegemony outside that area, we could live with it. But that was like endorsing the geographical division of Europe, which we tried to reverse in the CSCE. That's what the CSCE was really all about, to try to say, "Well, we don't acknowledge that those borders are permanent. We do acknowledge that we must not change them by force, we condemn the use of force to change any border, but we do not believe that the political status quo is permanent in Eastern Europe". That's what CSCE was all about. We had indifferent success, of course, in implementing that. All of the measures of greater human contact and so on have produced very little, I would say, in the way of the assertion of the doctrine of impermanence of political regimes in Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union for the same reason was trying to say: "The borders are permanent and here's our empire. We don't mind dialoguing a little bit with you across them, but don't, for God's sake, try to shake our regime or we will do Czechoslovakia all over again"; as I think they would.

 

[COX] It really brings us to the question of the two Germanies.

 

[CAMPBELL] Yes. Except there is a difference. Most of western Europe doesn’t really want Germany reunited either. Whereas I think that most of western Europe would like to see Czechoslovakia, Poland and so on, freer than they are.

 

[COX] This brings us to what I think to be an underlying view of NATO, at least amongst the dissidents: that there is no forward progress; that what NATO does best is to maintain the status quo.

 

[CAMPBELL] You put your finger on the dilemma about any alliance of that kind. It's now gone on how many years, 1949, we're nearly up to 40 years. And you can argue that it saved the peace or you can say there's been no war and you can attribute that to it. And I think a lot of it can be attributable to the evidence of the Alliance during the tenser periods. How do you end a thing like this, without precipitating a kind of exploitative reaction on the other side. I don't know. I suppose, in the end, just as we are now trying to negotiate an end to certain levels of weapons, maybe they could negotiate a decline in the scope of the two alliances. I don't know. It's something like that. It will be a part of a measured, deceleration of confrontation, as I see it. It has taken one awful time, you know, to get from the plateau of detente to the ascent of entente that we're about to get into now. And I think that one of the dilemmas, coming after a long, long, 30 years or more of stalemate and armed confrontation that is just beginning to run out, is to think of a way of handling the political side of change. Alliances can't last forever.

 

[COX] Are we not really in this dilemma? On the one hand you have the high risk of change and on the other, the risk, which it is almost impossible to estimate, of chances foregone, of opportunities foregone.

 

[CAMPBELL] Yes, I would say this. I believe that we should not even address this question of the undoing of the political superstructure behind the arms build-up or its decline, until we've had prolonged proof that what's happening in the Soviet Union is permanent. One of the reasons we've been going through this long plateau is that we have been bouncing from one rigid regime to another, and occasionally have had a soft one, a Krushchevian one or a Gorbachevian one, but we don't know whether they're permanent whereas we do know that you can get these wild swings in the Soviet Union. I don't think we should rush to undo anything. Ten years minimum of this kind of Gorbachevian policy would be a minimum in my judgment before you undo anything. And I have another comment that I would like to leave with you, a thought that it should not be ever a Canadian initiative. We are not the most vitally concerned, we're the least vitally concerned of all the Atlantic allies. We're protected. We're not at risk. It's Europe that is at risk in this game. You watch the machinations of our British and French friends over the next little while. They're not going to give up at all easily on this. Let them make the final running on it. It's like South Africa. Let's not get out in front, it's not our main business. We are happy with our Alliance policy, it serves Canadian interests best of all. Cheaper defence, and we don't have to confront the United States bilaterally; we can bury this relationship in an alliance - which is what we should always do; even bury our economic relations in bigger entities, never take them on the way we are now in a free trade, freer trade; it's folly. We can't win, we can only lose. Why don't we learn these lessons. Anyway, that's where I think we should be, we wait for others to take the initiative to undo the political underpinning, if you like, of the present security system. And I hope that we will stick to that. David, you have a lot of influence in this because you're writing a good deal. You should say that.

 

[COX] I certainly agree with the time frame. I think the time frame is ten to twenty years.

 

[CAMPBELL] Yes.

 

[COX] For the replacement of the present security regime with some other security regime.

 

[CAMPBELL] Right, and don't look to the United Nations, that's not a security regime. It has no capability of being it either. None.

 

[COX] The only real option is, in that time frame, a European one, as far as I can see, a European security regime which is really road tested. And how you road test it, I don't know.

 

[CAMPBELL] I don't think they can do it. You know, they might have done it, if they had been abandoned by the United States in 1948 or '49. I think if they had not been attacked, they just might have pulled it off, and been today a significant military factor, able to look after their own military defence. It didn't happen that way. They have been kept in thrall, if you like, by the Americans, protected by them for 40 years now. It's too late to catch up.

 

[COX] And yet the wild card might be the United States?

 

[CAMPBELL] How?

 

[COX] Because you might see there a change in domestic opinion that really drives change in the Alliance much more rapidly.

 

[CAMPBELL] You mean because of the economic plight.

 

[COX] I would say the combination of the economic situation and this kind of shift towards the West, which brings with it an indifference and lack of familiarity with European affairs.

 

[CAMPBELL] You mean "fortress America?" Well, David, we should also pause and think what that would do to us. You know, we’re just dead if our Government goes any further than they are along that path. I just don't know why none of this is entering into the present debate we’re in. It must be apparent to anybody that has his eyes half open that we're deep into a highly protectionist, highly "fortress America" philosophy, right now. Why we shouldn't be divorcing ourselves from this as fast as we can go, I really do not know. Instead, what are we doing? We have this Government of ours stumbling over itself to get deeper into the pockets of the United States. I can't understand it. Who's advising these people anyway?

 

[HILL] I'd like to ask you about the perception of American policy while you were at NATO. I mean, in '67 you had President Johnson and that I think was almost a policy of benevolent neglect by withdrawal. Then you had Nixon come in. What do you feel about that sort of period in US policy?

 

[CAMPBELL] Well, Nixon brought Kissinger along with him and we began to have a much more deft touch in relationships with the allies. Kissinger was really quite a good performer and there was a distinct warming, as you know, in the consultative process and so on. And Americans all of a sudden seemed to realize that they had some allies that had to be consulted. Czechoslovakia of course helped over this as well; the first crisis in a long, long time, and they discovered that they needed their European allies. So yes, from whenever it was that Nixon came in, when was it?

 

[HILL] '68, the end of '68.

 

[CAMPBELL] Yes, it was right after the Czechoslovakia crisis, you had a much greater sense of sensitivity towards the European allies. I thought the USA conducted things from then on reasonably well, given that they were deep in the Vietnam War.

 

[COX] Of course.

 

[CAMPBELL] In which they were running themselves without too much attention to what others tried to do. Canada tried, Paul Martin tried, to take an initiative inside NATO that would get a change in American policy in Vietnam, because he rightly perceived they were getting deeper and deeper into a mire there, a war that they couldn't win and one they were losing at home. It was tearing the United States apart. And he perceived this. Paul wasn't all words, I can tell you, and he tried to get an initiative going there when he said why don't you Americans try, for a change, risking as much for peace as you now do through rather reckless war-like moves out there? I have never heard anybody read a lecture quite like Dean Rusk thereupon read to Paul. He made a fool out of him, and he shouldn't have. It was a sincere initiative, it was a sensible one, and in the light of history, it was Rusk who was the fool.

 

[HILL] Was this in the Council?

 

[CAMPBELL] In the Council. In the Council itself. The crime that Paul committed was in not telling anybody he was going to do this, and forbidding me to tell anybody that he was going to do it.

 

[COX] You mean he came out of the blue into a Council meeting and ...

 

[CAMPBELL] A NATO ministerial meeting. And when it came to other business he put up his hand and started this thing. And said....

 

[HILL] "And, by the way, I've got something to add".

 

[CAMPBELL] I have never heard anything quite like it. It was brutal. But Dean Rusk could be like that, especially if it was a smaller nation in NATO.

 

[COX] Could I just ask you to compare that with Canada’s NATO decision. I just want to try to make sure that we've got it straight. NATO, the European NATO in any case, had kind of listened to the debate, which was a public debate in Canada, so they presumably knew what was going on - I'm talking about the withdrawal. We're back in '69. But when it finally went to NATO itself, was there consultation prior to the decision?

 

[CAMPBELL] We just told them what we were going to do.

 

[COX] So you were authorized to tell them that this speech was coming?

 

[CAMPBELL] Authorized, yes. I was authorized to tell them that it was coming.

 

[COX] But there were no consultations with them?

 

[CAMPBELL] No. No, we just told them what we were going to do - like everybody else.

 

[COX] Was that deliberate, no consultation, they're not going to be asked, we won't negotiate with them?

 

[CAMPBELL] There was no way that Mr. Trudeau was going to subject Canadian policy to...

 

[COX] Consultation?

 

[CAMPBELL] Consultation. I mean we complain about the Americans not consulting us. We didn’t consult them, we told them what we were going to do. Afterwards, we went through all sorts of machinations which Roger will remember, to say that we had carried a disproportionate share from 1945 until 1969, during a period when Europe was flat on its back; and we thought that Europe, now being no longer flat on its back, could carry a bit more of the burden. They didn't need us as much as they had, and they had to remember that we were responsible for two areas - one huge chunk of the North Atlantic area in North America, as well as our little corner of responsibilities in Europe. I had to concoct all this justification myself and try to make it sound as plausible as possible. I tried to make it sound reasonable, what we were doing. I didn't believe one word of what I was saying but I was obliged to do this.

 

[COX] When was the Paul Martin intervention?

 

[CAMPBELL] Over the Vietnam thing? I guess that must have been 1970 or '71. It was well after we had done our force reduction thing. It was at one of the autumn meetings.

 

I'd have to go back over my notes. You know, in my mind, there's a kaleidoscope of all these meetings from 1951 to 1972. I was at every NATO ministerial meeting but two I think. That's a long time and they get mixed up as to what the issues were.

 

Well, all I know is that Paul Martin's statement was one of the most unpopular moves that anybody had ever made in NATO, as far as the Americans were concerned, and they really squashed him.

 

[HILL] Even though the late '60s was a bad period in some respects, because the USA was preoccupied with Vietnam, my impression is that on the whole relations between the United States and the European allies and Canada were good. As you mentioned, Kissinger had a sort of deftness.

 

[CAMPBELL] Nixon, you know, under Kissinger, did some very good things with foreign policy, in the China opening, and all the rest of it. Those things were happening in that period.

 

[HILL] Right, exactly.

 

[CAMPBELL] And they all made for easier relations between the United States and Europe and us.

 

[HILL] But what about sources of difference between the US and its allies, for example during the '67 war in the Middle East. Did that create major problems in NATO or not?

 

[CAMPBELL] No, not really. I arrived just a few weeks before that happened. No, the '67 war didn't produce any great trauma inside NATO, and no disagreements really about what to - it was agreed that the Alliance should stay out of the thing, for one thing. There was no question of intervening on either side. The Americans muted their pro-Israeli stance considerably at that time, mainly because the Israelis were the aggressors in the war, I guess - I don't know, how do you estimate them, whether they really were? I guess they weren't, the others started it but they got wiped out. No, there were no disagreements. But what I think started to give rise to what I call the Eurogroup, and for all I know it may still be called that - the sort of European element within NATO - was indeed the Vietnam War. And even though we came out of that with Nixon and Kissinger showing a certain amount of enlightenment, nevertheless the lesson had been learned that the United States, when it wanted to, could be a pretty ruthless military actor. And I think at that stage the Europeans thought: "Well, we'd better pull ourselves together and see whether we can't assume responsibility for a bit more of European defence than we have done up to now, without pulling the Alliance apart; do it within NATO". And again, this was absolutely deadly for Canada. Where did we fit in, in a Eurogroup that comprised nearly all of the European members of NATO? Where did it leave us? You know we didn't want - to be left on the shelf with the Americans, and yet that's really what has been the consequence of the growth of this European centre within NATO. I don't know where it is now. I'm not up to date. You probably know more about it than I do as to whether the Eurogroup is now alive and well.

 

[COX] I think it's as you have described it. Except that it has taken the form now of intermittent discussion about reviving the Western European Union.

 

[CAMPBELL] Oh, dear, yes. That goes a long way back. WEU. Brussels Treaty, all the rest of it. Oh well, I suppose it will come to that in due course and maybe it wouldn't be a bad thing. It's one way, David. We came up that route, you know, maybe we could walk back down it. It's my theory of the plateau. The up, the plateau, the down. I've always believed that this is a 50- or 80-year process we were looking at and we're about that far along it you know. I'll never get down the other side.

 

[COX] You have expressed a number of views which I guess one could characterize as the internationalist view of Canadian foreign policy, which amounts to, "Don't just stay in North America". Some people of course take the opposite view and say that it's a lost cause. And of course some of the things you have been saying, you know, could be interpreted as fairly pessimistic about....

 

[CAMPBELL] Not hopeless though. I'm only pessimistic because governments won't recognize the kind of box they're stepping into, and act accordingly.

 

[COX] But in your time there, after all, what was discussed is relevant for the present day. It all seemed to come out at that period. I mean, were there people that said the writing is on the wall, we're going to have to move past this?

 

[CAMPBELL] No. No, there were not, largely because for most of that period we had Pierre Trudeau as our Prime Minister and a Liberal government, and believe me there was no disposition then to hand the country over to the Americans. You know, it was a different philosophy. I think Trudeau was right. I think his Third Option was right, badly executed, but a great idea. It's where we should be. If you are in a situation such as we are in in this continent, vis-a-vis the giant in the United States, even if the giant were healthy, we should be striving to dilute that influence in larger groupings, be it economic or military. It’s why we're in NATO in part and it's why we should rely on GATT and other instruments rather than bi-lateral relations with the United States. We all lose if we go into a bi-lateral thing with the USA. It's even more apparent to me when that giant is in decline and angry and lashing out and protectionist, that again, we should have less to do with it. We should, instead of trying to accommodate to this thing. And it's unachievable in my judgment. There is no way the United States is going to give us what we want.

 

[COX] No.

 

[CAMPBELL] We were wasting time. We should have redoubled our efforts to make the Third Option work without calling it a Third Option. There is the mistake. You don't need a five-year plan to do five-year planning, you know.

 

[COX] Functional co-operation?

 

[CAMPBELL] That's right, and we should have just done it without putting a name on it.

 

[HILL] Of course, in the Trudeau philosophy too, he was also looking out to Africa, the Pacific and so on, at least in theory anyway. And that was all part of a sort of broader world.

 

[CAMPBELL] Oh yes, he had a thing about the Third World. But you know, there's no salvation for us really in the Third World. They haven't any money to salvage us with. It's an economic thing and you have to look to the prosperous non-American regions in the world. There are plenty of them. It would drive you normally towards heavy concentration on the Far East and that's what we should have been doing. And why we didn't do it, I don't know. It's the fastest growing area of the world, greatest economic potential for us anywhere, including the United States - far greater potential than south of the border. Why didn't anybody make a big pitch for it?

 

[HILL] You can't get it into people's consciousness somehow. It's very strange.

 

[CAMPBELL] We're not really international traders. We're American traders. This is a very parochial country. I am in a bit of despair. It is unrewarding to spend your whole life, your whole career, trying to make something out of your country, only to wake up as you travel to the edge of your final box, to find the country worse off than were when you started. I find that a disagreeable fact of life and yet it's true - we are worse off.

 

[COX] The only countries that I can see that actually have expressed positive interest in Canada are the Scandinavian countries.

 

[CAMPBELL] No, I think you would find that the truth is that the countries that really are expressing interest in Canada are the Koreas, the Thailands, the Taiwans, Japan, these are giant - countries on their way up at a rate of knots in this world, but they are very interested in Canada. Very, and if we had wanted to dilute this slide that we are on with the United States, we could have easily have done it, and we didn't.

 

[HILL] Actually, I was very struck about three years ago, on a trip to that area, by the fact that I think I saw more newspaper articles about Canada, or Canadian involvement in that area, than I'd seen normally in a year in Europe.

 

[CAMPBELL] That's right. In Europe and the United States, they're indifferent to us, they don't care. For all I've said about Europe, it's true they're negligent towards us, they don't care, apart from a colonial heritage from both French and British. The rest of the world is much more interested in us; the prosperous part of the world is interested in us. We are the ones who have failed to pick that up.

 

[HILL] I'd like to ask you some more about it later on. I just wonder if we could finish up with a couple of points that I had about the NATO period. One was: how useful were the NATO consultations on things like economic affairs, particularly East-West trade. Also, in the period you were at NATO, they set up the Committee on the Challenges of Modern Society, the CCMS. How valuable in your view were those activities?

 

[CAMPBELL] Not very. I think they were of very minor consequence. NATO has not been a success as an economic forum. We did our best, as you may know, in the formative period, to try and inject an economic element into it and indeed a political one too, so that it would not just be a military alliance. We failed on the economic front and from the creation of the OEEC through its conversion into the OECD, progressively the economic and social content of NATO was hived off onto specialized organs, namely the OECD in the economics sphere and a thousand and one other bodies in the social sphere. CCMS was a bust as far as I'm concerned, and practically all economic initiatives within NATO were also. It's not an economic organization.

 

[HILL] My impression of the CCMS was that it was something that somebody stuck in a speech by Nixon, and NATO simply accepted it for that reason.

 

[CAMPBELL] Oh well, they were scratching around for, you know, new things to revivify the Alliance after it had taken some punishment over Vietnam. That's the truth. The Americans were looking for new strands to the relationship and we went along with it because it was compatible with our original views of what NATO should be. I told you the other day about that interesting conversation that I had with Mike Pearson, didn't I? Mike had always wanted NATO to be far more than a military alliance, and I can remember coming back here in the autumn of 1967 and saying to him, you must pay more attention to this alliance, it's now becoming what you always wanted it to become, the principal political consultative forum of the West. Remember this is pre-Czechoslovakia '67. It's all the things you wanted it to be, far more than a military alliance. The military side declining by the day, the political way up there somewhere, very useful. And he said, "Look I know what's happening in NATO, and I am as pleased as you are that it's happening". But, he said, "What you don't know is that something is happening in this country that is far more important, and that is the rise of this thing in Quebec". He said, "And that is so overriding in my judgement. I have no more time for foreign affairs. That's the issue".

 

[HILL] Yes.

 

[CAMPBELL] The man was absolutely prescient, this was in 1967. It was well before the October Crisis. He saw that coming. I give Mike the credit, not Pierre Trudeau, for identifying the Quebec issue as being vital to the survival of this country. You know, that was a big jump for a man who had spent his entire life in foreign affairs and was a kind of author of NATO, member of the Three Wise Men group. He'd had a career in NATO and he deliberately had to turn his attention away from it because he perceived more important issues at home. I tell you he's an unsung hero that man; he's better than anybody thought, domestically as well.

 

[HILL] That was also, while he was PM, the period of the Quiet Revolution in Quebec; so it was put right before his attention, whether he liked it or not.

 

[CAMPBELL] What he perceived then was that it wasn't so damn quiet, that revolution; he saw the real troubles coming. No, he was beginning to think it could tear the country apart, a year or more, two years before it happened.

 

[HILL] So, in effect, while you were in NATO, the whole ideal of the Atlantic Community being a grouping that was on its way to becoming a federal state, that was really gone by then?

 

[CAMPBELL] Gone long since. And it never was realizable anyway. You know that was a concept that thrived in the euphoria, the post-war euphoria of the weakened Europe, the faith in international institutions to replace bilateralism and so on. It faded in no time at all. It was gone by the mid '50s really. Too bad in a way, that was a very hopeful mood, that of the immediate post war period. If it could have been followed through, we would have perhaps lived in a kind of utopia. But I guess nations are like individuals. There are about 50 percent that are bastards and 50 percent that are good guys.

 

[HILL] I probably shouldn't have used the word federal state there. That wasn't where it was going, but it was the idea of a whole collective grouping of some kind or another.

 

[CAMPBELL] It was a kind of super state idea, people had at one time, of the North Atlantic community. Well, I guess we messed that up when we strayed beyond the North Atlantic, and swept in people like Greece and Turkey.

 

[HILL] Well, of course it ran head on into Europeanism as well.

 

[CAMPBELL] Well, the European movement though, died in a sense, or it went into a long decline. I think you're only watching it now come back, reference your comments about a WEU type of revival. I think we're looking again at a 40-year curve. In 1948, or whenever, WEU and the Brussels Treaty were the only thing on the international horizon. Now, 40 years exactly later, here we are watching those ideas coming back because we've had 40 years of peace. Maybe the trans-Atlantic connection is not so vital now that the Soviets look a little more tame, less aggressive. These things evolve - you really have to step back and look at them in that kind of a time frame, not day-to-day.

 

[HILL] Of course, also the European movement itself ran head on into Gaullism. I mean de Gaulle came back in '58, and dominated the scene until 1968. I mention that year because of the student riots in Paris.

 

But by the time you arrived in NATO, the worst of this sort of NATO-French discord was pretty well over.

 

[CAMPBELL] No. We were still in Paris when I arrived, you see. No. It was far from over. The decision was taken after I arrived that we would put ourselves out of Paris, put the Council out. He expelled the forces and the Allied command, but he didn't expel the Council. We expelled ourselves. He in fact said there was no need to go. "We're staying in the Council and so you're welcome to stay." And we said: "No, thanks. It makes no sense, that you who have put yourself in a neutral category in war-time should be the siege sociale of the headquarters of the thing. No thank you." So we left. It was a very difficult decision.

 

[HILL] So, there was plenty of acrimony?

 

[CAMPBELL] Oh yes, terrible acrimony. Luckily they had a series of stars there as French ambassadors, such as Roger Seydoux, one of their most senior people. He was so good, he made everybody accept the French withdrawal from the NATO force structure. They did send extremely good people to the North Atlantic Council. They had to; their relations were otherwise appalling.

 

[HILL] But after that, about '68-'69, there really was quite an amiable situation.

 

[CAMPBELL] Amicable, and yet, you know, it led to the creation of the Defence Planning Committee, as an entity, one short of the full Council. It made us divide everything in the Alliance, and it was, you know, and still is, a very awkward arrangement to have the French in on the political side of the thing but not on the military side. It couldn't happen anywhere but in western democratic society that you would contrive an animal of this kind, almost unworkable. You're telling them that you can't rely on them militarily, and yet you're discussing all the strategic concepts with them. It makes no sense.

 

[HILL] How well did you feel the defence planning and nuclear planning systems of NATO worked in the period that you were there. I mean there was quite a lot of work done in that period. I'm not asking whether the eventual plans they worked out were necessarily going to be very effective if they ever had to be used, but how well did the mechanism work?

 

[CAMPBELL] I'm inhibited about talking about it as you know, that particular period. But I would say it again, it's a sort of contrived thing. The Nuclear Planning Group includes certain members of NATO on a permanent basis, and certain others on a rotational basis. That almost automatically defines it as a device for keeping people mildly happy rather than a serious consultative mechanism. The Americans used the Nuclear Planning Group really as a way of just barely keeping the Alliance members happy about what they were doing in the nuclear sphere. It's more of an information group than a consultative group. I think it can be very seriously faulted as a serious mechanism of the Alliance. It played a tremendous role, however, when it came to the SALT Agreement, because there you had at least a nucleus of people who had been exposed to enough of the military nuclear planning of the Alliance to understand the decelerations of the plans in that sphere. And I think that's where the creation of the Nuclear Planning Group was justified, in that it gave the Alliance a consultative forum fairly well informed - not wholly informed, fairly well informed - on the disposition and significance of various nuclear forces in the Alliance, in terms of trying to reach a deal with the Soviet Union. And believe me, NATO was very active in SALT II, based upon the experience of the people in the NPG - the Nuclear Planning Group.

 

[HILL] And other fora, other defence planning mechanisms in NATO? I mean, how good do you think it is on the whole? How realistic is the NATO strategy, at least in terms of what it is feasible to work out?

 

[CAMPBELL] Are you asking me whether I think that a nuclear strategy really can make sense?

 

[HILL] Not really, I suppose what I'm asking is how realistic do you think is the strategy of forward defence and flexible response. I mean, is that about the best that can be arranged?

 

[CAMPBELL] I think so. I mean we've watched it evolve from trip wire and massive retaliation, in the days when we had total superiority over the Soviet Union, to other pragmatic adjustments that took place when they finally got the nuclear capability. All of a sudden we decided on graduated response, flexible response, which meant that there's no point in committing suicide. Let's develop a doctrine that is a little more realistic and that says we'll respond with the degree of force needed to restore the status quo. We won't attract a holocaust if we can help it. Well, you know you can laugh about this, in retrospect, but when you're at the peak of a Cold War, it is another matter and these policies looked sensible. They look ridiculous in retrospect. At the time they looked very sensible because we didn't really know what was going to happen in the future. We don't know now, but it's going to be very interesting to see what happens in the face of zero options which nobody really believes in. And I don't believe in them. I think we'd be mistaken if we actually implemented the zero option, until we know how permanent is the dove in the Kremlin. I'm not sure at all if he's there for good. I want to see a generation grow up that all thinks like Mr. Gorbachev. I don't doubt his sincerity. I'm astonished that this man has been able to come as far as he has in two years. And it worries me that he may be living dangerously.

 

[COX] But you know, if they were all gone, the Minutemen and the short-range, there would still be an awful lot of nuclear weapons.

 

[CAMPBELL] But then, that isn't really the point, is it? Nobody is going to really use them. It's a kind of game of chicken, that's all that nuclear weapons are used for. They're political weapons, they're not really a usable military weapon, you know. You do commit suicide if you unleash these things. It's the threat of their use that compels governments to react to threatening situations.

 

[COX] You wouldn't like to see even those battlefield nuclear weapons being used, of course.

 

[CAMPBELL] I think that is one of the great evils that has taken place is that the distinction between the strategic and medium range missiles, and theatre weapons, has been blurred rather badly. Soldiers have forgotten there's a hell of a difference between the smallest nuclear weapon and the largest conventional stuff.

 

[COX] And if the Soviets really were coming and they had made a significant breakthrough and you said, you come another three miles and were going to use nuclear weapons, you'd have exactly the same threat as you've got now.

 

[CAMPBELL] But that's what we have been saying to them, that's been the whole doctrine.

 

[COX] Yes, that's what I'm saying, I don't think it makes an awful lot of difference whether you've got ...

 

[CAMPBELL] Big ones or little ones?

 

[COX] Big ones or little ones.

 

[CAMPBELL] No. We could get rid of a lot of those things. Yes, you're quite right. But I don't think we should get rid of everything. Just keep people a little bit honest.

 

[HILL] Just to wrap up this point: so, by and large, you feel that while you were in NATO, the defence planning mechanisms and systems were about as good as one could hope in that kind of organization?

 

[CAMPBELL] Well, yes. You know, I have no illusions about it. Neither on the conventional side nor the nuclear planning side, was it a great deal more than an enlightened information system rather than a consultative one. Nobody was asking the Canadians of this world whether they might or might not do thus and so with their forces. This is just a function of being a lesser member of the Alliance. If we had let our forces grow much smaller than we did, our influence would have been even less. We were a little bit respected because we had these professional forces in NATO. But I was never happy about the consultative arrangement, no. I'm not happy now with the way even the political consultation works in NATO. It has improved, but if you're sitting in that chair you're pretty conscious of the fact that it's something short of true consultation that takes place, and if there is a crisis over the NATO area there is no consultation. You learn about it afterwards.

 

[HILL] One other question is, while you were in NATO was the period of the Mansfield Amendment in the United States, and that was defeated, perhaps partly because the US Administration was able to claim that MBFR was in the works. But anyway, it was defeated. But then Mansfield introduced another amendment in '73, I think it was. The thing is still alive.

 

[CAMPBELL] It never goes away.

 

[HILL] What if one of these went through? What was your impression of what would have happened at the time? What would happen now?

 

[CAMPBELL] There is a constant threat that it will go through. The Americans have a perpetual discontent, if you like, with the extent to which the Europeans do not carry their weight in the defence of Europe. And the Mansfield Amendment - there were resolutions before it, and there have been resolutions since - are all in the same vein. Unless Europe does more, the United States is going to pick up its toys and go home. I don't think it's a real threat. The United States isn't there in order to protect Western Europe. They're there because they have perceived that it is the front line of their own security perimeter, as we do. We think the same thing. And so it's an empty threat. The Americans can't go home without doing themselves more harm than good. And so, no, I don't believe that the Mansfield resolutions of this world are going to be implemented.

 

[HILL] But, certainly while I was there, I had the impression that people were very conscious of the Mansfield Amendment, while it was under debate in the US. People in NATO, I mean, Europeans and Canadians.

 

[CAMPBELL] It's a perennial. It's a hardy perennial. It keeps coming back and coming back in one guise or another; it's been doing it for 35-40 years to my knowledge. Almost immediately after the Alliance was formed, the moment Europe started to get at all prosperous, the moment the Marshall Plan was winding down, the United States started then to ask Europeans to do more. And by then Europeans had become comfortable in doing less, and there's no way they're going to spend the massive amounts really needed to confront the Soviet Union. Do you agree with that, David?

 

[COX] Yes, it's a conundrum, isn't it?

 

[CAMPBELL] Isn't it, though? There's a paradox there, but it's a truth nevertheless.

 

[HILL] Also, there is the thought that the Europeans don't want to do more financially, because this might give the Americans an inclination to do less on the nuclear side.

 

[CAMPBELL] Now that's exactly where we are now. We're up to the litmus test with all of these theories with Mr. Gorbachev - the cat among the pigeons.

 

Part VII - Ambassador to Japan and Korea, 1972-75

 

[HILL] I'd like to ask one question about Part Seven, your period as Ambassador to Japan and Korea. It's really a sort of reflection upon NATO in the world, but linked to this thought is the fact which we touched on earlier, that the world is changing and of course Japan probably has changed more than any country. Where is Japan going, where is the world going in balance of power terms and the development of this new world in the Pacific, and where does NATO fit into this scheme of things?

 

[CAMPBELL] The Americans are the common link between all of these regional organizations. They have a very powerful bilateral treaty with Japan born out of World War II. The Japanese see themselves, really, as sort of an ancillary member of NATO. It is a curious attitude. Unlike Europe they would like to do more in their own defence, and it's the terms of the peace treaty they have with the United States which ended the Occupation that forbade them to enter into full self-defence. That situation is eroding right now, as the Americans get economically weaker and more and more tired of carrying both Europeans and Japanese on their backs. They are now rather dangerously urging the Japanese to do more in the military sphere. I think it is dangerous. But that's what's happening. And they've got the very man who is ready to do it, Mr. Nakasone. According to the American conception of things, Japan is a kind of Britain. It is a floating airfield as far as the United States is concerned, the way Britain was in World War II. That's the way they regard Japan and the Far East; they don't want the Japanese manning those airports themselves, they want the Americans to have the right to do so. They are still looking after the security interests of that flank of the Soviet Union, but as I said, with the Japanese being invited to do more and more. But my time there was almost entirely occupied with the economic crisis that was happening at the time. I arrived in the same breath as the first "oil shock”, as they called it. They had four or five days supply of oil to make that giant economy go, and in four or five days they mounted fourteen missions to all the oil producing countries of the world with a very simple message: "What is it you want, car factories? a new port? an oil refinery? It's yours; you pay in oil." And they didn't suffer one day's shortage of oil in Japan. They overcame that crisis in the most admirable way; you can only admire it, a tour de force. They adjusted to this crisis that could have crippled them and in no time at all they had beaten it, and were just sailing on to higher economic dizzy heights.

 

[HILL] Where are they all going to wind up, the Japanese?

 

[CAMPBELL] They may end up owning half of the United States. I think that's the only place they can end up. They've got all this surplus money now and the United States is in a massive deficit and is selling off parts of itself, almost as rapidly as we sold off the majority of Canada in the same circumstances.

 

[HILL] You don't see them slowing down, the Japanese economy slowing down at all?

 

[CAMPBELL] Not at all.

 

[HILL] It's going to keep on going, in other words?

 

[CAMPBELL] I don't know where this thing, this dizzy spin-off, ends. It's frightening, but they seem to be able endlessly to adjust to new trade circumstances. They have now moved into the knowledge-intensive rather than the manufacturing-intensive industries, and to be beating the Americans at their own game, and making computer mega chips, or whatever it is...million bytes or whatever they are. I don't know, there seems to be no end to it. They're increasing the amount of money they have, they can only start now to re-invest around the world, and they seem to prefer the United States. We rank somewhere up there as a reasonably stable area for investment. They're certainly not gambling in Third World areas very much. I reckon they are going to own a good chunk of the United States before this is all over.

 

[HILL] And they are sort of pulling a good chunk of the Pacific Rim up with them, Korea and Taiwan and so on.

 

[CAMPBELL] The reason the Taiwans and the Thailands and so on in this world are prospering, is that the Japanese, whose standard of living and wage roles have now risen to about the same as ours, have been progressively moving those things off shore into the cheap areas all around them. And those areas benefit you know; they are going through a cycle of increased standards of living as a consequence of this. It isn't that the Koreans or the Taiwanese invented this. A lot of it is Japanese investment in those places, at the lower end of the manufacturing scale, cameras and motorcycles and things. They are all moving off shore out of Japan, and Japan is moving into high tech industries.

 

[HILL] I was struck, when you commented about the Americans pushing them to do more in defence, that perhaps this is dangerous. You start some country like Japan moving, and they're going to go their own way to some degree; especially if they fora alliances of some kind or another with other countries or nations including China and so on.

 

[CAMPBELL] They can't.

 

[HILL] I mean, not necessarily a close alliance.

 

[CAMPBELL] Oh, they despise each other. Don't worry about that, it's not going to happen. There's never going to be any alliance between the Chinese and the Japanese. Oh no, don't worry about that. The Japanese are using the Chinese as, you know, a huge market. Here are a billion people with nothing and lots of resources, and the Japanese have all the things that the Chinese don’t. What a wonderful marriage! Take their oil and coal and everything else and give them cameras and Hondas. That’s the way they're doing it. No one in the end is going to have a real look into that Chinese market other than the Japanese. We'll nibble, the Germans will nibble, the Americans too. It's 85 percent Japanese. They're doing very nicely.

 

[HILL] But in any case, that area of the world is going up and becoming more and more powerful; and quite rapidly, at least economically. So, by the turn of the century, where would you see the link to Canada and the link to Europe and the NATO link, where is this going? Is this going to be a central feature in world affairs or will it turn down somewhat.

 

[CAMPBELL] No, I can only perceive it becoming more of a power centre. You can't deny, even if they're weak in military terms, you cannot deny the clout that the Far East region now has. It's had a growth rate of something like 17% annually for almost as long as all of us can remember now. It's far and away the most prosperous part of the world. And it's not just Japan; its Korea, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan. It's a huge area, a very, very active economic power. But not military.

 

[HILL] Could we turn discussion back to Europe, now, for a while? I suppose the link to Europe will remain important as far as Canada is concerned?

 

[CAMPBELL] Europe, to my regret, has not become an important area of Canadian concern, other than the strategic link. To me it's a growing matter of great regret that we don't seem to be able to capitalize on significant economic relations with Europe.

 

[HILL] In your view we should do more?

 

[CAMPBELL] We should have done more, I think we forfeited a lot in 1968. But if today, if you had to choose, you wouldn't go to Europe because Europe has, after all, created this great exclusive trading bloc, a group that has erected a wall against the rest of the world and has improved its own circumstances at the expense of others, including us. They more or less kicked us out; no matter how much we might have wanted in, we've been put out. And it is partly a function of what they were trying to achieve politically and still haven't, but I think will. I think there is going to be a kind of United States of Europe, and a very important power centre it will be. The other, the Rising Sun is in the Far East.

 

[HILL] And we would probably have a better opportunity of getting involved there.

 

[CAMPBELL] Sure we have. That's still a relatively unexploited marketplace. It's a growth marketplace. Europe's an old one, but a highly developed one. Incidentally, we underestimate the technological strength of Europe. We're all brainwashed by what we see south of the border. We believe that everything technologically advanced is to be found in the United States and nowhere else. It's not true, not anymore true. I can name a dozen different technologies where Europe is miles ahead. Even in space, the Soviet Union is way ahead of the United States. We've idolized the American manufacturing ability and innovative capability in our minds in this country without really examining where other countries now stand. I think they are being challenged on every front. I don't think it's just because their dollar was over valued that they weren't selling. I think it's because they have fallen behind in the race for excellence in a lot of areas.

 

[HILL] In light of these comments about the world scene, how would you see NATO and Canadian foreign policy in the coming decades? I mean, do you think it still should remain a key element in Canadian foreign policy?

 

[CAMPBELL] Yes, I'm afraid I do, but increasingly for negative reasons. I still believe that it's a very important political and military strategic forum for us. But my main concern would be, where would we go if we're not in that collective grouping? And it's this fear that I have of seeing us isolated on the North American continent with this behemoth south of the border. That's what bothers me. So I say, hang on to this mature political economic and military organization as an outlet for our foreign political activity rather than crawling into bed with the United States. We're drowned if we do it the other way.

 

[HILL] It always struck me that being a member of NATO costs very, very little. It's one of those things, really, for which the cost is minuscule, and yet the entree that it gives to all kinds of discussions is significant. At the very least it gives some opportunities, and so there would seem to be little point in throwing that all away.

 

[CAMPBELL] Well, there is this other risk. You know, I confess to being disappointed at how little we have had in a positive economic sense out of relations with Europe. I can rationalize why, but the fact is that they are not great and they're not growing at this moment. But it's the negative aspect that I think we have to now look at. And now also there is some risk that things are beginning to fall apart, in the western security sense, under the flourishing of detente today. We could again find ourselves, through the unfolding of international events, forced into a North American mold. And it's the one thing that I think is deadly for Canada.

 

[HILL] That's where we'll conclude. It's been great to have you, and a fascinating session.

 

[CAMPBELL] I just wish I were sure all the time that I'm right.

 

[HILL] I'm sure that's what we all feel.