For the UN, the intention is to create an environment for those tenets of peace to take hold, but it's more than that for the United Nations. The UN is interested—just as it has traditionally been interested—in helping countries become part of the global commons, to be a part of what it calls the brotherhood of states, the international community and all of the benefits that come with that. It's almost self-regulating at some point in the future.
The UN wants that mission to take root, so there's a cessation of hostilities, a suspension of them through the peacekeeping efforts, a suspension of the violent armed conflict, so other things can take root. When enough time goes by, people usually forget to fight, because they have jobs and their kids are at school. When that happens, there's more opportunity to have the good tenable peace take root, versus the negative peace.
When it comes to Canada, again it comes back to why peacekeeping? It's part of our national identity, and it actually very much underpins our national security and our security interests in North America. We have—and I said this last year for your report on NATO—benefited from our geography for a long time: people cannot walk to Canada. Well, they can, and we were noticing it last summer that they could walk to Canada, but not in the same way that Italy and Germany have realized over the last 130 years.
Now that the emergent security trends are changing, what are our interests? How much are we committed to collective security? Because we do not have the resources to pay for our own security as fortress Canada—that doesn't even make sense—we have to be a part of that collective security web.
Peacekeeping and that wider remit of peace operations are ways in which to bolster the web, but we have to innovate. We can't just apply the 20th-century peacekeeping methodology to a 21st-century emergent security environment.
