Now, to turn to the Arctic, I want to raise three quick points about the Arctic before I turn briefly to missile defence.
One needs to distinguish between rhetoric and reality, or what's written on paper in the North Atlantic Treaty, signed in Washington in 1949, and what the actual practices of the alliance have been relative to North America. As you probably know, throughout the Cold War, even though there was a NATO Canada-U.S. regional planning group, North America was not a place for NATO. NATO was about European defence and security and, effectively, Canada and the United States' guarantee to support the defence of western Europe—and now this is extended further to the east, with the expansion of NATO.
I believe you all have copies of three overhead maps that I forwarded. The key point is that when you look at North America with regard to the Arctic, if you look at everything west of Greenland, this is an issue for Canada and the United States. Its central defence institution, as you know, is NORAD. It is not a place for NATO.
The second point I want to raise with the committee is that when you look at the current international system and the changes that have occurred, which most academics talk about as the return of “great power politics”, we need to be careful—and this fits into the first point—to think back in Cold War terms to when the west's relationship, including Canada, the United States, and NATO with the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, was clearly adversarial across all issue areas. We were adversaries politically, militarily, strategically, socially, and economically.
In the world we live in today, which is going to continue, we have to recognize that in certain areas with great powers—in this particular case, Russia—we are adversaries or we are in conflict. This, of course, is in eastern Europe with the issues surrounding Crimea and the Ukraine, as well as, of course, the Baltics and with our eastern European allies.
However, that doesn't mean that this conflict, this adversarial element, should be transferred across the board. There are areas where we will compete with a great power like Russia—you may look and think in terms of Syria—and there are areas where we will co-operate with the Russians. The Arctic is an area of co-operation with the Russians, particularly when we recognize the economic interest and vital importance of the Arctic to the Russians themselves, and Russian capabilities in the Arctic, including civilian capabilities, particularly their icebreaker fleet, and our common interests as transportation opens up further with climate change. We need to recognize the real passage of vessels transporting goods from east to west will not be the Northwest Passage, but the Russian route, because it's simply easier to go that way.
From Russian behaviour with regard to the Law of the Sea and the extension of the continental shelf, which has followed the legal process, I think it's very clear that when we look at Russia and Canada, as well as the United States, with regard to the Arctic west of Greenland, it is an area for co-operation among the three, and other members of the Arctic Council.
Entering NATO here through whatever specific means is likely going to be perceived as provocative to the Russians, and this is not going to be helpful to our interests and requirements of future needs as the Arctic expands, both for population centres and social and economic questions as they emerge.
The third point is that where there is an issue relative to North America and NATO, notwithstanding the issues of our presence in eastern Europe supporting our allies, is east of Greenland. This is what was loosely called the “North Atlantic seam”. This is the Greenland-Iceland-U.K. gap and further north to Norway. The issues, as you see in the second graph, include the increasing threat posed by Russian long-range cruise missile capabilities.
Cruise missile defence is a NORAD mission. A variety of issues need to be worked out in the absence of the old Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic, to ensure the defence of North America. This is new in the context of NATO from the Cold War, because with the Atlantic at that time, the issue was largely about keeping open the sea lines of communication to support or reinforce forces, if necessary, in case of war. That is the area where attention needs to be paid in Canada because a variety of issues related to U.S. Northern Command are involved here, including the U.S. European Command, NATO, and how we're going to develop command structures and how we are going to ensure effective air defence of North America.
Those are my three basic points about the Arctic.
Turning to missile defence, I know that members of the committee have received a very good report from the parliamentary assembly on the European phased adaptive approach. I certainly can answer questions with regard to its evolution, where you want to start dating it back to—I usually date it back to 1999 and the Washington summit, which set in motion the first study by NATO on theatre ballistic missile defence—where we stand today, and the details of where it might go. That has now expanded to Lisbon and Chicago.
There are two points I want to make about the missile defence program. The first is that, despite what the Russians say, the missile defence system deployed in the Mediterranean and Romania, and that is about to be deployed in Poland, does not threaten Russian strategic forces with regard to North America. The system does not have the capability. The angles of any attempt to intercept a warhead or a missile in mid-course phase from a launch transiting northwards, with us coming at it from behind—basically it's a trailing shot—simply can't be done. The interceptors of standard missile-3 and the variants of it do not have the speed to catch up to that missile.
One area where there is potentially an issue with regard to Russian strategic forces—particularly in the context of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which prohibits intermediate nuclear forces and ground-launched cruise missiles between a range of 500 and 5,500 kilometres—is the potential use by the Russians of their ICBM fleet in an alternative trajectory to be able to threaten western Europe, our European allies. Even so, unless you go to a much faster interceptor, the system will not really be able to intercept that—but you could take shots at it.
The second issue is one that I think is very important for Canada. If you go back to the Bush administration's plan, which was to put mid-course phase interceptors—i.e., the interceptors that are located in Alaska—in Poland and a phased array guiding radar in the Czech Republic was, by and large, as a layer of the defence of North America. The layer right now cannot defend North America, but Canada has to be interested in the potential requirement against Middle East threats. As you see in the third overhead, which provides a threat fan of ICBM tracking from launch points in Iran or elsewhere in the Middle East, you certainly would need to upgrade it.
At some point in the future, however, the issue concerning proliferation will whether we need another site somewhere to defend the east coast from attacks from the Middle East. As I and most people predict, the Iranian program, at least in its ballistic missile form, will continue to be able to bring North America under threat. The Fort Greely, Alaska, site is not appropriately placed to deal with those threats. It can take a shot, but it would be a trailing shot, and from what I've been told, it would be very difficult for it to be able to intercept a missile from the Middle East.
The United States is looking at, and I think completed, a review of that, but we're waiting for the 2018 ballistic missile defence review report from the U.S. regarding the future prospect of a third site in northern United States, either in New York, Ohio, or Michigan.
There are other issues involved here, but if the United States feels that its site in Europe cannot defend the continental United States from a long-range ICBM from the Middle East, then these are direct issues for Canada in the long-standing question about whether we should or should not participate in the U.S. program.
I shall leave it there. Thank you.