National Defence Committee on Dec. 12th, 2024

[Dr. Robert Hamilton]

I don't think it can, because it's a belligerence. They're in the Mediterranean now. They would have to come through the Bosphorus, which means that the Montreux convention is operative. My understanding is that the Turks have been fairly scrupulous in not allowing countries that are belligerents in the war in Ukraine to enter the Bosphorus, but again, I caveat by saying that I'm also not a Turkeyy expert.

[Max Bergmann]

That's my understanding as well.

[Don Stewart, Conservative, Toronto—St. Paul's, ON]

If we go back to the Ukraine situation with Russia, what does that say about the U.S. commitment if Trump does go ahead and does not provide more aid? What does that say about the commitment to the rest of Europe?

[Max Bergmann]

I think it speaks to where the United States has been moving, and I think that where the United States is moving is really to a focus on the Indo-Pacific. I think that Donald Trump in particular has not viewed NATO as particularly important to the United States, and that's been a long-held position over many decades.

During his first term, he ordered his secretary of defense to pull troops out of Germany, so I think there's a prevailing sense that the United States wants a paradigm shift when it comes to European security, such that we are less interested in providing European security than we have been for the past 75 years and want to shift that responsibility to Europe. The problem is that European security is entirely dependent on the U.S. military, and removing that is like removing the backbone, and that's very hard to replace. I think that an abrupt pullout, which I'm afraid might happen, will leave Europe very insecure.

[Don Stewart, Conservative, Toronto—St. Paul's, ON]

In your introduction, you talked about a lack of “critical thinking” in this country. Can you explain to me what you mean by that and how we can address it?

[Dr. Robert Hamilton]

I didn't mean Canada specifically, of course. I meant in western societies in general. I just meant that.... Look, Russia is extremely good. This is not your grandfather's Cold War and ham-fisted Soviet propaganda that we're seeing in western societies.

There's a very good RAND Corporation report from 2016 called the “Firehose of Falsehood”. It talks about Russian misinformation. It talks about four characteristics: It's high volume, it's multichannel and it has no commitment to consistency and no commitment to objective truth.

The idea is that Russia is not trying to get the western public to build a positive image of Russia, to agree with the Russian position or to think that Russia is telling the truth; it's trying to undermine the idea of objective truth altogether and have the western public believe that all governments lie all of the time and that therefore what my government says is no more legitimate than what comes out of the Kremlin. It takes critical thinking skills to disentangle what is objective truth, which does still exist, from what is not truth.

Unfortunately—

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Okay, and unfortunately, we're going to leave this again. I have to stop and apologize. I just can't do this.

We are on to the second round.

Madame Lalonde, you have five minutes.

[Marie-France Lalonde, Liberal, Orléans, ON]

Thank you very much.

Thanks to both of you.

I would like to hear a bit more about your thoughts on Russia's reaction to the Assad regime and its fall. Do you anticipate a repositioning of Russia?

My colleague was mentioning Ukraine. I'm more interested in knowing if we see possibilities where Russia could repurpose some of their assets into the Arctic or Africa. Maybe they will find other ways within the Middle East so that they could continue to have a certain “power”, and I say that in quotes.

[Max Bergmann]

Yes. I think what Russia will attempt.... Also, it still remains to be seen if they're fully evicted. I think the first step will be to try to maintain their current presence in Syria. If they are evicted, I think we will see them try to shop around to see if they can strike a deal, perhaps in Tobruk in Libya, or possibly in Sudan.

What is key is that Russia needs to have a naval port where it can support its forces in Africa and its private military contractors. This is critical for Russia's broader authoritarian support services, essentially, which it provides for many African leaders. I think it sees those as a vital geopolitical tool to potentially create instability, migration flows and other things that could give it some leverage vis-à-vis Europe and could destabilize European politics.

[Dr. Robert Hamilton]

I would just say that I think Sudan is the most likely place. Russia and Sudan, after years of stops and starts, have finally concluded a basing agreement for a Russian naval base at Port Sudan on the Red Sea. I don't know how long it will take until that base is operative, but to me that would be the most obvious place for Russia to relocate if it had to get out of Syria.

[Marie-France Lalonde, Liberal, Orléans, ON]

Thank you.

You mentioned—and I really appreciated it—that Ukraine needs to win and that Ukraine is fighting for Canada and all the NATO allies. We have heard this numerous times from a number of other countries. We did discuss the possibility of a U.S. military retraction. In my view, it would be a deterrent and a very bad decision by the leadership, leading up to President-elect Trump.

How does a win look to you? What's the win? I believe that losing territory is not a win, but I would really like to hear your opinion on what a win looks like.

[Max Bergmann]

For me, I think it goes back 10 years and to what this is all about. I think this is about Ukraine realizing its European future of, ultimately, membership in the European Union, and Ukraine being a free and liberal democratic state and part of Europe.

I think that can happen with territorial concessions, so whether Ukraine has the Donbass or Crimea—at least from my perspective as an American—is not the relevant thing. It is maintaining sovereignty, its democratic status and its European future. I think negotiations can get there, with territorial concessions. It will not be an easy pill to swallow, but I think the focus needs to be on preserving Ukrainian democracy and the Ukrainian freedom to choose its own future.

[Dr. Robert Hamilton]

I fully agree, with the caveat that no Ukrainian politician can say that out loud going into negotiations, obviously. However, there will be some negotiating space that will probably lead to some outcome, I think, in which Russian troops will remain on part of Ukraine's territory.

I think a good analogy here is the Welles Declaration. Throughout the Cold War, the United States never recognized the incorporation of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia into the Soviet Union. That may seem as a weak or diplomatic response to a military occupation, but it had legal consequences when the Soviet Union collapsed, in that it was a resumption of diplomatic relations with those three countries and not their establishment, as it was with all the other Soviet republics except Russia. Therefore, something analogous to that, in terms of Russian occupation of Ukraine, I think, is what would be advisable.

[Marie-France Lalonde, Liberal, Orléans, ON]

It was mentioned in a public forum that I had the pleasure of participating in that the current territory that's occupied by Russia also contains a lot of critical minerals. When I think about critical minerals and the world's future, I do believe that those assets should stay within Ukraine, which is a democratic country, as you mentioned. How can leaving that territory to Russia possibly be seen as a win for NATO or the United States of America?

[Max Bergmann]

I think that's a very negative outcome, and the broader question for Ukraine is whether continuing to fight to try to retake that territory, and the potential costs that it could entail, are worth it. I think there is a potential case for negotiations, especially given the state of the Ukrainian military and economy, so Russia could tee that up as a win.

However, one other thing I would say is that this is where maintaining sanctions vis-à-vis Russia and our posture toward Russia as a threat are critical, so I wouldn't necessarily consider that a victory for Russia if it occupies that territory. It's not a good outcome for Ukraine, but we may be in a situation in which “not great” outcomes are what Ukraine is looking at, particularly if the United States is getting weak-kneed in its support for Ukraine.

[Dr. Robert Hamilton]

I have nothing to add. I agree.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Mr. Simard, go ahead for two and a half minutes.

[Mario Simard, Bloc, Jonquière, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Hamilton, earlier, in response to a question from my colleague about disinformation, you said that an attempt was being made to discredit the idea of objective truth.

What does that look like? What is under attack? Are they trying to undermine trust in institutions? Are they trying to get involved in political debates? Are they trying to influence civil society groups?

[Dr. Robert Hamilton]

I'll start with the last question.

Yes, the Russians are reaching out to both the far right and the far left in most western societies. I think their ideological preference is for the far right, but they're very instrumental in how they do this, and they also reach out to far-left groups. The idea is to destabilize societies, not necessarily to have most people in a society agree with Russia's ideological view of how the world works.

The Cold War was analogous to this. The Soviet Union did the same thing. Yes, most of its contacts were with the far left in western societies, but it also reached out to and funded far-right groups. The idea, again, is to destabilize and to cause people in the west to give up on the idea of objective truth. The objective there is to cause paralysis. If you give up on the idea of objective truth, you don't know who's right or who's wrong, and then you're paralyzed and you can't react to what the Russians are doing. I think that's the objective.

[Mario Simard, Bloc, Jonquière, QC]

To your knowledge, are any of those efforts working?

Is there some way to document the influence Russia may gain from using these methods and these new communication channels? Are there any indicators that would show us their efforts are working?

Or do their efforts have a minimal influence, all in all?

[Dr. Robert Hamilton]

I don't think there's a lot of good data, because it's hard to determine exactly how many votes may have been swayed.

I would again point to the two recent examples of Moldova and Romania. We know Russian-linked money essentially bought over 100,000 Moldovan votes in their recent election. Russian money and influence operations also caused the rise of a Romanian far-right candidate. He went from literally nothing—polling within the margin of being statistically insignificant—to over 22%, winning the first round of the Romanian presidential election.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you.

Madame Mathyssen, you have two and a half minutes.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Mr. Hamilton never had the opportunity to answer in response to the Armenia-Azerbaijan question. I'd love to give him the opportunity to answer that.

Thank you.

[Dr. Robert Hamilton]

Sure.

The south Caucasus is one of my favourite parts of the world. I lived in Georgia and served in the U.S. embassy there for almost four years.

Armenia picked the worst possible time for its turn to the west, unfortunately. Of course, they didn't pick the geopolitical conditions that surrounded their turn to the west. If you look at Armenia's position, you see that it has four neighbours. It has no diplomatic relations with Turkeyy. Azerbaijan just defeated it in a war. Iran is its best bilateral relationship, but Iran is a global pariah state in many ways. Then there's Georgia, which was always Armenia's window to the west. Georgia is possibly another place where Russian influence operations were successful. The Georgian government is increasingly anti-western and authoritarian. There have been hundreds of thousands of people on the streets of Tbilisi for over two weeks now, sustained, since the Georgian government announced it was suspending its EU accession process and rejecting EU aid, after it manipulated the October parliamentary elections to award itself a victory.

Armenia is in a very difficult position. As Mr. Bergmann said, it's reaching out for partners. Russia is clearly not reliable. I tell Armenians when I'm there, “Don't assume the west is a reliable security guarantor, either, because we're not.” We don't have a high enough order of interest at stake to come to Armenia's aid if it's attacked again. It needs to diversify its partnerships. It needs to matter in a diplomatic and economic sense, and have strong economic and diplomatic relationships with countries around the world.

Armenia-India is another relationship that has really burgeoned in the last several years, including in the defence sphere. I think Armenia is now India's number one export destination for military arms.

It's a tough situation in the entire south Caucasus, and in Armenia in particular. It's just a very bad time for a turn to the west.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Mr. Bezan, you have five minutes.