Mulroney helped end the Cold War

Guest columnist Ian Brodie on "a grand strategist of the 20th Century"

Brian and Mila Mulroney at the Brian Mulroney Institute of Government, Antigonish, NS, June 2023. The photos in this post are by Justin Trudeau’s official photographer Adam Scotti, whose father Bill McCarthy was Mulroney’s official photographer.

I’m grateful for thoughtful friends. Ian Brodie at the University of Calgary sent me this reflection on the foreign-policy contribution of Brian Mulroney, who passed away Thursday at the age of 84.

A full reckoning of Mulroney’s contributions and shortcomings would take weeks, run to thousands of words, and in the nature of things, spark endless heated debates. This isn’t that. Consider it a first look at one aspect of an extraordinary career, by a close observer. — pw

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In the years following the Second World War, Canadian political leaders had choices to make. Despite our wartime political, military, and economic partnership with the United States, Canada could have taken a more independent role in the post-war world. The impulse to be an honest broker was popular as Canadian troops returned home, the western allies demobilized, and the federal government’s Keynesian civil servants planned a domestic agenda of economic and social development to avoid a renewed recession. The creation of the United Nations held out the promise of an era of peace, independence and progress for colonies, and collective defence against aggression.

Louis St-Laurent stands out for his grand strategy as Canada’s prime minister. Having played a part in creating the United Nations as Canada’s foreign minister, he was well aware of its shortcomings, and heeded both intelligence reports and Winston Churchill’s warnings about the iron curtain descending on Europe in the aftermath of the war. Rejecting pressures to keep Canadians at home and distance Canada from world events, St-Laurent opted to make Canada a leader of the emerging western bloc, deepening the tri-part alliance with the US and putting the fine diplomatic corps to the service of creating NATO to stand in where the United Nations would not, as the mechanism for the collective defence of the transatlantic powers in the case of open warfare in Europe. Unlike Mackenzie King at Ogdensburg, St-Laurent had a choice to make. A non-aligned Canada, or a Canada that would throw its lot in with the western allies. He chose well and as the Cold War settled in, Canada found it could best plot a foreign policy that defended Canadian interests while remaining very much aligned, to the US and its allies.

More than twenty-five years later, after some of St. Laurent’s successors chafed at the limits of the great man’s grand strategy, the Cold War was once again front and centre in international relations. With US leadership, NATO allies were confronting the disappointment of 1970s détente with the Soviet leadership. Reagan, Thatcher, Kohl, Giscard, and Mitterrand began a campaign of increased political assertion, deep economic reform, and military modernization. For all their strong leadership, however, the arrival of Brian Mulroney in the Canadian prime ministership turned out to be an essential step in the peaceful ending of the Cold War and the promising years of cooperation that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Mulroney’s role has long been poo-poohed by intellectuals on the Canadian left. He was said to have an unhealthy obsession with pleasing the Americans. As a young boy, his fine voice won him an opportunity to entertain visiting American executives with a song. Amateur psychologists diagnosed a disturbing link between Mulroney’s having grown up in a company town, under the shadow of a US owned mill, and his reinvigoration of St. Laurent’s post-war grand strategy.

Mulroney never automatically fell in with US positions on the global issues of the day. His opposition to the apartheid regime in South Africa ran counter to the positions of both Reagan and Thatcher. But he drove the effort to link the American and Canadian economies through the free trade agreement. He backed our allies in the strategic competition with the Soviet bloc. And in helping to create the International Democratic Union, he helped put the west’s centre-right parties on the side of international political cooperation on the side of democracy, liberty, and the rule of law. The contrast with an earlier prime minister who could not bring himself to condemn the declaration of martial law in Poland a few years earlier was clear. 

His personal relationships with a generation of American leaders gave substance to the transactional successes. As the Soviet Union came apart, he secured a spot for Canada as the first NATO country to recognize Ukraine’s independence and bolstered the independence movements of the Baltic republics. When Iraq tried to establish a precedent that, following the Cold War, large, powerful countries could invade their neighbours with impunity, Mulroney backed the US led coalition to liberate Kuwait with all the diplomatic and military power he had on hand.

And along the way, he so closely befriended both Reagan and the first Bush that he was given a privileged platform at two US state funerals, an honour never extended to a Canadian leader before and unlikely to be extended to one again soon.

Mulroney deserves to be remembered along with St. Laurent as Canada’s grand strategist of the 20^th century. A trusted confidant of world leaders.

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Ian Brodie was Stephen Harper’s Chief of Staff during much of Harper’s first term in office, from 2006-2008. He is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Calgary and a Fellow at the Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies.  He is also Program Director at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, a Fellow of the Halifax International Security Forum, and Chair of the Research Committee at the Institute for Research on Public Policy.