Statecraft Without Security

Despite the headlines it remains true that although statecraft can involve death, it often does not involve drama, at least for states. In the spring of 2026, as the USA and Israel were attacking Iran, the prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney, was in India for a friendly meeting with Narendra Modi, the prime minister of the world’s most populous democracy.

Carney’s presence in India was a volte-face, since for the previous three years Canada had been trying to hold the government of India responsible for ordering its external intelligence service, the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW), to assassinate a Canadian citizen, a Sikh leader living in Canada whom India’s Home Ministry had declared a terrorist. Canada expelled six Indian diplomats, including the High Commissioner, for direct involvement in the assassination, an allegation consistently denied by Indian government. In 2024, the Canadian government, led by prime minister Justin Trudeau, even named the Indian Minister of Home Affairs, Amit Shah, as the procurer of the assassination. Carney abandoned the froideur in 2026. In the secret world, democracies might use violence on each others’ territory, but there were much more important issues that held them together.

Carney seems to be imagining a world in which Canada could nurture relations between the democratic states, especially those of the English-speaking world, somehow circumventing the United States, whose government he had come to distrust. This was notable to some, since he had vehemently opposed the idea of the UK trying to circumvent Europe in pursuit of similar goals. Now Canadian prime minister, rather than the governor of the Bank of England, he changed his tune. However agile Carney might be, he will have a hard time escaping the structural decisions made by his forebears. In both Canada and Britain political leaders decided to transfer their nations’ security to the United States. It is an existential decision for any state to enter into client, perhaps even vassal, status. Such status is very hard to escape.

Until the mid-twentieth century most western politicians regarded ‘national security’ as the core activity of the political class, and thus the state itself. In the late 1960s national security became a second-tier issue.

In 1970 Britain entered a new ‘war world’ that bore little similarity to its predecessors. National Security ceased to be a defining structural characteristic of the British state. By the 1970s, proportionately very little state expenditure was focused on war or national security. Subsequent ‘armed conflict situations’, such as the Falklands and the First Gulf ‘wars’, barely registered as blips on the graph of public expenditure. ‘Welfarists’ rather than the ‘warfarists’ won the ‘war for war’. Military spending became a very convenient alibi for the fundamental ills that underlay Britain’s poor post-war economic performance. Endemic weaknesses in management, investment, productivity, or innovation, were difficult subjects for governments’ intent on maintaining a high level of public and private consent. Politically, it was much easier to speak the language of sacrifice than the language of incompetence. As the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Roy Jenkins, put it in 1967, ‘the keynote … must be the dependence of the country’s standing in the world upon the strength of the economy and not upon a world-wide military presence.’ The Minister of Defence, Denis Healey, pointed out that cuts in defence expenditure were little more than a political blind, however, since the real problem was the failure to put a ‘firm grip on civil expenditure generally’. Healey’s contention was amply borne out by a comparison of the government’s expenditure plans for defence and social security in the 1970s.When he subsequently became Chancellor of the Exchequer Healey, tentatively, suggested that it was social expenditure that was the back-breaking burden.

The notion of the ‘defence burden’, however, remained firmly entrenched in political consciousness. Under Margaret Thatcher, despite Cold War rhetoric, defence was a ‘relative loser’ in comparison with the rest of the public sector. Defence remained a ‘soft touch’. Defence was an even bigger loser under John Major than under Margaret Thatcher. The trends apparent under the Major government remained dominant under its Labour successors. Left-wing commentators branded Tony Blair a ‘warmonger’, as a result of his propensity for entangling Britain in armed conflict situations. Yet Britain’s political economy of war had already been transformed. Since defence expenditure now constituted such a low proportion of government expenditure – one-fifth of social security – its management could no longer be regarded as an issue that lay at the heart of politics. The current British prime minister, Andy Burnham, was a minister in Tony Blair’s government. When he observed recently, ‘we do everything to support our national security, but it can’t come at the expense of social security,’ he was merely describing the actual situation.

Canada has followed a more extreme version of the same trajectory. Social welfare expenditure reached five times defence expenditure in 1980. Anchored in its own bilateral defence treaty with the United States - NORAD, created in 1958 and renewed in 1986 - Canadian politicians proceeded on the basis that the US would defend their country, regardless of how far they downgraded its security. At the same time as the 1960s Wilson government in the UK (1964-1970) was making national security a second-tier priority, the Pearson (1963-1968) government in Canada was doing the same thing. The difference between the UK and Canada was that whilst the Labour government in Britain was succeeded by a Conservative administration in the 1970s, the Liberal government of Pearson was succeeded by the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau. Trudeau could not even bother to hide his contempt for the national security. His minister of national defence, Donald Macdonald, was saying the kind of things in 1970 which it would take British leaders another five decades to fully articulate. No level of defence spending was supportable until all social welfare demands had been satisfied.

Although the Mulroney Conservatives of the 1980s rhetorically distanced themselves from this kind of welfarist radicalism, their increases in defence spending made as little impact as those of the Thatcher Conservatives in the UK: barely a blip on the chart. Accordingly, it was easy to switch the rhetoric back in the other direction. The Liberal national security policy launched by the Liberal Justin Trudeau - Pierre’s son, and Carney’s predecessor - in 2017 mentioned diversity forty-seven times, gender forty times and war twice. Carney has returned to a more measured tone.

The structural shift in national security engineered by some English-speaking democracies since the 1960s is visible to policymakers in other English-speaking democracies who do not regard their security as a second, or even third, tier priority. They can cut through the rhetoric and treat the governments of countries like the UK and Canada accordingly.

Disclaimer: Views expressed are of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Statecraft Institute.