Canada and the Early Cold War, 1943 - 1957

Eyes West: Canada and the Cold War in Asia

Robert Bothwell

Résumé : Bien que l'Asie ait été un théâtre décisif de la guerre froide, les décideurs canadiens l'ont abordée avec une grande réticence. Pour le Canada, la guerre froide en Asie s'inscrivait en marge, sans plus, des relations canado-américaines, ou était une conséquence fâcheuse de ses relations avec la Grande-Bretagne. Les Canadiens partageaient la vision occidentale traditionnelle d'une Asie exotique, mystérieuse et riche, mais contrairement aux états-Unis, qui avaient depuis longtemps un regard direct et indépendant sur l'Extrême-Orient,le Canada a gardé une attitude résolument européenne. Son optique nord-atlantique restreinte, combinée à un manque de ressources, a dissuadé Ottawa de participer à la guerre froide asiatique, même si l'objectif du Canada - protéger l'Asie du communisme - était le même que celui de ses alliés occidentaux. L'Inde, où l'Empire avait cédé le pas au Commonwealth, était l'exception, et faisait l'objet d'ardents efforts de la part du Canada pour créer des « liens spéciaux ». Ailleurs, en Corée et en Indochine, la guerre froide est passée au second plan, se heurtant à la réticence canadienne, et demeurant une exclusivité américaine.

When I was asked to prepare a paper on Canada and the Cold War in Asia, I hesitated. Yes,there had definitely been a Cold War in Asia, beginning in 1917 or 1945, according to taste, and indeed Asia had been a crucial theatre of the Cold War, the site of three of its bloodiest conflicts - Korea, Vietnam,and Afghanistan. It was the notion of Canada and the Cold War in Asia that gave me pause. It was true that Canadians had been present at the creation, at least if we accept 1945 as the launch date, as they were at the conclusion,and at points in between.But for Canada,the Cold War in Asia was rather like "noises off " - a distracting attachment to Canadian- American relations, or the unwelcome aftermath of our imperial connections. The Cold War in Asia belonged to somebody else, usually the Americans,and it was our job to make sure that they did not exaggerate its importance. Canadian policy in Asia was different from American - different in focus,different in importance, and different in commitment.

There were reasons for this, but in exploring the differences we must not lose sight of the similarities. "Asia," exotic, mysterious, dangerous but above all rich, has haunted Western thoughts since the Middle Ages and Marco Polo. North America is, after all, an accident that happened to the explorers on the way to Asia,all the way down to Lewis and Clark.Asia is more than a storehouse of wealth and opportunity; it is also, in our cultural tradition, a source of danger, equally mysterious but very serious. Sam Huntington's recent work, not to mention Colin Gray's, reminds us that this tradition has not yet been exhausted. ¹

In an age when Europe dominated Asia, the danger receded somewhat, though there were always prophets and romantics, from Backhouse to Rudyard Kipling to G.A. Henty to Philip Mason to Sax Rohmer, to remind us that the mysterious East might be cowed, but it was never defeated.Canadian library shelves still testify to the fact that even this cultural outpost of empire shared in the vicarious pleasure of empire as well as in its inspirational uplift through such cultural artifacts as A.J. Cronin's Keys of the Kingdom or Pearl Buck's The Good Earth. For the less literate there was always the cinema - The Good Earth or Gunga Din or The Lives of the Bengal Lancers. And across Canada, as throughout the Western world, there were the stories of missionaries told to enthralled church-basement audiences,who would presently give up their pennies and quarters for the missionary enterprise in the mysterious and benighted East.It was an East which for reasons best known to itself dwelt in poverty, which in itself represented a danger. Poor people were discontented people, and discontented people might seek their gospel not in Jesus Christ, but in Karl Marx.

Bolshevism gave a particular spice to oriental danger. The Bolsheviks themselves were aware of this, and held a conference of and for the Asian oppressed in Baku shortly after the Revolution. Scribes such as Nikos Kazantzakis or André Malraux whetted their talents on the dreadful but romantic vision of the oppressed masses of the East rising up.

Canada participated in the cultural phenomenon of the Orient,of Asia East and South, and Canadians shared in the visions of wealth and uplift and danger. Until the Second World War, however, Canadians were not really required to experience the Orient directly. Culturally, Canadians,like Americans, faced East, not West, to Europe, not Asia. As late as 1940, North America's Pacific Coast was an underpopulated if pleasant backwater, whose inhabitants mimicked the styles not of the temples of Kyoto but of Anne Hathaway's Cottage. Fortunately, the original proprietors of Anne Hathaway's Cottage were taking care of the Orient, admittedly with increasing difficulty as the century wore on.How fortunate, Canadians and Americans (British Columbians and Californians) thought,that their people, like their houses,embodied Europe. Certainly their immigration policy kept them that way.As late as 1951,Canadians of Chinese descent numbered a scant 32,528; those of Japanese origin, 21,663; and other Asians accounted for 18,636 - roughly 73,000 out of a population of 14 million and change - half of one percent of the population.

Canadians were not averse, any more than Europeans or Americans were, to the riches of the Orient.They followed the romance of the clipper ships of the 19th century (some built in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick), the China trade, the opening of China and Japan, the banks and trading firms of the Bund. Canada had, in particular, the Canadian Pacific and its steamships. Yet while prewar trade with the Orient was not entirely insignificant, it was specialized and,in the depressed decade of the 1930s, it hardly signified the fabled riches of the East. In any case, the War put paid to trade.

I have suggested similarities between the backgrounds of Canadians and Americans as they contemplated Asia but there are of course many differences. One is size: as Hemingway said to Fitzgerald or Fitzgerald said to Hemingway,The Rich are different from us - they have more money. The Americans have more money, of course - 12 times more in the 1940s, on the average - but they also have more people and, as a country, they have more history, without having to share it, as Canadians must, with the British Empire. The Americans had a history of their own in the Far East, a history of independent and competitive action, not to mention a peculiarly American policy in the Open Door doctrine. The Americans had gunboats of their own on the Yangtze River, and when they searched for a policy they found the history to justify it. Canadians of the day had no difficulty identifying with the British Empire and using the services and conveniences it provided, but there was an ambiguity in the imperial connection to Asia that was not present where the Americans were concerned. Especially as the British Empire began to wind down and wear away, Canadians discovered that they were less inheritors of the old family firm than temporary passengers on one of its vehicles, and that it was time to get off.

Recent history also played a part.The PacificWar of 1941 to 1945 was an American war. Circumstance eliminated the European colonial powers as significant combatants in Southeast Asia,while further out in the Pacific, the Americans fought virtually alone. Even where another nation contributed substantially to aspects of the war, as the Australians did in New Guinea, imperious American commanders refused to believe that consultation was a necessary part of cooperation. It was true that the American government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt for some time pinned its hopes on the Guomindang regime of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek in China, but by 1944 repeated disappointments persuaded Washington that chaotic China under its corrupt government was not an ally for all seasons. Japan, though an enemy for the duration of the war, might not always be so. ²

Canadians were not directly offended by American practice in the Pacific. The war was far from North America, and British Columbia was mostly a dumping ground for unwilling conscripts.As the war drew to a close, Canadians observed that the Americans were keeping postwar Japanese policy very much to themselves, but while this might be theoretically deplorable, it had no direct implications for Canada. But as the war in the Pacific approached its climax, in the bloody battles for Manila and Iwo Jima and Okinawa, it was hard to escape the impression that for Americans, the war, and the world, had a different shape than for Canadians. Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie King's special assistant, Jack Pickersgill, accompanying the Canadian leader to the founding conference of the United Nations (UN) in 1945, witnessed the end of the European war while in San Francisco. For Canadians,this was the culmination of six years of peril and sacrifice; but in San Francisco, with troopships steaming outbound under the Golden Gate Bridge, it was nothing special. He was in a very different country, Pickersgill reflected.³

During the war, the Canadian government had to deal with its own version of American unilateralism, in war production, in atomic research, in international institutions. It met the challenge by husbanding its resources for the most important questions, rather than squandering them in a process of universal complaint, and by encouraging in the Americans a sense of shared identity, stressing that its objectives and point of view were similar to those of the United States. After the war, the Canadian government employed the same tactic to encourage the Americans into amiability and alliance, knowing that the American government faced more or less the same problems with the same priorities and the same general sense of limited resources.That said,American resources outweighed Canadian at the usual ratio of twelve to one, meaning that the United States had the capacity to make a real difference on certain issues where Canada could at best temporarily top up other countries' financial sink-holes (as in the British loan of 1946). But in the world of 1945-46,American resources were politically limited even if, economically, they seemed a cornucopia by comparison with anyone else's.

The British,conscious of their limited resources but desirous of maximizing their diplomatic clout,made a few half-hearted efforts to entice the dominions into some kind of common defence arrangement.They succeeded, as far as Canada was concerned,only in awakening restless colonial memories about sending troops to the far corners of the earth - the Bay of Bengal was cited in Canadian memoranda - to defend the Empire. ⁴

Japan was, admittedly, less remote than the Bay of Bengal from Canadian thoughts. Nevertheless,American suggestions that Canada join a Far Eastern Advisory Commission received the same reluctant reception as British fantasies of imperial defence. Australia and New Zealand, also named as prospective Commission members, had a "very direct" interest in Far Eastern questions, wrote Norman Robertson, the under-secretary of state for external affairs. He was writing to Mackenzie King, who would have understood and nodded vigorously at the implication that Canada did not have such vital interests. ⁵ In another context, a Canadian historian once characterized Canada as a country of limited identities, a phrase which might have appealed to King. He would have added that Canada in the postwar era was a country of limited resources, rigorously husbanded. Those resources were directed toward Europe, where, after an initial false start, they were successfully deployed.

Canada's European diplomacy had the advantage of applying well tried patterns of behaviour to a situation,the Cold War, that,though novel, featured familiar elements. Fear of communism and distrust of the Soviet Union were not news to anybody in Canada who could remember 1939, while even 1917 was effectively the day before yesterday in the minds of Canadian politicians and officials.To this sense of a familiar enemy could be added the lessons of how to beat such a foe, which showed that wartime allied cooperation and especially solidarity among Canada, Great Britain, and the United States were a prerequisite for victory. During the war, Canada had not frittered away its strength in distant parts of the globe, but had profitted from the lessons of its resistance to the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese alliance in l921,and its refusal to send troops to Chanak in 1922.

What we might call the creative limitations of Canadian policy were embodied in external affairs minister Louis St. Laurent's statement of Canadian foreign policy, the Gray Lecture of January 1947. St. Laurent paid a great deal of attention to Canada's neighbour, the United States, and to Western Europe. In his analysis,"a threat to the liberty of Western Europe, where our political ideas were nurtured, was a threat to our way of life." ⁶ In Europe, Canadians could engage their basic values and beliefs. St. Laurent had much else to say in his address, which was the most coherent public definition of Canadian foreign policy ever presented. Yet among his promises of engagement and justifications for action,he sounded two cautionary notes. First, Canada's national unity must be enhanced, not subverted, by its foreign policy. To an audience that remembered the conscription crises of 1942 and 1944 - and possibly 1917 - his meaning was clear. Second,Canadians must not forget that they were a secondary power. If Canada's policy was to have force, it must carry with it those states "who must carry the burden of whatever action is taken." The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was to be a happy example where Canadian policy meshed with the interests of the burden-bearing states; as with the United States, Canadians knew Europe, appreciated it, and had recent experience in the region.Alliance meant sharing burdens.The problem was that while NATO was geographically restricted,the burdens were not.

In his masterful biography of Lester Pearson , who as under-secretary of state for external affairs,foreign minister, and then prime minister was fated to oversee almost two decades of Canadian external policy, John English singles out Asia as an area of relative failure. ⁷ In Asia , English observes, Pearson was unprepared , by formation, by temperament, and by focus.Yet time and again, in Korea, in Indochina, and in the nagging question of China,Pearson was forced to confront Asian issues. Like most Canadians, he did not much want to do so, and his efforts, well meant and sometimes well considered, did not do him or his country much good. For Canada's policy toward Asia was constrained by its policy toward Europe, and ,above all, its relations with the United States. These constraints - the diplomacy of constraint, one might say - restricted Canada's freedom of manoeuvre even though, in theory, Canada's objective in Asia was the same as that of its allies: preserving Asia from communism.

Up to a point, Canada could do little to intervene in the Chinese civil war, though it did pursue briefly a quest for commercial connections in the fa rcical episode of the Ming Sung ships. (Shades of Marco Polo.) Canadian representation in China was not strong, as the dispatches in Documents on Canadian External Relations attest. Nor did Canada derive much benefit , in analysis or insight, from the presence of the fabled Dr. Herbert Norman at the right hand of General Douglas MacArthur, the American proconsul in Tokyo. Japan was American territory, where Canada interfered at its peril: naturally, Canada did not interfere.

Canada was not so constrained in those areas where Empire was becoming Commonwealth.India had always attracted a certain amount of Canadian attention and some Canadian diplomats hoped that its British heritage would tell. ⁸ India,because of its size, was important, but part of its importance for Canada lay in its history, and in the presumed relevance of a shared inheritance. ⁹ As Japan had risen in American eyes after 1944, so India assumed significance for Canada, in both cases in the absence of China where the Americans had given up, and where Canada was ineffective.

Canada's interest in India thus met several of St. Laurent's criteria for Canadian engagement: historically and culturally, there was common ground; economically, India did not draw on Canadian resources, and therefore met the test of proportionality;and strategically, India's sheer size, as the second-largest nation after China in terms of population, made a decent interest advisable. Canadian interest was confirmed a few years later with the Colombo Plan,whose purpose was to offer an explicit alternative to communism,ultimately by drawing in American funds,and with a modest Canadian contribution. ¹⁰ In the end, Canada probably gave less in money, at least during this period,than in attention and appreciation. As the deputy under-secretary, Escott Reid, put it in 1949, "We have endeavoured... to let that country know of the importance we place on her strategic position as an active link between the Western point of view and the abnormally active and complex issues that are now emerging in the East." ¹¹ Canada's Cold War interest was not absent from Reid's thoughts about India; as was evident then, and later, his objective was to shore up Western interests in the hope, and later the certainty, that Canada could formulate these in a more acceptable way where the Indians were concerned than the United States. ¹² Reid, drawing on a terminology usually reserved for Anglo - American or Canadian-American or Australian-American relations, wanted to create and believed he did create, a "special relationship" with India.It was to be a marriage of Canadian strategy with Indian tactics,for there was no question that Canada would or could abandon its commitment to a Cold War. Thus it was,in a restricted sense, what Steven Lee has called a policy for "an Asian Cold War." ¹³

Lester B. Pearson,Secretary of State for External Affairs, meets with Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India,during a visit to Asia in November 1955.National Archives of Canada/PA-165518

Elsewhere in Asia the Cold War took a back seat to Canadian reluctance and American exclusiveness.Already suspicious of the American tendency to act first and command support later, Canada was a very reluctant participant in the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea (UNTCOK), so reluctant as almost to split the cabinet at the beginning of 1948. ¹⁴ Canada's representative on the commission, Dr. George Patterson, did not prove a happy follower where the Americans led, stimulating charges from the US military that he was,in Pearson's words, "a Communist or a fellow traveller." ¹⁵ Canadian participation on UNTCOK certainly did little to encourage a desire for further contact with that country, as an interview between a Korean delegation and acting prime minister St. Laurent showed in October 1948: "Korea was still a long way from Canada," St. Laurent stated, and while he did not add, "Thank God", the notion may not have been far from his thoughts. ¹⁶

Korea remained a long way from Canada and Canadian priorities in 1949 and early 1950. Interest centred rather more on China and on the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war, but without any strong sense that vital Canadian interests were engaged. Canada instead followed others in deciding whether or not to recognize the Communist regime; at first, the British and Indians,and later the Americans.By the time that issue was shelved, Korea was an issue again, because of the outbreak of the Korean War and later Chinese intervention in the conflict.

The war, and the unexpected American response, have long since been authoritatively examined.That Canada was surprised at the outbreak of war should not concern us greatly: the Americans, with observers on the ground,were also taken unawares as,of course,was the South Korean government. More interesting is the Canadian astonishment at the American decision to defend Korea - interesting because of the purportedly close relations between senior Canadian diplomats and their counterparts in Washington. But that is a subject for another day.

What should be underlined here is that Canada did not participate in the UN expedition to Korea because of any intrinsic concern for Korea and Koreans , but because of an interest in the UN, first , and in relations with the United States, second .The possibility that Korea was a prelude to a general Communist attack else where on the vast periphery of the Soviet Union was ,when reinforced by the serious though temporary American defeat in November 1950, sufficient to bring the Canadian government to the contemplation of war. But it was the prospect of war in Europe that moved them, and not war on the continent of Asia. ¹⁷

In 1950 and later, Canadian officials proved highly resistant to the possibility of involvement in the defence of Asia.Conferences on the defence of Southeast Asia might draw Canadians, but only as observers. And when these conferences threatened to bring forth a new defence organization, eventually the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), Canadian reaction was negative. While prepared to contemplate some effort in the North Pacific, bureaucrats,officers,and ministers otherwise held firmly to their view that, with large forces committed to NATO, enough was enough."Militarily," General Charles Foulkes wrote in March 1953, "we have no more interest in South East Asia than we would have in a case of communist aggression in Iran or Pakistan. It appears to me that the Canadian interest in the Pacific will really be directed more to the Northern Pacific than to the area around South East Asia." But having raised the Pacific - meaning Japan - Foulkes quickly drew back. Japan was American turf, and any scheme for a Canada-US-Japan arrangement would at best create "a certain embarrassment for us for some time to come." After all, Canada's ships were sailing around the North Atlantic, and there were none to spare elsewhere. ¹⁸

"What is admirable on the grand scale is monstrous on the small," says a character in a recent German novel. There was a contrast, often painful, between Canada's aspirations for world harmony and the resources it was actually prepared to put behind them. And yet Asia kept interfering in the destiny of Europe.The war in Korea concluded with a stalemate, but the war in Indochina carried on, between Viet Minh insurgents - Communists - and the French.The war drained French resources from Europe, made nonsense of NATO's force goals (already enfeebled), and imperiled the European Defence Community, an improbable confection of mixed motives and mixed armies.

When the French finally confronted defeat at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, Canada's reaction, as far as the French were concerned, resembled relief. On the other hand, there were the Americans, and the Americans showed a disposition, incomprehensible to Canadians, to keep the war going.To patch up matters as best it could, Canada accepted an unsought and unwanted nomination to a tripartite truce supervisory commission in Indochina (really three commissions). ¹⁹ There is no doubt the Canadian government thought it was doing good if not doing well, and equally no doubt that it hoped its efforts would amount to a decent veil over an unpalatable surrender to the Communists.

It was, as diplomacy so often is, the application of the Micawber principle: something will turn up, and conflict postponed is better than conflict engaged. And, as we know, something did turn up, in the person of Ngo Dinh Diem, who would be, for nine years, the Asian tail that wagged the American dog in Southeast Asia. But that is another story - the second stage of the Cold War, and the subject of Canadian document books yet to come.

Nevertheless, in that future chapter, the same old story line will be present. Canada and the United States, starting from similar backgrounds and related assumptions, arrived at different conclusions. It was a line well established in the ten years after World War Two; it would play for another twenty.

^1. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, 1996); Colin S. Gray, Explorations in Strategy (Westport,1997).

^2. See Walter LaFeber, The Clash:A History of U.S.-Japan Relations (New York,1997),pp. 215-30.

^3. Interview with J.W. Pickersgill.

^4. Donald Page, ed., Documents on Canadian External Relations (DCER),Volume 12: 1946 (Ottawa, 1977), pp. 1235-36. Norman Robertson to Vincent Massey, restating the objections of "Canadian public opinion" to the defence of "remote"areas,such as the Bay of Bengal.

^5. John F. Hilliker, ed., Documents on Canadian External Relations,Volume 10: 1944-45, Part 1 (Ottawa,1987), p. 980.

^6. Louis St. Laurent, The Foundations of Canadian Policy in World Affairs (Toronto, 1947), p. 21.

^7. John English, The Worldly Years:The Life of Lester B. Pearson,Volume II: 1949-1972 (Toronto, 1992),pp. 31-32.

^8. Harry Ferns, Reading From Left to Right: One Man's Political History (Toronto, 1983).

^9. Donald Page and Norman Hillmer, eds., Documents on Canadian External Relations,Volume 13:1947 (Ottawa,1993),pp. 34-41.

^10. On the origins of the Canadian contribution to the Colombo Plan,see Greg Donaghy, ed., Documents on Canadian External Relations,Volume 16:1950 (Ottawa,1995),pp. 1202-79.

^11. Hector Mackenzie, ed., Documents on Canadian External Relations,Volume 15:1949 (Ottawa,1995),pp. 1433-37.

^12. Mackenzie, DCER,Volume 15, p. 187.

^13. Steven Lee, Outposts for Empire:Korea,Vietnam and the Origins of the Cold War in Asia,1949-1954 (Montreal and Kingston,1995), p. 90.

^14. Hector Mackenzie, ed., Documents on Canadian External Relations,Volume 14:1948 (Ottawa,1994),pp. 148-51.

^15. Mackenzie,DCER, Volume 14, p. 187.

^16. Mackenzie, DCER,Volume 14, pp. 1862-63.

^17. Donaghy, DCER, Volume 15, pp. 1159-62.

^18. National Archives of Canada (NAC), Records of the Department of External Affairs,File 50,273-40, Foulkes to Dana Wilgress,under-secretary of state for external affairs, 10 March 1953. On Foulkes' letter, Wilgress minuted:"This is undoubtedly true."

^19. Greg Donaghy, ed., Documents on Canadian External Relations,Volume 20: 1954 (Ottawa,1997),pp. 1675-97.