Why Canada Goes to War: Explaining Combat Participation in US-led Coalitions

Abstract

Canada has taken part in six wars since 1945, all of which have been conducted under US leadership. Despite such military interventionism, there have been no systematic comparative analyses of Canada's decisions to take part in US-led wars. The objective of this article is to develop and test a theoretical framework about why Canada goes to war. More specifically, it seeks to account for variations in Canada's provision of combat forces to multinational interventions led by the United States. It assesses leading theoretical explanations by examining five post–Cold War cases: the wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Libya; the war against ISIS; and the refusal to take part in the invasion of Iraq. The article concludes that Canada's willingness to go to war is shaped primarily by a desire to maintain transatlantic alliance unity and enhance Canada's alliance credibility. Threats to national security, the legitimacy of the intervention, government ideology and public opinion are not found to consistently or meaningfully shape Canadian decisions to take part in US-led wars.

Show them the flag: status ambitions and recognition in small state coalition warfare

“…In this way, some of the empirical and theoretical shortcomings which the modified threat hypothesis has encountered can be modified. First, contrary to expectations, there has been a striking variation in the contributions to US-or NATO-led operations by similar security dependent small states, which indicates that other drivers than just a fear of abandonment might be at play (Haesebrouck 2017a, 2017b, Schmitt 2018, Massie 2019. Second, the modified threat hypothesis insufficiently explains why small allies might "punch above their weight" by providing relatively large contributions or by demonstrating a high degree of risk willingness in those operations where the US would otherwise be expected to provide the public security good (Neumann and de Cavalho 2015).…”

Incentives and constraints: a configurational account of European involvement in the anti-Daesh coalition

“…Another explanation for military involvement in coalition operations pertains to the value that states place on their alliance relationship (Davidson, 2014;Massie, 2019). This is related, but not identical to long-standing arguments about alliance dependence (Bennett et al, 1997;Snyder, 1997).…”

“…This underscores the relevance of international-level incentives for coalition contributionsas most of those countries that contributed militarily had foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria (many of these countries also experienced jihadi terrorism on their own soil), and many valued their alliance membership in NATO and their relationship with the USA. Moreover, the analysis documents the utility of a configurational perspective that integrates international-and domestic-level factors (Bennett et al, 1997;Haesebrouck, 2018;Massie, 2019), because neither external threat nor alliance value are sufficient on their own to bring about the outcome. Throughout the three paths, the two conditions combine with other push factors (Path 1 and Path 2) and with the absence of a constraint against military involvement (Path 2 and Path 3).…”

“…How to explain this variation among EU member states' contributions to the anti-Daesh coalition? Several studies have documented the early phases of the US-led coalition and explored potential explanations for the observed variance in deployment policies across countries (McInnis, 2016;Saideman, 2016;Haesebrouck, 2018), whereas others have focused on individual countries' contributions (Doeser and Eidenfalk, 2019;Massie, 2019;Pedersen and Reykers, 2020), but there has not been a systematic comparison of EU member state involvement in the fight against Daesh. 3 Since the 2015 incident was the first invocation of the Lisbon Treaty's mutual defense clause, it is of particular policy relevance to conduct such a comparison across EU members and their foreign and security policies.…”

“…Governments further operate under institutional and legal constraints, such as parliamentary veto rights over military deployments (Peters and Wagner, 2011;Ruys et al, 2019) and they usually observe public opinion, which can form an additional constraint against military involvement (Baum and Potter, 2015;Everts and Isernia, 2015). Building on previous efforts to combine such international and domestic-level explanations (e.g., Bennett et al, 1997;Haesebrouck, 2018;Massie, 2019;Mello, 2019), this article develops an integrative theoretical framework to explain EU member states' military contributions to the anti-Daesh coalition in Iraq and Syria, as outlined in the following sections. 4…”