Ottawa’s initial reaction to these findings was one of trepidation and secret dealings. The Soviet Union had emerged from World War Two as an ally, and Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King feared that revealing such knowledge would trigger a diplomatic crisis. For months, Gouzenko’s defection was kept a secret, even from much of the Cabinet. However, Prime Minister King knew that such information would inevitably come to light amid rumours beginning to spiral, and the government should not be seen as merely reactive; thus, he established the Royal Commission on Espionage, chaired by Supreme Court Justices Roy Kellock and Robert Taschereau, on February 5. When Gouzenko’s defection and the content of the files he carried out were revealed to the public in February 1946, “[n]ews of the ring of spies made headlines around the world as the RCMP seized and interrogated twelve Canadians and one British civil servant on suspicion of espionage,” in the words of historians Reg Whitaker and Steve Hewitt.^[1] Moreover, on February 16, 1946, the Globe and Mail had reported that the “atom secret” had been shared with the Soviet Union.^[2] Drastic times called for drastic measures.

The Kellock-Taschereau Commission was sweeping in scope and thorough in discovery. Extraordinary powers were granted to it under the War Measures Act, allowing those involved to detain, interrogate, and search suspected communists or spies. This work led to the arrest of more than twenty alleged Soviet agents or sympathizers, and ultimately, to eleven convictions, including that of Fred Rose. Even the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) joined Ottawa in its espionage probes.^[3] Moreover, the possibility that scientific and industry secrets might be leaked or stolen to advance the Soviet Union’s acquisition of the atomic bomb was enough reason to infringe on individual liberties. Indeed, the Western world reconciled with scientific treason when British scientist Alan Nunn May was accused of passing uranium samples and bomb details to Soviet handler Pavel Sudoplatov in 1945.^[4]

The first, and arguably largest, primary industry in Canada to be impacted by investigations was mining. Located approximately 180 kilometres north-west of Ottawa, Chalk River Laboratories is a nuclear research facility that began in 1945. By the spring of 1950, Chalk River was extracting approximately 50 grams of plutonium per week and, ultimately, had sent over 254 kilograms of used plutonium reactor fuel to the U.S. Department of Energy to be used in the production of nuclear weapons between 1955 and 1985. This made Chalk River a prime economic and strategic target for scientific espionage and economic sabotage. Canada’s nuclear program, which included Chalk River and the Montreal Laboratory (producing Tube Alloys), was rife for Soviet spies. Bruno Pontecorvo, a scientist at Chalk River who conducted cosmic-ray work, defected to the USSR in the 1950s with nuclear reactor designs, prompting RCMP loyalty probes and FBI collaboration.^[5]

Another site of concern was the Montreal Laboratories, founded in 1942 at the Université de Montréal by the National Research Council. Included among Canadian and British scientists were Hans-Heinrich von Halban and Lew Kowarski, both of whom joined from France. The Montreal Laboratories played a pivotal role in developing natural uranium-heavy water reactors, reporting on neutron physics and criticality, and ultimately contributing to the development of fissile material production that would go into the development of the Manhattan Project (the U.S. creation of the atomic bomb). Gouzenko’s files had named Montreal Laboratory spies, including that of Dr. Alan Nunn May, who had been working at the Montreal laboratory in 1943.^[6] The extent to which Gouzenko’s files were tied to atomic secrets (or the economy more broadly) is hard to determine, but by the 1950s, enhanced RCMP surveillance strategies were aimed at protecting billions of dollars’ worth of intellectual property due to the threat of infiltration. Indeed, nuclear physics, cryptography, and radio were all valuable foci for espionage because they were integral to the larger Western innovation system and defence industry. The question was no longer whether radicals might sabotage a factory or military base, but whether foreign intelligence could secretly copy and acquire the blueprints and records of the most advanced science Canada possessed.

—Prof. Nicholas Hrynyk

^[1] Reg Whitaker and Steve Hewitt, Cold War Canada: The Making of a National insecurity State, 1945-1957 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 27.

^[2] Author unknown, “Atom Secret Leaks to Soviet, Canadians Suspected,” Globe and Mail, February 16, 1946.

^[3] “FBI Joins Ottawa Spy Hunt: Investigation Now Focused on Munitions Department,” Globe and Mail, February 18, 1946.

^[4] “Dr. May Released,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 9, no. 1 (1953): 30.

^[5] Giuseppe Fidecaro, “Bruno Pontecorvo: From Rome to Dubna (personal recollections)” (December 1996): 6. https://cds.cern.ch/record/1543889/files/PONTE_5.pdf

^[6] Henry Gass, “Montreal in the Age of the Atom,” The McGill Daily, November 10, 2010. https://www.mcgilldaily.com/2010/11/montreal_in_the_age_of_the_atom_/

To put things into context, 1929 saw Canada slide toward an economic depression. The Great Depression, which would last until World War II, saw rapid economic disruption to global stock markets that compromised industrial output across Canada. Simultaneously, and without coincidence, the Communist Party of Canada had extended its reach into key industries, relief organizations emerged, and labour unions continued to strengthen. While Communist sympathies had reached their zenith during the Great Depression, there was still broad disapproval of Socialism in Canadian society. For instance, on August 1, 1930, Canadian newspapers reported that Communists across Canada had unsuccessfully attempted to meet and demonstrate “against imperialist wars and as a movement in support of revolutionary movements in other parts of the world” due to police and citizens quashing their protests.^[3] In response, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Canadian Federal government painted a picture of Communists as part of a larger subversive movement embedded in urban and industrial organizations and associations. Indeed, the RCMP established an impressive network of informants in bodies such as the Workers Unity League, Ukrainian Labour temples, the Montréal Young Communists League (YCL), and the Montreal Trade Union Commission.

From the RCMP’s perspective, communists were not just a political nuisance, but a potential conduit for industrial intelligence to flow back to Moscow. The Victoria Daily Times reported on June 12, 1931, that the Honourable Joseph Philipe Baby Casgrain, a Liberal Senator for De Lanaudière (Montreal), had warned cabinet that “Communists in Canada acted under direct instructions from Moscow, and were taking advantage of the depression in an attempt to undermine the present social order in Canada,” in the words of the paper.^[4] Surveillance reports from this era reveal an obsession with tracking radical organizers across rail shops, mining camps, naval ports, and munitions-related factories. Each offered technical data, production figures, and labour, which the government believed could be leveraged by a foreign power.

For example, The Auto Workers Life reported that the anti-union Corporations Auxiliary Co. of New York had been retained by Detroit automakers (including their Canadian subsidiaries) to plant spies within the Auto Workers Union. “Fifteen men, all members of the Border Cities Local of the Automobile Workers Industrial Union of Canada were discharged from the plant of the Ford Motor Co. of Canada,” the paper informed readers.^[5] Ford Motor Co., was particularly infamous for its “Service Department,” which was made up of gangsters, thugs, and ex-convicts who patrolled and disciplined workers.^[6] While unionism was at the forefront of corporate executives’ minds, there were also fears of economic espionage and the leaking of trade secrets. The Auxiliary Co., of Canada Limited reportedly offered companies spies as part of a suite of services for corporations to quash dissidence and crack down on trade secrets being revealed.^[7]

Despite media scrutiny of such tactics, clearly the Canadian federal government, and by extension the RCMP, condoned such practices because they believed that there was a concerted effort on the part of a conspiratorial party to turn factories and shops into sites of direct conflict through labour unrest or, more subversively, economic sabotage when industrial capacity or patents were revealed to foreign powers through intelligence gathering. Historian Steve Hewitt notes in his book, Spying 101, “the RCMP sought evidence of covert Soviet influence on overt events—strikes, riots, etc.—much like British intelligence did…”^[8] Nevertheless, Ottawa had prepared for this potential concern with the Canadian Criminal Code. Section 98 was used in 1931 to outlaw the Communist Party of Canada and jail its leader, Tim Buck. Use of the Criminal Code in this capacity codified the idea that revolutionary politics were a direct threat to national security, well before any language of “economic espionage” existed. Between 1929 and 1930, the RCMP had analysts looking at labour agitation, communist organizing, and rumours of industrial sabotage across Canada. A central problem remained, however: how does the federal government keep control over the knowledge and infrastructure that underpinned Canada’s war-fighting potential and export controls?

—Prof. Nicholas Hrynyk

^[1] Gregory S. Kealey, “Spymasters, Spies, and Their Subjects: The RCMP and Canadian State Repression, 1914-1939,” 18-33. In Whose National Security? Canadian State Surveillance and the Creation of Enemies, edited by Gary Kinsman, Dieter K. Buse, and Mercedes Steedman (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2000), 18.

^[2] Dieter K. Buse, “Observing the Political and Informing on the Personal: State Surveillance Systems in a European Context,” 11-17. In Whose National Security? Canadian State Surveillance and the Creation of Enemies, edited by Gary Kinsman, Dieter K. Buse, and Mercedes Steedman (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2000), 15.

^[3] Author unknown, “Police Forces Are In Control on Reds’ Day,” Victoria Daily Times, August 2, 1930, 3.

^[4] Author unknown, “Registration Private Bill Before Senate,” Victoria Daily Times, June 12, 1931, 10.

^[5] Author unknown, “Spy on Ford and Chrysler Workers,” The Auto Workers Life, March 1929.

^[6] Gilbert King, “How the Ford Motor Company Won a Battle and Lost Ground,” Smithsonian Magazine, April 30, 2013. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-ford-motor-company-won-a-battle-and-lost-ground-45814533/

^[7] Stephen Endicott, Raising the Workers’ Flag: The Workers’ Unity League of Canada, 1930-1936 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 190.

^[8] Steve Hewitt, Spying 101: The RCMP’s Secret Activities at Canadian Universities, 1917-1997 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 49.

For more than three decades, beginning with the Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement and later NAFTA, trade policy was built on a simple premise: reduce barriers, expand markets, improve efficiency, and prosperity would follow. The prevailing assumption was that globalization would make nations wealthier and, in doing so, more stable and cooperative.

That world no longer exists.

The geopolitical shocks of the past two decades have fundamentally altered the strategic landscape. The global financial crisis exposed weaknesses in the international economic order. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the fragility of global supply chains. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrated how energy, food, and critical resources could become instruments of coercion. Competition over semiconductors, artificial intelligence, critical minerals, and advanced technologies has underscored that economic dependence can quickly become strategic vulnerability.

Perhaps most significantly, China’s rise as an economic superpower has challenged many of the assumptions that underpinned the post-Cold War trading system. Their framework for trade with nations is based solely on leverage as highlighted in a paper in the Journal of Geoeconomics (Countering China’s Economic Coercion: Lessons from Japan). The expectation that deeper commercial integration alone would produce greater political convergence, liberalization of human rights, and fair trade with the PRC has given way to a more complex reality, one in which trade, technology, industrial capacity, and national security are increasingly intertwined amongst allied democracies in order to complete and prosper.

Governments are responding accordingly.

Washington’s approach to CUSMA reflects this evolution. The agreement is no longer viewed simply as a mechanism to facilitate commerce across North America. Increasingly, it is becoming the economic architecture of a trusted continental security partnership–one intended to strengthen supply chains, protect advanced manufacturing, secure critical technologies, and reduce strategic dependence on geopolitical competitors.

This is not protectionism in the traditional sense. It is geoeconomics: the recognition that economic policy has become an essential instrument of national strategy.

For Canada, this presents both an opportunity and a challenge.

Canada remains one of the United States’ closest allies and its largest trading partner. Our economies are deeply integrated through manufacturing, agriculture, energy, aerospace, financial services, and increasingly through investments in electric vehicles, battery production, and critical minerals. Millions of jobs on both sides of the border depend upon this relationship.

At the same time, successive Canadian governments have sought to expand commercial engagement with China, recognizing both the scale of its economy and the opportunities it presents for Canadian exporters and investors.

That balancing act is becoming increasingly difficult.

Washington no longer views trade exclusively through the lens of comparative advantage. Investment screening, technology transfers, telecommunications infrastructure, critical minerals, digital networks, artificial intelligence, and advanced manufacturing are now considered matters of economic and national security. These issues are rapidly becoming central to America’s expectations of its closest trading partners and the reality of geoeconomics and sides need to be chosen in this highly contested hybrid war space.

The question facing Canada, therefore, is not whether it should trade with China. Canada should continue to engage internationally wherever doing so advances our national interest and remains consistent with our security obligations and democratic values. The more pressing question is whether Canada’s broader economic strategy remains aligned with the strategic direction in which North America is moving.

The timing of recent developments is instructive.

As North America begins to reassess CUSMA through the lens of economic security, China has moved further toward integrating its legal, political, and economic institutions under a unified national strategy. Its newly-enacted National Ethnic Unity Law forms part of that broader approach. The legislation has attracted criticism from democratic governments, human rights organizations, and legal scholars because of concerns that it could further erode the cultural, linguistic, and religious identities of ethnic minority communities in favour of a more centralized conception of national unity. While the law has drawn significant criticism from democratic governments, legal scholars and human rights organizations for its potential impact on the cultural, linguistic, and religious identities of China’s ethnic minorities, it also reflects Beijing’s broader approach to governance. Rather than treating economic policy, national identity, education, industrial development and security as separate policy domains, China increasingly integrates them into their comprehensive national economic strategy designed to advance long-term state objectives.

Democratic societies should reject any suggestion that national competitiveness requires sacrificing pluralism, individual liberty, or the rule of law. Those principles remain among our greatest strengths. Yet we should also recognize an important strategic reality: our principal competitors increasingly integrate economic policy, industrial planning, technology development, investment, education, and national security into a coherent long-term strategy. The lesson is not to emulate China’s political system. It is to ensure that democratic nations pursue their own economic strategies with equal clarity, consistency, and purpose.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the global competition over electric vehicles.

China’s EV industry is not simply the product of market forces. It reflects years of coordinated industrial policy, strategic investment, and deliberate efforts to establish global leadership across the automotive supply chain–from battery production and critical minerals to advanced manufacturing and software integration.

Canada, together with the United States, has committed billions of dollars to developing a North American EV ecosystem starting with the Biden administration. Those investments are intended not only to accelerate the transition to cleaner transportation but also to preserve advanced manufacturing capacity and strengthen the continent’s long-term industrial competitiveness.

This raises an important strategic question.

Can North America successfully build a resilient automotive sector if heavily subsidized Chinese manufacturers gain significant access to the Canadian market? Both renowned China expert Dr. Charles Burton and Michael Kovrig have argued that this debate extends far beyond consumer prices. It touches on industrial resilience, supply-chain security, technological leadership, and the long-term viability of Canada’s manufacturing base. These concerns deserve serious consideration as governments seek to balance the benefits of open markets with the imperative of protecting strategic industries.

The same logic applies to critical minerals.

Canada possesses many of the resources essential to the technologies that will define the twenty-first century, including lithium, graphite, nickel, cobalt, and antimony. Yet ownership, processing capacity, investment screening, and supply-chain control increasingly matter as much as the resources themselves. As Canada has learned through debates over foreign investment in strategic sectors, from telecommunications to critical minerals; economic sovereignty can no longer be separated from national security.

These are precisely the issues that will shape the next chapter of CUSMA.

The agreement’s review mechanism should not be viewed merely as an administrative exercise or a technical trade negotiation. It is an opportunity for North American partners to determine whether they are building an economic community capable of competing in an increasingly contested geopolitical environment that defends their respective

The implications extend far beyond Canada.

Around the world, governments are recognizing that trade policy can no longer be developed in isolation from broader national objectives. Agreements negotiated solely to increase exports or reduce tariffs are no longer sufficient. Nations must also ask whether their trade relationships strengthen economic resilience, protect critical industries, encourage innovation, secure trusted supply chains, and advance their long-term strategic interests. If foreign investment is involved, their objectives must be part of the risk analysis going forward.

Every government has a responsibility to create prosperity for its citizens. But in an era of intensifying geopolitical competition, there is an equally important question that policymakers can no longer afford to ignore: whose national agenda is ultimately strengthened by the wealth that trade creates?

The United States’ decision to place CUSMA under regular strategic review suggests that Washington has already begun answering that question. Canada and, indeed, every trading nation would be wise to do the same.

It is about geoeconomics, stupid.

—Dean Baxendale @ OPI

As Westad observes at the outset, today “less than half of 1% of the world’s population has experienced Great Power war.”[1] Coddled by the safety of the postwar World War II era, the vast majority of us grew up during the Cold War -- a stable-ish world governed by two Superpowers -- or the post-Cold War era, in which just one Superpower reigned. During these eras, we learned to think of the clashes of Great Powers as a vestige of history, rather than a danger that could return under new conditions.

Westad notes will change.

“We are entering a phase where multiple Great Powers jostle for supremacy within regions and within human endeavors such as nuclear technology, artificial intelligence, or space exploration,” he writes.[2] “This world is unlike anything any of us have experienced in our lifetime. But it does look quite a bit like the world of more than 100 years ago, from the late 19th century to 1914.”[3]

Westad argues that today’s Great Powers, to avert looming risks, urgently need to seek compromise wherever they can. This will require making difficult decisions over complex sovereign and territorial questions which could otherwise potentially serve as triggers for Great Power disputes, such as Taiwan and the South China Sea. It will require resolution in wars in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine. And it will necessitate arms control over sensitive technologies, like artificial intelligence.

Otherwise, the consequences could be devastating.

The book is clearly inspired by the scale of devastation that arose in the past when Great Powers clashed. “The total number killed in battles among Great Powers in the hundred years between 1815 and 1914,” he writes, “is smaller than the number of casualties at the Somme in the summer of 1916.”[4]

Concerned about this scale, Westad weaves that past into the present. He starts with an exploration of the various Great Powers’ circumstances in the 19th century. He highlights the example of Britain, indisputably the strongest power in the mid-19th Century, with its leadership in industrial output and technological and military innovation and production essentially unrivaled.

By the end of the century, he observes, political attitudes based on fear had contributed to Britain’s decline. Westad suggests that these attitudes present a helpful comparator with the United States today: as Britain did then, the Great Power’s anxieties and fears led to the sudden appearance of tariffs leveled by a country that was once “the free-trade nation in the world.”[5] Britain suddenly did not wish to behave like the guarantor of the order it helped build, much like the United States today.

Another characteristic of British society of the time resembling the United States of today: inequality. “In 1910, the top 5 percent in Britain owned almost 90 percent of the country’s wealth.”[6] Compare that with the United States: “In the United States today, the top 5 percent own around two thirds, and that share is rising.”[7]

The comparator that he makes with Wilhelmine Germany -- growing rapidly after unification into a credible superpower -- is the dizzying rise of China. China’s ascent, like Germany’s, has created a potentially dangerous combination of capability, grievance, and impatience.

Westad acknowledges that many of the global institutions created in the wake of World War I and II, which were designed to contribute to peace and development and to avert Great Power conflict, have been thwarted, bent, ignored, or exploited by states that do not share the assumptions behind them. However, he seems to downplay this fact. Trump’s critique of the postwar system has political force for a reason Westad too often overlooks: the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, NATO, and other multilateral fora have not always been respected by the states operating inside them.[8]

But Westad nevertheless effectively shows how institutional weakness, domestic resentment, and nationalist confidence can reinforce one another until compromise becomes impossible and tensions come to a boil. “Economic, resentment, aided by fears, guided by nationalist beliefs, were key aspects of what led toward war in 1914,” he writes.[9]

This is where the book is especially good: not just on current constellations of power and comparisons with the past, but on the emotions -- especially the emotions of strong leaders -- that make this power so dangerous. Westad’s most important subject is fear -- the fear of Great Powers over their own decline, the fear of Great Powers about encirclement or entrapment by other Great Powers, the fear of Great Powers of humiliation by others, and the fear that waiting is wrong.

“Very few leaders inherently believe that a major war is the best outcome for their country,” he writes. “What pushes decision-makers toward war is usually fear, and often fear of the debilitating kind, preventing them from taking action that could move away from military conflict, or at least buying time in which peace can be negotiated.”[10]

That observation helps explain why wars can arrive even when nearly everyone wants them averted. Fear narrows the imagination.

The most immediate test is Taiwan. Westad emphasizes how much uncertainty still surrounds China’s military capability and its willingness to act. The risk is not only that China might decide to move; it is that the United States, Taiwan, China, and other regional partners might misread each others’ resolve or intentions.

Westad believes that even in the event of a quarantine or blockade of Taiwan, deathly military conflagration would likely spiral as a result. That judgment is bleak but it aligns with his study of events following the assassination of Franz Ferdinand: once Great Powers begin testing red lines, events tend to overrun the intentions of leaders that set them in motion.

The danger is not confined to Taiwan. Westad identifies other potential hotspots, including India and Pakistan, India and China, North Korea and South Korea, the Philippines, Russian revanchist wars of aggression (including Ukraine and potentially the Baltic states, especially if the United States leaves NATO), and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The final accelerant is speed. That may be the book’s other most alarming point. As Trump’s conduct on X demonstrates almost daily, modern communications do not necessarily make leaders wiser; they may instead make them more reactive. A rumor, cyberattack, blockade, or missile launch could produce a chain of decisions before diplomacy has time to work. This might be why books like Nuclear War: A Scenario or the recent political thriller film A House of Dynamite have captivated so much attention in recent years.

This is also why Westad’s conclusion is both realistic and urgently cautionary. Great Powers must compromise not because it is satisfying, but because the alternative is so utterly catastrophic.

—The Director

[1] 3

[2] 4

[3] 4

[4] 15

[5] 35

[6] 80

[7] 81

[8] 106

[9] 109

[10] 65

But more recently, emboldened by the backlash to woke politics, a much more public version of Palantirology has been demanding attention.

Last year, CEO Alex Karp and Head of Corporate Affairs Nicholas Zamiska published The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.[3] If you haven’t read the book, it offers a fusion of anti-woke rhetoric with a strident commitment to re-aligning the private sector with the state to develop the capabilities necessary to deter the threats facing the West.

In Mobilize,[4] Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar and employee Madeline Hart make another contribution to this burgeoning field, but with a sharper focus on procurement and the industrial base. Their contribution is persuasive when it shows how badly processes have decayed, but it often forgets that technological innovation is not a replacement for strategic judgment.

Published just weeks into the start of the war in Iran, the book depicts the new realities of warfare with the opening example of Operation Spiderweb, in which Ukrainian drones smuggled into Russian territory self-deployed to destroy a third of Russia’s strategic bombers.

“Billions of dollars of hardware were eliminated for an estimated cost of $1 million,”[5] they write. Reading Mobilize as Iranian drones choked the Strait of Hormuz and brought America to its knees, one could not help but feel the parallels. Better technology -- such as affordable and scalable anti-drone technology -- might have gone far in countering Iran.

Mobilize is a nostalgic book, with a lot of love for a very particular historical period of America -- WWII and the immediate post-WWII era. The historical chapters capture in glowing depiction an America that could build quickly -- very quickly. At the outset of WWII, President Roosevelt set an ambitious goal -- ridiculed at the time -- of building 50,000 planes per year. By the end of the war, they achieved it.

After WWII, procurement success endured. “Military aircraft projects took an average of five years from first contract to first flight,” they write. “The trend was similar for other systems. It took five years for Bernard Shriever to build the Atlas, Minuteman, Thor, and Titan missiles. Hyman Rickover’s first nuclear-powered submarine was delivered in fewer than seven years. The list goes on.”[6]

These examples are best read as evidence that strong institutions worked under the umbrella of informed strategy. Speed served a purpose. Institutions were trusted by citizens. Those institutions trusted founders to build. Today, that is not often the case. Procurement practices seem based on mistrust. Today’s bureaucracies tend to homogenize their assessment of talent, not give talent the latitude to do invent.

Anyone who has worked with government procurement -- or tried to apply for a Tri-Agency grant -- understands the problem in broad strokes. A contortion of competing policy imperatives -- protect the environment, buy local, support X disadvantaged group, maintain research security, etc. -- has generated a procurement / granting process that is often as perplexing as the building of the product or service actually being procured / supported.

In many military circles, despite discussions of reducing the burden of paperwork, the time from application to award to signing has been widening, and the inevitable make-work reporting obligations that come afterward make it dreary beyond imagination.

As the authors point out, it was not always this way: the procurement specifications for the F-4 was just two pages long. With such a wide-open door, the best competed. Chrysler made missiles. Goodyear did aerospace.[7] But the sprawl of process and policy and the professionalization of the bureaucracy after the end of the Cold War made working with the government unattractive. The old industrial base was porous; the new actors simply learned to master the rules. (In Canada, that is why staffing firms, not IT companies, now provide most IT solutions.)

This is where their argument is sharpest. The authors argue that government monopsony has transformed the defense industry by enshrining norms like corporate subsidized R&D research, cost-plus contracting, and “spreading” of contracts to certain non-competitive companies as a way of keeping them alive. The research industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned about shaped an industry.

“Monopsony is the root cause of defense dysfunction,” they write, “and the logical result of all the centralizing and controlling ‘reforms’.”[8] They argue for more competition, spurred by the procurement practices that bring it about.

“The monopsony’s fixation on control and tedious regulation has made working in the national interest bad business, suitable only to risk-averse investors who are addicted to dividends and buybacks -- a luxury only affordable at the end of history.”[9] As they write: “[Y]ou either die a startup or live long enough to see yourself become a prime.”[10]

At its best, Mobilize asks the state to recognize exceptional people, buy commercially-viable working products, reward speed, and stop treating requirements documents as if they were substitutes for competence. It is spottier on the financial incentives at play -- figures like von Braun and Kelly Johnson haloed in the book were not chasing money -- but that isn’t surprising coming from at least one author who is a billionaire.

Mobilize is right that the United States cannot regulate, reimburse, and five-year-plan its way into deterrence. It is right that builders matter, that talent matters, and that the government has become too comfortable funding process instead of buying results. But it is incomplete when it lets technological innovation become the sole answer to America’s travails.

As the disastrous terms of another embarassing defeat in the Middle East has recently made clear, strategy matters. Without it, mobilization will only produce faster failure, generate better software for bad or pointless wars, and create more efficient procurement processes for unclear ends that enrich a select few, such as the authors.

Maybe that is why Palantir’s new public confidence deserves real attention.

—The Director

[1] https://theijf.org/brief/canadian-palantir-contract-amendments-obd

[2] https://theijf.org/article/lewis-palantir-secret-contract

[3] https://www.amazon.ca/Technological-Republic-Power-Belief-Future/dp/0593798694

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Mobilize-Reboot-American-Industrial-World/dp/B0FQWGC94Z

[5] 1-2

[6] 88

[7] 124

[8] 146

[9] 148

[10] 148

In present circumstances, it’s a fascinating read.

Born in Boston, Franklin was raised and remained a loyal subject of Britain “until it became clear independence was inevitable.”[3] A runaway to London at an early age, he later returned to Pennsylvania to start a very profitable printing businesses. That success -- and his general adeptness at mixing personal and public ventures -- helped Franklin rise into the role of clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly (1736), then deputy postmaster of Philadelphia (1737), then Postmaster General of British America (1753).[4] Franklin was routinely dispatched to London as an agent of the Pennsylvania Assembly, lobbying to the Privy Council and appearing before the Chief Proprietor of Pennsylvania, Thomas Penn, who lived in London.

In an early piece of writing advocating for stronger defence of the British colony of Pennsylvania, Plain Truth: or, Serious Considerations on the Present State of the City of Philadelphia, and Province of Pennsylvania (1747), Franklin fleshed out arguments for British militarization against French and Indigenous populations on the continent -- which would later enable the fight for independence against the British themselves. Franklin was already viewing as ripe for the colonies’ expansion the French-controlled land to the West of the Appalachian mountains, which roughly defined the geographical limit of Britain’s colonies on what is today the eastern seaboard of the United States.

In 1745, British troops briefly captured the fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton (at the time, Île-Royale). She presents the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which saw the fortress returned to the French in exchange for Chennai (at the time, Madras) to Britain, as an early source of the feud between the colonists and the empire.[6]

Critically undecided in that treaty was the fate of the territory to the West of the Appalachian mountains whose vague boundaries were of such concern to Franklin. As Drohan writes, securing what was then France’s Canada in British hands and expanding to the West would both resolve security issues and “a huge new area would be open for expansion.”[7] Another Franklin essay shortly after this period, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c (1751), showed the hardening of Franklin’s positions on these issues.[8]

As British designs on French assets in North America intensified, sustained fighting continued to break out. In July 1758, the British captured Louisbourg permanently, followed shortly thereafter by Quebec City (September 1759) and Montreal (September 1760), which helped bring a close to the Seven Years’ War, formally through the Treaty of Paris (1763), bringing almost all of North American under British rule. France retained only a few Caribbean islands.

Shortly after the Treaty of Paris, the Royal Proclamation (1763) established new borders and established the Province of Quebec. The question of the western border for the thirteen colonies was again effectively drawn at the Appalachian Mountains, with the western limit at “the heads or Sources of any of the Rivers which fall into the Atlantic Ocean from the West and the North West.”[9] This was a major irritant for the colonists.[10] It meant those colonies were encircled by “a mix of French and English law and toleration of the Catholic faith.”[11]

The Seven Years War also saddled the Brits with enormous debt. In short order, the “Coercive Acts” were introduced to pay for these costs. “This provoked riots and boycotts of British goods in the thirteen colonies,” writes Drohan, but not, interestingly, “in colonies like Canada, Nova Scotia, and Jamaica, which entirely depended on funding from Britain to survive.”[12] In 1774, the Quebec Act gave recognition to the Catholic religion and French civil law. While this move empowered the Catholic clergy and solidified British control over a large part of North America, it incensed the American colonists.

Franklin’s stint as the Postmaster General of British America terminated in 1774, after he had largely failed in efforts to repeal the Coercive Acts or to prevent the Quebec Act from passing.[13] This period dovetailed with the impending splinter between the Thirteen Colonies and the British Empire. Drohan nicely captures the contradictory views of the Thirteen Colonies’ towards French Canada -- oscillating between fear of an alien people and a desire to liberate them.[14] “Some Americans jumped to the conclusion the French Canadians were secret allies,” writes Drohan, “just waiting for the right time to join them.”[15]

As fighting broke out and intensified in 1775, and as many Canadians today do not know, the British were briefly chased out of Montreal -- with the Governor General Guy Carleton paddling down the St. Lawrence to safety in Quebec City, which never fell to the Americans. Franklin arrived in Montreal with two other commissioners to convince French Canadians and the Indigenous population to rise up against the British. But the Catholic clergy advised their followers to resist these calls.[16]

Franklin, who was sick at the time, left after a short time. When Carleton returned, collaborators suffered: goods were seized and houses were burned down.[17] By then, the aim of emancipating Canada was gone. “I am sorry to say -- the plan proposed for the purpose does not appear to me to be eligible, under our present circumstances,” General George Washington wrote in 1778.

Drohan’s book is an able account of these events. While the desire to capture French Canada was common to many British subjects seeking security guarantees against the French and Indigenous populations, early efforts at actually transforming these yearnings into reality is little appreciated today.

—The Director

[1] https://madelainedrohan.org/

[2] 2

[3] 32

[4] 47

[5] 47

[6] 59

[7] 94

[8] 67

[9] 103

[10] 110

[11] 121

[12] 112

[13] 137

[14] 13

[15] 152

[16] 178

[17] 177