Canada has quietly resigned its role as the world’s peacekeeping nation.
Driving the news: Canada’s Department of National Defence is slashing its troop contribution to United Nations peacekeeping missions, withdrawing all of its peacekeepers from UN missions in Congo, South Sudan, Cyprus, and Kosovo by the middle of next year.
Before this withdrawal was announced, Canada’s UN peacekeeper contribution was already the lowest it's ever been, ranking 65th globally. By next year, that rank will slip to around 100th.
Catch-up: Canada is widely credited with inventing modern peacekeeping. Lester Pearson won the Nobel Prize for engineering a UN effort to defuse the 1956 Suez Crisis, one of the first times that Canada’s foreign policy approach split meaningfully from the U.S. and U.K. After that mission, peacekeeping became core to Canada's international identity.
Canada was the top peacekeeping contributor in the world for decades (averaging around 1,000 troops deployed per month over 40 years). It was also the only country to serve in every single UN peacekeeping mission during the Cold War.
Why it matters: With NATO putting a greater emphasis on defence spending, Ottawa’s peacekeeping efforts have taken a back seat. Canada spent a record high ~$63 billion on defence in the last fiscal year, up from just ~$20 billion a decade ago.
Meanwhile, the number of peacekeeping troops deployed by Canada has dropped from a peak of 3,300 troops in the early 1990s to less than 30 today.
Zoom out: Canada’s certainly not alone in this respect. After Donald Trump took office (the first time) and pushed for a reduction in peacekeeping troops, the UN cut the number of peacekeepers it deployed by almost half of what it was in 2016.—LA
