The following piece is drawn from Rear Admiral (Ret’d) Brian Santarpia’s address to the Canadian Seapower 2025 Conference in Calgary in September 2025. It is not a verbatim transcript, but a condensed narrative intended to capture the key themes and strategic vision presented.
One of the great requirements that Canadian defence policymakers face today is a lack of a clear grand strategy. The country has long enjoyed the rare privilege of geography: bordered by oceans and a superpower, its survival has seldom depended on deliberate choices about war or peace. This geographic security has fostered a bureaucratic and political culture oriented toward management rather than direction. Governments plan in increments; departments defend budgets; consensus is prized over contestation.
During my time as Director, General Plans at the Strategic Joint Staff, I observed how this culture manifests. The staff’s work was to coordinate military advice and ensure alignment with government policy, not to articulate an overarching theory of national purpose. Decisions were reactive, calibrated to events rather than guided by a unifying framework. That pattern persists across the national security enterprise.
Canada has therefore never institutionalized the process of strategy-making. The United States, United Kingdom, France, and Australia all possess interdepartmental structures dedicated to continuous strategic assessment. Canada does not. Its defence and foreign policies operate in parallel, often with compatible rhetoric but rarely with integrated planning. The result is a state that manages security competently but without vision, a “policy state” rather than a “strategic state.”
True strategy is not a collection of initiatives. It is the art of relating ends, ways, and means: defining what a nation seeks to achieve, how it will pursue those goals, and with what resources. The logic is deceptively simple but demands intellectual discipline. Strategy is also inherently political. It involves prioritization, trade-offs, and the acceptance of risk. To define ends is to admit limits.
Modern discourse has diluted the term. Governments routinely label any long-term plan a “strategy”: an innovation strategy, a communications strategy, a climate strategy. These are useful policies but not strategy in the classical sense. They lack the integrative quality that binds statecraft together.
Historically, “strategy” was purely military. It referred to the maneuver of forces to achieve victory in battle. The notion of grand strategy, namely the orchestration of all instruments of national power, emerged only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, largely through naval thinkers. Alfred Thayer Mahan and Julian Corbett recognized that maritime power, trade, and industrial capacity formed a single system of influence. Their insights transformed strategy from battlefield art to statecraft.
For Canada, the lesson is clear. As a maritime trading nation dependent on global commerce and continental defense, its prosperity and sovereignty are inseparable from the sea. The logic of grand strategy is therefore inherently maritime.
The end of the Cold War ushered in a period of unipolar stability that allowed Canada and many Western states to drift strategically. Under the protective canopy of U.S. hegemony, Canada could afford to treat foreign and defence policy as an extension of domestic values. The language of “rules-based order” and “responsibility to protect” replaced the language of national interest.
This posture was comfortable but deceptive. It obscured the material foundations of stability: American military preponderance, global trade liberalization, and the absence of peer competitors. While those conditions endured, Canada’s lack of strategy seemed a virtue, proof of moral clarity rather than geopolitical dependence.
That world is gone. The return of great-power competition has exposed the fragility of a system built on assumption rather than design. The United States, China, and Russia are now engaged in multidimensional rivalry that fuses economics, technology, and ideology. The notion that trade automatically promotes peace has proven false. Interdependence has become a weapon.
The relationship between economics and security has always existed but is now explicit. The global economy has become an arena of coercion rather than cooperation. The U.S. CHIPS and Science Act restricts semiconductor exports to China and Beijing retaliates with bans on critical mineral exports essential to Western industries. Russia uses energy supply as leverage over Europe, while the United States itself increasingly employs financial instruments as tools of strategic denial.
For Canada, a nation built on resource wealth and export trade, this merging of economics and security poses unique challenges. The country’s prosperity depends on open sea lanes and reliable access to markets. Its defence, however, depends on alliance credibility and the ability to secure North America’s approaches. When these spheres merge, as they now have, Canada must think holistically.
The absence of a coherent economic-security framework leaves the country vulnerable to both coercion and neglect. Allies expect contributions that demonstrate seriousness of purpose and adversaries exploit indecision. Without clear priorities, Canada risks being treated not as a partner but as a passenger.
Historical analogies are imperfect but instructive. After 1815, Britain emerged as the world’s dominant power. Its navy guaranteed freedom of the seas; its industries fueled global trade. The period of Pax Britannica was one of immense prosperity, but also of complacency. By the late 19th century, Germany and the United States had surpassed Britain industrially, while France and Russia refused to accept permanent subordination. The system that seemed eternal unraveled within decades, ending in global war.
The United States followed a similar trajectory after 1991. Victorious in the Cold War, it presided over an unprecedented expansion of global liberal order. Yet structural factors such as debt, deindustrialization, and political polarization eroded its ability to sustain hegemony. Today, America remains powerful but overstretched, its leadership contested and its credibility tested.
For middle powers like Canada, these transitions are perilous. The decline of a hegemon creates space for competition and demands strategic self-reliance. As the guarantor of order falters, states must define their interests anew. Canada’s continued assumption of benign continuity is therefore the most dangerous illusion of all.
Canada’s geography ensures that its fate is bound to the United States, but not identical to it. The two nations share defense obligations through NORAD and NATO, yet their threat perceptions diverge. For Washington, Canada is a security partner; for Ottawa, the United States is simultaneously protector and potential source of strategic dependency.
The real danger is not invasion but marginalization. If the United States loses confidence in Canada’s capacity to defend its northern and maritime approaches, it will act unilaterally. That would amount to a loss of sovereignty by default, the quiet erosion of control over one’s own territory.
The Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) is central to preventing this outcome. A credible maritime capability demonstrates commitment to collective defense and asserts sovereignty in Canada’s vast maritime estate. It also enables meaningful participation in global operations that uphold the principles from which Canada’s prosperity derives: freedom of navigation, secure trade routes, and deterrence of coercion at sea.
The ends of naval strategy flow directly from national interests. Canada must deny adversaries the ability to operate within its maritime approaches; enforce sovereignty against non-military incursions such as illegal fishing, smuggling, and environmental violations; and contribute to the maintenance of international order through alliance operations. These are not theoretical goals; they are the practical expression of sovereignty and credibility.
The means to achieve them are limited but potent. Anti-submarine warfare remains essential as Russia and China expand undersea capabilities. Persistent surveillance and domain awareness are indispensable for both defence and constabulary enforcement. Partnership with the Coast Guard and other federal agencies must evolve toward seamless integration.
Beyond defence, maritime power supports diplomacy. Naval presence signals commitment, deters aggression, and reassures allies. Even small deployments carry disproportionate political weight. The Navy’s ability to operate globally through task groups, humanitarian missions and freedom-of-navigation patrols constitutes one of Canada’s most visible contributions to international security.
Developing such a naval strategy would be an important step, but it cannot substitute for grand strategy. The deeper problem is cultural. Canada lacks a tradition of strategic debate. The public discourse on defence is episodic and reactive, focused on procurement controversies or specific missions but rarely on the relationship between power and purpose.
A strategic culture is not simply awareness of military matters. It is the collective willingness of political leaders, officials, scholars, and citizens to think in terms of ends, ways, and means. It demands that choices be debated openly and that interests be defined explicitly. Nations that possess such cultures, such as Britain, France, and Australia, can adapt to changing environments without losing coherence. Canada must join them.
Building this culture requires deliberate effort. Professional military education should emphasize strategic theory alongside operations. Universities and think tanks should foster sustained dialogue between scholars and practitioners. Parliament must institutionalize strategic review, ensuring that defense and foreign policies are debated as integrated instruments rather than separate portfolios. Most importantly, Canadians must learn to see security not as a distant abstraction but as the precondition of prosperity and autonomy.
Developing a grand strategy will not be achieved through a single document or commission. It must evolve through sustained practice. Yet several steps could begin the process. First, Canada should establish a National Security Strategy Secretariat responsible for integrating defence, foreign, and economic policy planning. Such a body would provide continuity across governments and ensure that national objectives inform departmental programs. Second, the government should mandate a comprehensive maritime strategy that connects Arctic sovereignty, trade resilience, and alliance commitments into a single framework. The Navy, Coast Guard, and commercial shipping sectors must be treated as parts of one ecosystem of national power. Third, Canada should develop a National Industrial Mobilization Plan linking defence procurement, technological innovation, and energy security. Economic resilience is strategic resilience.
Finally, strategic education must be institutionalized. Senior public servants and military officers should undergo joint training in strategic analysis, ensuring a shared vocabulary of power and purpose. These steps are not revolutionary. They are the routine practices of mature powers. What is revolutionary for Canada is the willingness to think strategically at all.
For generations, Canada’s security rested on fortunate geography and benevolent hegemony. Those conditions no longer guarantee safety or influence. The world that allowed Canada to drift without strategy has disappeared, replaced by one in which deliberate choice and credible power determine survival and prosperity.
The RCN stands at the forefront of this national adjustment. Its mission: defending sovereignty, contributing to deterrence, and maintaining global stability embodies the link between prosperity and power. But the larger task extends beyond any single service. It requires a transformation in how Canadians conceive of their place in the world.
To act strategically is to accept responsibility for one’s future. Canada must learn once again to connect its ideals to its interests, its ambitions to its means. Only by cultivating a genuine strategic culture rooted in history, informed by debate, and expressed through maritime strength can the nation move from reacting to events toward shaping its destiny.
Reprinted with permission, Starshell Fall 2025 issue, www.navalassoc.ca
