The world view of the Halifax International Security Forum was well summed up by the rolling weather updates on the TV screens in the event’s media room. The updates reported weather conditions in three cities: Halifax, of course, and Kyiv, Ukraine, and Tel Aviv, Israel.
It’s not just that the eyes of the event’s attendees were trained on war, but specifically on wars that, as they see it, concern a black-and-white civilizational battle between “democracies” and the bad guys working tirelessly to destroy them. This has been the forum’s core agenda since it was first held in 2009.
This year’s forum attendees, as is typical for the gathering, hailed from all corners of the American empire’s favoured nations (mostly in Europe) and NGO leaders working against its enemies. Some of the higher profile guests included former Israeli prime minister, military general and close Jeffrey Epstein associate Ehud Barak (more on him below), and several defence ministers and American senators.
Absent, however, were any official representatives from United States President Donald Trump’s administration, which despite being more than happy to engage in its own murderous military adventurism, has different priorities to the ones espoused at the forum.
This was made clear by the weekend’s biggest curveball: the release of Trump’s 28-point peace plan for Ukraine, which demanded concessions from Ukraine that are anathema to many of the war hawks attending the forum.
The type of American empire that most of the forum’s delegates believe in is more of an ideal that persists in spite of Trump, and which they hope will be restored just as soon as he goes away.
It’s an ideal that insists on unlimited military support for Ukraine at any cost and regardless of whether Ukrainians themselves actually want to keep fighting (69 per cent don’t). It means backing Israel to the hilt as it commits genocide against Palestinians, or at most asking it to gently tap the brakes on its campaign of extermination.
The most important objective in this worldview is that our guys win at all costs. This, of course, is branded as a noble struggle for “democracy,” with inconvenient truths that complicate this narrative minimized or simply ignored.
To this end, the forum had an official “24 words” — a title which sounded eerily similar to another slogan consisting of 10 fewer words and which would probably be more to Trump’s liking.
The 24 words read: “Democracies don’t despair. They defend differences and defeat dictators. Democracies demand decency. Democracies decide destiny.”
Most of the forum’s “on the record” conversations (i.e., those where journalists were allowed to listen in and report on what was said) had bizarre three-word titles riffing on these alliterative 24 words. One, for example, was named, “Democracies Design Doodads.”
There were some very measured criticisms of certain “democracies” on some of the panels throughout the weekend.
On at least a couple of occasions, muted references were made to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, although nobody used that word. It’s worth recalling that several weeks into the genocide in November 2023, that year’s forum awarded “the people of Israel” the “John McCain Prize for Leadership in Public Service.”
The award is named after the former Republican senator who was also a Trump critic. At this year’s forum, a series of video skits played before some of the plenaries gently mocked Trump’s crackdowns on immigrants and political enemies.
The bipartisan American congressional delegates in attendance lamented trade tensions between the Trump administration and Canada, and at a press conference on Saturday night, struggled to explain Trump’s Ukraine peace plan.
There was no sign of disagreement, however, on supporting massive increases in military spending. In fact, some took particularly extreme stances in favour of this.
As I reported over the weekend, U.S. Senator Thom Tillis during one plenary said he wants Canada to cough up a $300 billion “make up payment” for what he claims are Canada’s “shortfalls” on military spending over the past two decades.
Tillis claimed that Canada and other countries that have not met NATO’s military spending targets are partially responsible for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and suggested that Canadians should not criticize U.S. health care, because the U.S. spends heavily on its military.
Alex Cosh
The vast majority of the other plenaries were heavily sanitized discussions that, if I’m being honest, were simply too dull to listen to all the way through. And based on conversations I had with colleagues in the media room, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.
I’m sure more interesting and substantive conversations happened in the “off the record” panels throughout the weekend. I wouldn’t know, of course, because I wasn’t allowed into them.
In theory, we were allowed to request one-on-one interviews with the forum’s delegates. I tried to do so with Tillis and Canadian Defence Minister David McGuinty, without any success.
I was, however, able to ask McGuinty a question during the forum’s introductory press conference on Friday.
Last week, Israeli media named Canada as one of several countries that sent delegates to an international seminar hosted by the Israeli military. I asked McGuinty to confirm whether or not Canadian officers took part, and what lessons he believed they could learn from it.
He said: “I can’t confirm whether we had officials there or not, I can come back to you on that. I think that it’s important for us to reflect, and I know our officials and our Canadian Armed Forces are reflecting on whatever lessons we can learn and derive from that tragic situation.”
I followed up with McGuinty’s staff via email after the press conference, but did not receive a response.
Alex Cosh
Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the bloodiest blot on the forum’s self-congratulatory lectures on the virtues of what it called “democracy,” was the focus of Halifax residents who gathered outside to protest the forum.
In particular, the protesters drew attention to the participation of Ehud Barak, who for years maintained close ties to pedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Barak was also Israel’s defence minister during Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s 2009 assault on Gaza that killed 1,400 Palestinians, and during Israel’s attack on the 2010 Freedom Flotilla, in which Israeli forces killed 10 Palestine solidarity activists who were carrying aid to Gaza.
Recent reports by Drop Site News on troves of Barak’s hacked emails have shown Epstein’s work on behalf of the Israeli state. Among documents released by the House Oversight Committee, an email sent by Epstein boasted about helping Barak’s return to Israeli politics in 2019.
Israeli Prime Minister and fugitive war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, a political rival of Barak, shared a recent Jacobin article focusing on Epstein’s latter claim.
Barak was asked about this during the forum. He responded by calling Jacobin an “extremely anti-semitist and extremely anti-Israeli publication,” and claimed that “the whole story is nonsense.”
He continued:
“Epstein tried to aggrandize a little bit his whole and his activities and so on. I regret ever meeting him. I was introduced to him in 2003 in a public event by [former Israeli prime minister] Shimon Peres and the event with hundreds of Americans, including the Clintons and many others. And I was quite friendly with [Epstein] for years. Met many times on business issues and others. This story of intervening in Israeli election is total nonsense.”
The forum delegates seemed happy to take Barak’s word for it, and with that uncomfortable topic out of the way, proceeded to ask him questions with the kind of deference and praise one would give to a revered statesman, and not someone with extensively documented ties to a pedophile sex trafficker.
Barak joked with the audience, and received laughter and applause. He was asked about how to achieve “peace” in the ashes of Israel’s genocide, the two-state solution and about trying to rehabilitate Israel’s international image.
Barak cheered on Israel’s genocide in Gaza at the 2023 Halifax forum, dismissing Palestinian civilian casualties as “part of war.”
This year, Barak hailed Israel’s “impressive military achievements [...] all over the Middle East,” and while he suggested that “certain things” that happened in Gaza “need accountability,” Israel, he insisted, should be left alone to investigate itself.
“I believe that we should run independent Israeli inquiries, not by the world, not wait for anyone from abroad,” he said.
Barak was also asked about what “lessons” the Canadian and U.S. militaries can learn from Israel’s arms and technology industries, which have played a crucial role in supplying the Israeli military with the tools of genocide.
It’s worth recalling here that McGuinty avoided answering a similar question at the forum’s opening press conference. Barak, unlike McGuinty, had an answer:
“We started with armed armed drones, weaponized drones, 15 years before [...] America, and we started with Iron Dome, long before Golden Dome had been announced as a project for America, and we were very successful [...] So it’s very successful. We can join hands about it.”
This, after all, was the real reason politicians and NGO leaders came from far and wide to spend the weekend in Halifax. For every plenary trumpeting the virtues of democracy, the real point of the exercise was to entrench faith in military co-operation and supremacy among America’s allies at any human or economic cost.
Whether or not this march to war actually makes any of us any safer, of course, is simply taken as a given, and not interrogated in any meaningful way.
Canada’s Liberal government, meanwhile, has shown itself to be ready to comply with this agenda. For one thing, it already spends tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on Israeli-made weapons.
And while McGuinty did not respond to the question about Canadian participation in Israel’s international seminar, he did say something about Tillis’s wild suggestion that Canada should hand over $300 billion in military “make-up” payments.
Canada won’t, of course, pay $300 billion in imaginary military back payments. However, McGuinty said, “I think that I get [Tillis’s] position.”
“We respect it, but we’re moving forward.”
