I stood in the room when the Ottawa Treaty was signed. As a Doctoral Fellow working with Canada’s then-Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, I played a modest role in supporting the diplomatic machinery behind what became one of the most celebrated humanitarian disarmament treaties of the post-Cold War era. At the time, it felt like a victory for civilization—a moment when ideals seemed to shape the international order rather than merely reflect its brutal underlying structure.
But that moment is over. And we need to get over our nostalgic, half-remembered, half-imagined take on that moment and come to grips with the actually existing geopolitical realities of the current moment.
Today, the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel landmines—and its cousin, the Convention on Cluster Munitions—no longer make strategic sense. They are relics of a geopolitical ecosystem that simply no longer exists. Continuing to adhere to them in an age of rising great power competition, peer-on-peer warfare, and protracted land campaigns such as that conducted by Russia in Ukraine handicaps responsible military powers and benefits revisionist states that reject the rules altogether. These treaties were artifacts of a now-vanished world order – and order that is not coming back anytime soon.
In the 1990s, it was still possible – perhaps even rational – to believe that the world had exited history and entered a “post-war” era. The Cold War was over. American unipolarity seemed entrenched. Civil wars, intrastate violence, and rogue actors dominated the security agenda. The campaigns in Cambodia, Mozambique, and Afghanistan – where landmines had caused appalling humanitarian devastation – dominated the policy imagination.
The Ottawa Treaty, which was opened for signature in 1997 and entered into force in 1999, was designed in and for that context. Its architects, including myself in a very modest supporting role, imagined a world in which the primary threats were asymmetric and humanitarian. The goal was to constrain small arms proliferation, reduce the toll on civilian populations, and use norms to shape behavior even in the absence of major military threats.
That was a moral vision. But it was also a strategic gamble – one that assumed great power conflict and major inter-state war were relics of the past. And that was a very bad gamble indeed.
We now live in a world that looks much more like 1913 or 1938 than 1998. War has returned to Europe. Large-scale land battles are back. Inter-state warfare, – including trench systems, layered defense-in-depth, mass artillery, and minefields – have again become central to operational planning. The war in Ukraine has made it painfully clear that modern land warfare depends on tools – including mines and cluster-munitions – that were once seen as expendable.
This isn’t some theoretical argument about military doctrine. We are seeing in real time how limitations born of moral idealism are creating operational vulnerabilities. The point is not that these weapons are without humanitarian consequences. Anti-personnel mines are terrible weapons, and in a perfect world we wouldn’t use them. But the renewed brutality of modern conflict reminds us that we do not live in a perfect world. We live in a strategic environment where our enemies do not share our scruples. Russia, China, North Korea, Iran—all are perfectly willing to deploy anti-personnel mines and cluster munitions. To bind ourselves unilaterally to avoid these tools while others wield them freely is not humanitarianism. It is virtue signalling at best, and self-sabotage at worst.
Let’s be brutally honest: it is militarily irrational for a vulnerable state to deny itself weapons that can provide battlefield advantage – especially when its adversary has no such qualms. The cluster munitions ban and the Ottawa Treaty, far from being instruments of universal disarmament, have become asymmetric constraints on Western liberal democracies. They are what happens when virtue-signaling substitutes for strategy.
Western militaries are already struggling with underfunded procurement, aging platforms, and declining personnel numbers. To artificially limit our arsenal based on treaties crafted during a different strategic era is not only imprudent—it’s dangerous. In Ukraine, we’ve seen that minefields—properly deployed—can delay, degrade, and even halt mechanized offensives. They are not just area-denial weapons. They are force multipliers.
Britain’s own defense establishment is beginning to acknowledge this. As The Spectator recently noted, the UK is quietly rethinking its position on landmines – as are Poland and the Baltic states. So should Canada. So should every NATO member that is serious about territorial defense. In Ukraine, the Americans have already transferred cluster munitions to Kyiv in acknowledgment of battlefield necessity. That was the right decision. But it also reveals the hollowness of the moral posture surrounding these treaties. We have reached the point where Western powers are willing to violate the spirit—if not always the letter—of these agreements when the stakes become brutally obvious. That tells us something important: the treaties no longer reflect strategic reality.
Let me forestall the inevitable objection: this is not a call for unrestrained warfare or for disregarding civilian lives. On the contrary, responsible states must always balance military necessity with humanitarian concern. But moralism is not morality. To deny ourselves lawful and effective means of defending our territory, our troops, or our allies in the name of a moral ideal divorced from strategic context is not virtue. It is recklessness dressed up in piety.
And here’s the deeper problem: clinging to these treaties actually undermines the very norms they were intended to enshrine. When norms become strategically untenable, states begin to break them selectively or abandon them altogether. That erodes the credibility of international law itself. In contrast, when states revise or exit treaties transparently and for clearly stated reasons, they preserve the integrity of international rules by adapting them to changing conditions.
We are reentering history – a history in which attritional warfare, mass mobilization, and hard power matter once again. The fantasies of “forever peace” have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Western states need to rearm, rethink, and recalibrate. That includes rethinking legal frameworks and treaties forged in a now-evanesced interregnum.
Strategic realism must replace moral grandstanding. And that means telling hard truths: the Ottawa Treaty and the Convention on Cluster Munitions no longer serve the interests of responsible, law-abiding military powers. They were well-intentioned responses to the conditions of their time. I was proud to contribute to them when they made sense. But they no longer do.
Ukraine War TOS-1A. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
The war in Ukraine should be the last warning. The next war—in the Baltics, in Taiwan, or elsewhere—may be even more punishing. And if we enter that fight still shackled by outdated legal constraints, it will not be our enemies who suffer. It will be our soldiers. It will be our allies. It will be us.
Thomas Sowell once wrote, “There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs; and you try to get the best trade-off you can get.” That is the hard wisdom of strategic realism. The Ottawa Treaty once represented a decent trade-off in an era of relative peace. But that era is gone. In today’s world, the best trade-off may involve retaining capabilities we once hoped never to use. That is not a counsel of despair. It is the realism demanded by the return of history.
It’s time we act like it.
About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham
Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. Andrew is now a Contributing Editor to 19FortyFive, where he writes a daily column. You can follow him on X: @aakatham.
