If Canada is to have a constructive role in this Brave New World, we will have to be much more honest in owning up to our own dark role in creating it.
In a recent post at the website of the Centre for International Governance Innovation, James A. Haley writes: “if Trump wants to pursue isolationist policies, the rest of the world should oblige him. But obliging him does not mean following him into isolation. On the contrary, the need for international cooperation has never been greater.”
As the essay unfolds, it is perhaps impossible for Canadians to read the piece without some affinity for its chest-out, law-of-the-jungle bravado in these strange times when “desperate measures” seem to be the call of the day.
But let us not fall prey to self-serving delusions and obscured history that somehow conveniently situates ourselves above the fray, innocent victims, noble and civil bystanders reluctantly stepping forward to save the day.
Halley writes: “For most of the past 80 years, the United States has been a stabilizing force in international economic and political affairs. That is no longer the case … Under Donald Trump, the United States has become a source of global instability … countries committed to democratic principles and a rules-based international order must redouble their efforts to find collective solutions to shared problems. The threat to world peace posed by authoritarian tyrants and the risks of global warming, for example, is no less urgent because the United States has abandoned those principles and no longer supports that order.”
Principles? Order? What universe does this person operate in?
Well, we know only too well what universe. It is the universe that allows Canada and allies to sustain the US/Israeli genocide in Palestine, announced and celebrated repeatedly by the genocidaires; tolerate an ongoing catastrophe of military anarchy in Sudan, and much of the rest of North and Central Africa; embrace “friendly” despots in Latin America and elsewhere; do booming business with the proprietary absolute-ruling families of the Gulf states; avert our gaze as Narendra Modi strangles democracy and the multi-ethnic state in India; among so many, many other travesties worldwide, not least the ongoing, and selective, global “war on terror” — all the while poking and prodding persistently at the one unqualified permanent enemy, China, in a bizarrely unbalanced geopolitical demonology that defies logic and contemporary history.
And this is the universe that we and the author inhabited long before Trump was elected the first time, and subsequently under Biden.
We buy into this cynicism and hypocrisy with hardly a whimper, nodding smugly at articles that obscure Canada’s murky agency in its historical complicity with U.S. foreign policy while advertising our moral superiority. To be sure, this author is not alone in these representations, based as he is as an affiliate of the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) in Waterloo, and the Canada Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington. This is the “realist” school of Canada’s foreign policy establishment writ large. He is in good company.
But we should expect more, and offer more. The future demands it. We can start by acknowledging Canada’s own participation and acquiescence in the international norms and events that bring us to this point. And we can begin the serious national reflection that is required about the kind of leadership Canada might play in a transformed international order bending increasingly to peace, justice, and authentic global interdependence.
The current federal election campaign is an appropriate platform to be raising these issues. The most critical challenge of the next government will be in how it distances Canada from the old international regime, and begins again to collaborate with the world—the entire community of nations, north and south, east and west—in painstakingly building a new, and just, world order.