Strategies for Canada in the New World Order

New language for the planet we’re on.

The Fertile Crescent, the Ukraine’s wheat fields, the fractious Balkans, the Sudetenland. “Geography is destiny”. But Canada?

Yes, for Canada, geography will always be destiny.

Three oceans to the north, east and west, provided a degree of isolation while the world’s longest (hitherto-for) “undefended border” provided access to the huge US market.

Pulling back from the continental focus, Canada was well positioned geographically to trade across the Pacific and the Atlantic. Endowed with lumber, and minerals the world needed (it had once been cod and pelts; but we adapted), Canada thrived as a major trading nation in a globalizing world.

The post war superstructure of multilateral institutions (IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization etc.) and multilateral and bilateral trade agreements, very much an American project, benefitted us.

In that era, we knew the language to speak. There wasn’t a multilateral or bilateral agreement we didn’t subscribe to or a multilateral grouping we didn’t yearn to part of. Our zealousness for international engagement had us as the UN’s first “Peace-Keepers” and earned us our “boy scout” reputation as the first to sign or propose international agreements.

President Trump sees that the free movement of goods and capital has fueled the growth of economic rival China, upended American industry and that the free movement of people may be changing the composition of America. Globalization is a villain. A de-globalizing, multipolar world the new reality.

In this world, middle powers like Canada get squeezed, forced to choose whose side there’re on. Geography tells us that we have little choice.

“Shortening supply chains” and “localization” as an antidote to dependence on foreign suppliers, all the buzz after Covid, is achievable only by countries with deep domestic markets. We hoped that a shortened US supply chain included us, the good continental neighbor, and that “Buy America” meant “Buy Canada” too. Not so.

More bad news when your neighbour moves from benign neglect to overt hostility, eyeing your mineral resources, your energy and your water and threatening your economic prosperity and your sovereignty over more than half the continent.

Geography is certainly destiny. If your knowledge of geography is from the 1960s and 70s, the formative years of the President, chances are that the wildly popular board game, RISK ,a game of diplomacy, conflict and conquest, shaped your image of things. The global map in RISK has several curiosities. The territories of Canada and those of the United States are the same color. Greenland is disproportionately large. Panama doesn’t exist. If the RISK map of the world is what’s rattling around in your head, you have geographic dysmorphia.

For Canadians in the 60s and 70s, if your map was the one on the school wall, we have our own geographic dysmorphia. Canada is pink (!) dwarfing the United States. Not so, but comforting.

The diplomatic skills and language that we taught ourselves and the cloying tactics we deployed from 1950-2020, are simply not useful in dealing with a mercantilist, expansionist continental neighbor. What we have been good at (mostly just being nice and peaceable) now seems “so 20th Century”. What we need to be good at now is old fashioned 19th Century “realpolitik”.

We need to express ourselves in words that do not easily roll off the Canadian tongue -more hockey trash talk it has been suggested, rather than diplomatic niceties.

Knowing what to say starts with knowing who you are talking to.

New theologies are shaping ascendant American thought and informing their domestic and foreign policy:

  • A rejection of the accommodation of difference so essential to a multicultural nation like Canada.
  •  A moral belief system that sees the state as a “Strict Father” maintaining social hierarchy and discipline. In Canada, the “Nurturing Mother” moral belief code shaped the society Canadians have built.
  • The celebration and promotion of hypermasculinity (from “Because it’s 2015” to Elon Musk addressing Justin Trudeau as “Girl”).
  •  An overt promotion of America as a theocratic state based on Judeo-Christian (let’s be frank, there isn’t much Judeo really in it) values. This yet another rejection of the accommodation of difference so essential to Canada.
  • A marriage of convenience among elements of the MAGA movement and tech authoritarians who want to reshape the world by maintaining, or (in the case of MAGA), restoring hierarchy, resisting egalitarianism and elevating profit and power. This “tech-industrial complex” as President Biden labeled it, is not unprecedented. The “robber barons” of the early 20th Century were rapacious. So too the “military industrial complex’ of the 1950s. Industrial power harnessing government (the British in one Century, the American in the next) in the pursuit of profit is not new. What is new is the private control of information and means of communication in support of these goals.

All these are alien to Canadian mainstream thinking. Epoch shaping theologies and ways of seeing and ordering society are not the stuff of heated intellectual debates in Canada. Yet these ascendant views are shaping America’s interaction with other nations. We share a continent but the pre-eminent theories shaping our neighbour’s world are literally from another place. That is why we may be ill- equipped to decode (or believe) what they are saying.

We are most comfortable in an old paradigm of sacrosanct borders, traditional institutions, nation states, alliances, broadly shared interests and sustained economic arrangements. The lost world which we now yearn for is not coming back for a few years, if ever.

Suited-up for hockey and on the ice, the nets have been replaced by goal posts and the ice by turf. The other team is playing a different game. We need to take the game to them; but we don’t know the rules anymore and there is no ref.

What is our new language?

Charm is not the stuff realpolitik. Force and leverage is. Canada-force and leverage? Those words have never been uttered in the same sentence.

We are not a world military power; but we are not without leverage because geography is destiny. We are fortunate in where we live because the Americans and the rest of the world want and need a lot of what we have up here. Let’s take stock and use what we have.

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