Ted Campbell suggests that our current foreign policy goals have been seriously undermined by the — shall we say “disappointing” — outcomes of Prime Minister Trudeau’s Chinese and Indian trips:
[Former senior Canadian diplomat David] Mulroney begins by saying that: “The best that can be said about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s visit to India is that it may prompt a review, if not a complete rethinking of a Canadian foreign policy that appears to be seriously off the rails. We have some hard lessons to learn … [and] … At the very least, the Prime Minister’s debacle in India should encourage smart people in Ottawa to zero in on what isn’t working.” That’s good thinking. At the end of every major campaign, an especially after campaigns in which things go awry, good military commanders convene a board of senior officers to consider “lessons learned,” in the hope that they will not make the same mistakes next time. sadly, especially today, the lessons learned are all too quickly forgotten even if the analysis was rigorous enough in the first place.
“Most worrying,” David Mulroney says, “is a fundamental and puzzling failure at the level of policy implementation, something that appears to be compounded by the Prime Minister’s own impetuosity. Flying to India before the big meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in the bag, much like heading off to Beijing on a free-trade themed visit without any reasonable expectation that a deal was doable, exposes Mr. Trudeau to a degree of prolonged public skepticism that comes to define the visit itself.” In other words: Justin Trudeau goes off “half cocked” as we soldier say … not ready for action. That is, I suspect, in part because his team in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), was brilliant on the campaign trail in 2015 but is really unqualified to advice the leader of the government of the G7 nation; that poor quality of policy advice matters because Justin Trudeau was, and still is, to be sure, “just not ready” for the job he was handed. But his
officecampaign team wants to get and keep him in the public eye because that’s part of the 2019 campaign strategy … this time it failed because they really didn’t understand the business at hand.[…]
But India is not just any country, as Mr Mulroney explains: “India isn’t our friend. It is a rising regional power beset with a range of domestic problems, including serious human rights issues. It takes a prickly approach to global issues that is often at odds with traditional Canadian policies in areas ranging from trade policy to nuclear disarmament … [and, he says] … The Indian diplomats I worked with could be wonderfully pleasant after the official day was done. But, for the most part, they brought a formidably ruthless precision to their pursuit of India’s interests in the world. While they might ultimately agree to grant Canada a concession, this was always a product of hard and often heated negotiations. They never conceded a point because they liked us or because we are home to a large Indo-Canadian community.” Further, he adds that “My experience with Chinese diplomats was entirely similar.” Although never at the same level as Mr Mulroney, I worked in the international arena as a senior officer, especially in one sector (global radio-communications which included arranging for the expansion of mobile communications in the 1990s. My Chinese and Indian colleagues were, indeed, fine men and women but they, just like me, were there ~ Geneva, a lot, but everywhere from Washington, London, Canberra and Tokyo to Beijing ~ defending their interests. “friendship,” even long standing alliances didn’t count for anything. Billions of dollars were at stake, profits and losses would hinge on how we ~ engineers and lawyers and businessmen and soldiers from dozens of countries ~ managed to slice up the radio spectrum to allow these new services to thrive. The Chinese and Indian delegates were just as professional, just as technically qualified, just as hard nosed as the Americans, Brits and Canadians.
“Long before the election of U.S. President Donald Trump,” David Mulroney says, “it should have been clear to us that the world is changing in ways that do not align with traditional Canadian views, interests and values. If we’re smart, the rise of countries like China and India can certainly contribute to our prosperity, and with hard work, we should be able to find common cause on important issues such as global warming … [but, he adds] … the rise of these assertive and ambitious Asian powers will almost certainly challenge global and regional security. Both will also continue to reject traditional Canadian notions about global governance and human rights, and neither will be particularly squeamish about interfering in Canadian affairs.” Sunny ways, feminism and being green don’t count for much; they are very certainly not a sound foundation upon which to build a foreign policy. We have to start thinking about our vital interests in the world ~ about what they are and about how we can and will protect and promote them: that’s the basis of a grand strategy. It was also the kind of thinking that Stephen Harper hated: he wanted to deal with issues incrementally, linking them together, sometimes, into a coherent web but never allowing them to become too important in and of themselves. That was bad enough but I’m persuaded that Justin Trudeau doesn’t think about those “big ideas” at all … because, I fear, they are, simply, quite beyond his comprehension.
