{"id":42498,"date":"2018-03-02T03:00:09","date_gmt":"2018-03-02T08:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=42498"},"modified":"2018-03-01T12:01:55","modified_gmt":"2018-03-01T17:01:55","slug":"canadas-foreign-policies-in-the-wake-of-recent-prime-ministerial-mis-steps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/03\/02\/canadas-foreign-policies-in-the-wake-of-recent-prime-ministerial-mis-steps\/","title":{"rendered":"Canada’s foreign policies, in the wake of recent Prime Ministerial mis-steps"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ted Campbell<\/a> 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:<\/p>\n

[Former senior Canadian diplomat David] Mulroney begins by saying that: \u201cThe best that can be said about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau\u2019s 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 \u2026 [and] \u2026 At the very least, the Prime Minister\u2019s debacle in India should encourage smart people in Ottawa to zero in on what isn\u2019t working.\u201d That\u2019s 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 \u201clessons learned<\/em>,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost worrying,\u201d David Mulroney says, \u201cis a fundamental and puzzling failure at the level of policy implementation, something that appears to be compounded by the Prime Minister\u2019s 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.\u201d In other words: Justin Trudeau goes off \u201chalf cocked\u201d as we soldier say \u2026 not ready for action. That is, I suspect, in part because his team in the Prime Minister\u2019s 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, \u201cjust not ready\u201d for the job he was handed. But his office<\/del> campaign team wants to get and keep him in the public eye because that\u2019s part of the 2019 campaign strategy \u2026 this time it failed because they really didn\u2019t understand the business at hand.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

But India is not just any country, as Mr Mulroney explains: \u201cIndia isn\u2019t 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 \u2026 [and, he says] \u2026 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\u2019s 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.\u201d Further, he adds that \u201cMy experience with Chinese diplomats was entirely similar.\u201d 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. \u201cfriendship,\u201d even long standing alliances didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cLong before the election of U.S. President Donald Trump,\u201d David Mulroney says, \u201cit 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\u2019re 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 \u2026 [but, he adds] \u2026 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.\u201d Sunny ways, feminism<\/em> and being green don\u2019t 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\u2019s the basis of a grand strategy<\/em>. 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\u2019m persuaded that Justin Trudeau doesn\u2019t think about those \u201cbig ideas\u201d at all \u2026 because, I fear, they are, simply, quite beyond his comprehension.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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: \u201cThe best that can be said about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau\u2019s visit to India is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,22,84,23],"tags":[432,887],"class_list":["post-42498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-china","category-government","category-india","tag-diplomacy","tag-justintrudeau"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-b3s","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42498"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42499,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42498\/revisions\/42499"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}