Diplomacy is an ancient martial art. Sometimes it is about seduction. Sometimes it is about threats.
But unless you’re dealing with an interlocutor who has no options, the gloved hand is always better than the mailed fist. Negotiation, with anyone other than the impotent, beats ultimatum.
Take-it-or-leave-it offers will only be taken by those who cannot leave it. Make an offer that someone is powerless to refuse, and they will not refuse it. But they will always reject an oppressive offer they do not have to take.
Ask, and you may receive. Demand, and you will no longer be able to ask.
Does Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping understand this? His government has spent the past two-plus years apparently operating under the assumption that the way to improve the Canada-China relationship is through hostage takings. China would hurt Canada; Canada would yield; and then Bay Street, the Trudeau government, the universities, and the entire Davos establishment – including the current ambassador to Beijing – would all reattach their blinders, develop amnesia and go back to worrying about how to make money in China.
But that’s not what’s happening. Of course not. Canada’s long period of sleepwalking into China’s embrace is over. Because even a somnambulist wakes up when punched in the face. Canada is awake and we’d like another dance partner.
China’s threat-based diplomacy is having – and was guaranteed to have – the opposite effect of the one intended. If Beijing’s goal was ensuring that Canada aligns itself ever more closely with the United States, and moves ever more completely into the U.S. orbit, it could not have chosen a more apt strategy.
Is Mr. Xi secretly working for Joe Biden? He’s doing a remarkable job of rebuilding America’s frayed alliances. Not since Stalin has a foreign leader made such a great pitch for why free countries might want to get under the U.S. umbrella, and why they might have no choice but to do so.
Pax Americana was supposed to be over, but Mr. Xi keeps stoking nostalgia and making arguments for its return. Countries in China’s backyard are searching for a counterweight to Beijing, and so is Canada.
A century and a half of Canadian foreign policy was primarily about managing the relationship with the United States, aiming to maximize economic benefits while giving up the minimum of independence. As much of an alliance with Washington as necessary; as much freedom of action as possible.
But China’s recent moves – hostage-taking of Canadians, threatening allies such as Australia, hacking away at Hong Kong autonomy, questioning the delicate balance in Taiwan and scaring the neighbours with muscle-flexing – are driving Canada to seek a closer alignment with the U.S.
And it’s not just Canada. The Europeans are worried, and so are Asian countries that have similar concerns about retaining their independence.
In some ways, it does feel like the start of a new Cold War, yet things are also very different. The Soviet Union was essentially a separate world. There was limited trade between West and East, and no economic interdependence. There were no extradition requests for senior executives of Soviet multinational corporations whose technology was widely used in the Western economy. No such things existed; they were not even imaginable. There was no Soviet equivalent of Meng Wanzhou, or Huawei. Not even close.
The growth of China happened because of its rejection of Soviet economics, and its move into the mainstream of the world trading economy. It was assumed that this economic transformation would pull China into embracing the legal and political structures that govern from Western Europe and Canada to Japan and South Korea. That is not how it’s gone.
The People’s Republic of China is today the most common source for everything from the clothes on your back, to the electronics in your pocket, to the air conditioning system in your home, and much more. It’s the realization of the old vision of economic interdependence, which has turned out to be a nightmare of growing powerlessness for countries such as Canada.
For the sake of our national security, Canada and its allies have no choice but to reduce those economic connections. We have to roll back what has become a dangerous interdependence.
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