Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations Bob Rae.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
When Bob Rae talks about the sort of expansive, clear-eyed view of the world that he wishes more national governments would adopt, it sounds on a certain level like Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations is advising everyone to grow up a bit.
One of the major maturing tasks for toddlers and very young children is to develop what’s known as “theory of mind.” It’s the understanding that each person has their own thoughts, desires, goals and feelings – just as real and important to them as the child’s own. It’s the foundation for kids realizing that not everything is about them.
In Mr. Rae’s assessment, the international community’s toddler phase is still a work in progress.
“There’s a tremendous tendency, still, in national governments to see the world as a chess board on which national ambitions are played out,” he says. “Everyone always has a clear ear and eye to opinion in their own country and to what they perceive to be their national interest. There’s still an extraordinary amount of isolationist behaviour, just in terms of pretending as if the world is simply a projection of your own country.”
This is a global tendency and not particular to Canada or the United States or anyone else, he says. Leaders and governments perpetually tend to see world events through the lens of how they affect their country or what they can get out of it, Mr. Rae says, and there isn’t enough looking beyond.
“There’s a big gap between that and asking another question, which is, ‘What does the world actually need?’” he says.
Mr. Rae was appointed Canada’s UN ambassador in 2020, and since taking on that role, he says he’s been forced to view the world “kaleidoscopically.”
What he means is that, much like the coloured shards of glass tumbling against each other inside a kid’s toy, his UN experience has taught him that nothing is linear and everything that changes in the world changes many other things in turn.
“That’s how I see things from New York a lot more – seeing how things are connected, but also how sometimes there are many, many unintended consequences, or consequences of which we’re not fully aware, which tend to have an even more serious effect,” he says.
That’s been the case with the “cascading crises” of the past year or so, Mr. Rae says. Among them, he lists the continuing health and economic fallout of the pandemic and the fact that those effects have been felt so unevenly. In addition, the Horn of Africa and the Sahel, and countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Myanmar are experiencing conflict that will be exacerbated by climate change.
All of it is compounded by the failure of governments to grasp the scope of the problems or that they won’t be tidily contained by national borders.
“The most thoughtful people who are working in this field, really, really feel that national governments don’t fully understand the extent of the risk to the global community,” he says. “Because frequently they’ll say, ‘Well, yeah, that’s a problem in that country, but that country’s not in great shape.’”
With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Rae believes “the so-called realist perspective” that would hold that a little country obviously can’t beat a big country is being replaced by a much more forthright view. For that shift, he credits the ability of the Ukrainians to mobilize against Russian forces and deal them heavy military blows, along with a groundswell of international public opinion on their side.
But Vladimir Putin’s aggression is far from ebbing, he argues.
“It’s very clear that the objectives that President Putin has set out in a couple of his speeches, those objectives have not changed, and acceding to those objectives is in my opinion absolutely not acceptable,” Mr. Rae says. “I think we have to be prepared for a much more challenging and difficult engagement – both militarily and economically – than many governments I think might prefer.”
On China, too, Mr. Rae detects a broad shift of opinion. The view that Canada and the rest of the world has no choice but to engage with China, given its reach and might, is counterbalanced by a new tension – which he welcomes. That tension resides in the recognition that China is an increasingly personal and concentrated dictatorship clutched in the fist of President Xi Jinping.
“We can’t afford to be naive” about China, Mr. Rae says, but on the other hand – and he emphasizes that he firmly occupies the middle ground here – it will be impossible to make any serious progress on climate change without it.
“I think we should move on from the phase where we express our amazement and wonder at the speed with which China has grown economically and has industrialized,” Mr. Rae says. “China likes to pretend it’s just another developing country and, you know, ‘Nothing going on here, nothing to worry about.’ And the reality is they are a major economic, financial, political player in the world.”
Mr. Rae periodically attracts near-viral attention for his blunt remarks and speeches at the UN. Most recently, it happened in mid-December during a debate on expelling Iran from the Commission on the Status of Women, when he said the country had shown the world a “face of cruelty and of terror.”
“The political discourse at the United Nations and elsewhere is so loaded with self-interest and self-congratulations and abstract language to describe things as they really are, that simply by saying the simplest things like, ‘You’re killing people, you’re throwing people in jail and torturing them,’ it’s shocking,” he says.
“I think one of the most important things Canada could do is just to tell the truth.”