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Terry Glavin: Carney, leader of an anti-Trump alliance that doesn't exist

Claims of the end of the international order are exaggerated

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The thing about “the world stage” is not just that it’s a place for play-acting. It’s also a global venue for wishful thinking, the construction of heroes and villains and imaginary plot twists and sometimes whole-cloth inventions of scenes that sometimes bear almost no relationship at all to events in the real world.

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An instructive illustration of this strange phenomenon occurred over the past week in headlines that roared around the world before the facts had an opportunity to put their trousers on: “Carney constructs a mega anti-Trump trade alliance.” The story was presented as an “exclusive” appearing in the otherwise perfectly respectable European edition of Politico, a digital news and analysis platform.

Terry Glavin: Carney, leader of an anti-Trump alliance that doesn't exist Back to video

“The Canadian prime minister is spearheading discussions between the EU and a major Indo-Pacific trade bloc after calling on middle powers to join forces,” Politico reported.

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This surely would have been a dramatic development in the ongoing story about Prime Minister Carney’s widely celebrated Jan. 20 speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he urged a way forward for “middle powers” being bashed around by the epoch-ending hegemon the United States is said to have become under the erratic weirdo Donald Trump. And it would have been a splendid fulfillment of Carney’s election campaign promise to lead the world through the Trumpist wilderness to a new and brighter place: “Canada is ready to take a leadership role in building a coalition of like-minded countries who share our values . . . if the United States no longer wants to lead, Canada will.”

Except it’s turned out that there was no such wish fulfillment in the Politico story, and no “news” either, strictly speaking.

In something of a climb-down, Politico reported Wednesday that Carney had merely offered to “broker a bridge” between the European Union and the member states of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). This would purportedly conjure a “new anti-Trump trade bloc” uniting the 27 EU states with the “fast-growing Indo-Pacific trade bloc,” Politico reported, all thanks to Carney.

In fact the EU-CPTPP talks have been going on for several months already. Politico’s “fast-growing” 11-member CPTPP has grown by only one signatory since it was established more than a decade ago — the United Kingdom — and only provisionally. And during a press conference in Montreal Tuesday, Carney said yes, the view in Ottawa is that Canada “can help broker a bridge” between the EU and the CPTPP. This is what Politico was referring to by reporting that Canada is “spearheading conversations.”

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Canada is a member of the CPTPP, and Canada also concluded a free-trade agreement with the EU in 2017 — the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) — which awaits full EU ratification. And several European countries already have free trade agreements with several CPTPP member states. So it’s all a bit of an anticlimax.

The Carney-built “mega anti-Trump trade alliance” yarn is among several persistent stories related to Canada’s newfound world-stage prominence that don’t withstand much scrutiny. Is it even true, as Carney insisted in Davos last month, that the rules-based international order that has sustained Canada’s prosperity over the past 80 years or so has been smashed by what the Munich Security Conference last weekend called the “wrecking ball” of Trump’s sanctions-obsessed defiance of the rules of the World Trade Organization?

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Among those who say no, is Michael McFaul, senior fellow with the Hoover Institution, a leading analyst in the stresses and strains on the global order and former U.S. ambassador to Russia. “Analytically, several false assumptions underlie the claim that the rules-based international system is dead,” McFaul wrote on his Substack. “Normatively, this fatalism about international cooperation can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

It would be an epic error for the leaders of the world’s democracies to adopt a script “blowing up what’s left of the old order and hoping that what comes next will be better than the status quo,” says McFaul.

In his speech at Davos, Prime Minister Carney proposed a way forward for “middle powers” that draws no distinction between democracies and police states: “It means acting consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals.” Carney simply pronounced the order that did draw those distinctions, when it was working properly, to be deceased. “We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

McFaul: “Hope is not a strategy,” either.

Carney’s decision to entrench a “strategic partnership” between Canada and China relies so heavily on “false assumptions” that it requires a thorough suspension of disbelief. The first and most noticeably peculiar assumption is that it is possible for a liberal democracy like Canada to profit from an alliance with a predatory, sadistic police-state superpower like the People’s Republic of China.

Another assumption Ottawa is asking us all to make is that the tranche of elaborate and semi-secret undertakings Carney entered into in Beijing last month will secure any significant expansion of “the meagre four-per-cent of our commodity exports that go to China,” according to the former Canadian diplomat Charles Burton, a senior fellow at Sinopsis, a think tank based in Prague.

“Based on experience dating back to Jean Chrétien, who despite his best efforts failed to grow our market share in China, it is unlikely that China represents economic inroads for Canada,” Burton wrote in a recent edition of iPolitics. Beijing simply won’t permit imports to compete on a level playing field with China’s own domestic goods, especially with Xi Jinping’s renewed emphasis on state control of domestic markets.

“Before we even begin negotiating the details of diplomatic or trade agreements, seeing the Canada-China relationship as a ‘strategic partnership’ first requires us to believe that we can have reciprocal, fair state-to-state relations. And that requires buying into a myth, not reality.”

The underlying premise in Carney’s approach to the Canada-U.S. relationship is based on a similarly shaky premise: that Trump’s contempt for Europe, his affinity with dictators like Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin and his radical antagonism to multilateral rules and institutions like NATO and the UN represent a final “rupture,” a permanent abdication of enlightened American world leadership.

It may be unfair to criticize Carney for failing to secure a trade agreement with the Trump administration by July 21 last year — a “promise” Carney made at last June’s G7 summit in Kananaskis, based on Trump’s own commitment to talks aimed at a deal within 30 days. It was Trump who blew up the negotiations altogether after Ontario premier Doug Ford sponsored an advertisement that appeared on American television networks featuring the beloved American president Ronald Reagan’s passionate objection to trade tariffs.

In retaliation, Trump threatened to add 10 per cent to a 35 per cent tariff on Canadian goods unless they were specifically protected by the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Trade Agreement. Trump had already imposed a 50 percent tariff on steel and aluminium, and 25 per cent on non-U.S. materials in automobiles. But Trump’s tariffs have gone up and down, his threats to invade Greenland have been met with overwhelming opposition by the American public and his sympathies with Vladimir Putin, along with his obstruction of Ukraine’s efforts to repel Russia’s invasion, enjoy hardly any support among American voters, even among Republicans.

It’s a fair bet that it will take years to repair the damage the Trump White House has done to Canada-U.S. relations, to the trans-Atlantic alliance, and to the capacity of Indo-Pacific democracies like South Korea, Japan and Taiwan to withstand threats from Beijing.

But the “Make America Great Again” mania that captured the formerly conservative Republican Party is already unravelling. Trump’s stranglehold on the U.S. Congress is not expected to last beyond the U.S. midterm elections, which will throw open 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, at least 33 seats in the Senate, and 34 of the 50 state governorships.

To go along with the undisclosed contents of an agreement Carney concluded between the RCMP and Beijing’s public-security bureau, to cite just one of several such examples, is to just sit back and watch a tragic comedy play out. Except it’s playing out in real time, in the real world, and Canada may never recover from it.

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