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Terry Glavin: Beijing offers a poisoned chalice. Carney shouldn't drink from it

We're embroiled in a hybrid war with China

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It’s a war that’s underway everywhere, all the time. It’s being waged by Beijing and Moscow. It’s a hybrid war that confounds western intelligence agencies and transcends borders. Like conventional warfare, it involves mobilizations and sophisticated operations and devastating weaponry that lays waste to entire industries.

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The war relies on command structures that establish tactical objectives in pursuit of strategic dominance by means of espionage, sabotage, intellectual property theft and the targeted flooding of western markets with heavily subsidized exports. The phenomenon defies description without resort to a lexicon that is only barely intelligible within conventional analyses of international conflict, statecraft and diplomacy: spearphishing, troll farms, botnets and cyber kill chains. Spamouflage, Dragonbridge, Salt Typhoon and Raptor Train.

Terry Glavin: Beijing offers a poisoned chalice. Carney shouldn't drink from it Back to video

Wholly new reality-distorting artificial intelligence manipulations are carried out at a global scale in tandem with primitive trench warfare in Ukraine of a kind unknown since the First World War, while at the same time, satellite-guided drone technology is rendering conventional arsenals of tanks, bombers and fighter jets obsolete.

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Compromised global supply chains, high-finance interdependency and digital interconnectivity have obscured the distinctions between the interests of the United Nations police-state bloc and the NATO capitals, and between the public interest and the interests of trade-reliant global corporations and the compliant politicians they champion. There’s no Berlin Wall anymore.

While the Five Eyes intelligence agencies do their best to keep up, the rapid acceleration of the Beijing-Moscow assault on the NATO countries has been midwifed by the Trump administration’s abdication of the United States’ traditional role as the democratic world’s primary defensive backstop. NATO disunity and a leadership vacuum in Europe have only deepened the West’s incoherence.

An analysis undertaken by the 38-member Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development published earlier this month found that nearly 60 percent of the global market gains made by Chinese corporations since 2005 are attributable to state subsidies.

Some European manufacturers appear to be finally willing to put up a fight — the European Union has proposed a “Made in the EU” Industrial Accelerator Act. Others, like the Mercedes-Benz corporation, now partly owned by Chinese carmakers, lean towards the accommodationist approach adopted by Mark Carney’s Liberal government in Ottawa. Prime Minister Carney has invested much of the Liberals’ political capital in the “strategic partnership” he entered into with Beijing in January.

The Ottawa-Beijing partnership consists of a series of agreements and promises, beginning with Ottawa’s guarantee to allow the import of low-tariff Chinese electric vehicles into Canada, starting with a quota of 49,000 EVs a year. The deal is opposed by the three largest U.S. automakers in Canada on the grounds that the annual quota represents nearly a third of EV sales in Canada last year and the deal “puts the North........

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