Canada’s Foreign Policy Crossroads

On Missile Defence And Options

Donald Trump has claimed that the Carney government has asked to be a part of a new missile defence system which I refuse to call by its actual name because it’s stupid. I’m not here to litigate the decision or not - I don’t know my ass from my elbow on the intricacies of missile defence in specific and most elements of defence policy more broadly, and we definitely need less columnists pretending they’re experts in places they’re very not - but I do think there’s an interesting conversation being had in private on foreign policy that’s not really being had in public. And it’s probably time we have it in public.

Canada is in the land of no good options on defence and security policy these days. The Europeans have never been serious about their own defence, and to whatever extent they are serious now they’ve got years of building capacity amongst themselves before they’re really a global power in these conversations. The Chinese are increasingly insular and have a lot of issues under the radar that make the question of whether a Chinese Century is possible, plus the whole “They kidnapped two of our citizens for nearly 3 years” thing. Oh, and they’re a brutal dictatorship that our House of Commons has said is committing genocide against Uyghurs and others, so, probably not on the table. And then there’s the Americans.

Are the Americans reliable allies right now? No, but that doesn’t matter. The set of options in front of Anita Anand is not the Americans or some hypothetical reliable, capable, and benevolent superpower, it is between the Americans in all of their lack of glory or two options that don’t really exist as serious options. And that’s the honest truth at this point - the Americans are a markedly worse option than they were 7 months ago. They’re still our best shot.

Now, Canada has a bunch of levers it can and should pull to help itself get friends and make relationships, and a serious effort to make those allies would be the creation of an additional global Foreign Aid fund designed to essentially buy allies in Africa - and weaken China’s influence by replacing Chinese Belt And Road money with western cash. Carney’s the kind of PM who has the relationships to make it work and it should be a priority, if only because as American aid departs, we can either step up or let China fill the gaps. I know which side of that battle I’m on.

But more than that, Anand needs to reframe Canada’s foreign policy objectives less around what makes us feel good and what makes us better off. In so many ways, it is what we do as a country - remember when we had a whole national debate about whether how we treated Indigenous people constituted a form of genocide and then we did very little beyond genuinely great, though decades overdue, investments in clean water? We like to think of ourselves as a moral people that make decisions for moral reasons and have moral red lines. We don’t, but we like to pretend we do, and that those moral lines drive our foreign policy. They haven’t for a long time.

The problem with this government’s Israel-Palestine policy, which I broadly agree with and think is pitched well, is that I have no idea why we believe what we believe. Nobody has bothered making an argument to the Canadian people about the conflict, why we’ve come to the position we have, or what any of this says about the rest of our country. We have had a failure of explanation on every front since the 2021 election, which means people can map their own biases and issues onto this issue and assume their own agendas in absence of leadership.

The fact is I have no idea why we make the decisions we do in foreign policy and international relations. I think I can muddle through a shitty guess from the answers, picking up a thread through the decisions even if those decisions weren’t linked, but I don’t know for sure. Canadians definitely don’t know, and that leaves us unsure of what we stand for, and what the options are.

I’ve been arguing for a government that trusts Canadians to meet the moment for weeks now, and a government that trusts Canadians enough to handle complicated arguments. Why is Anand not making a speech to the entire press gallery laying out the entirety of our foreign and security policy, in detail, in depth? We know she can do it, and answer follow ups - she did it every fucking day as Minister for Finally Getting Us Fucking Vaccinated or whatever her title was. We have in Anand a Foreign Minister of immense talent and stature, and we should take advantage.

We need the Americans, even if we don’t want to need them. We want a better option that doesn’t exist, we want the livesaving experimental surgery without the chance of bleeding out. We don’t have that, because life isn’t fucking simple and the choices aren’t either. I know Liberals have pretended the concept of tradeoffs are a conservative fantasy for much of the last decade, but it is the case that in this game morality is a nice to have that isn’t always available. We need a clear articulation of what we do prioritize and what we need from our defence, foreign, and security policies.

We need to be a country that can handle hard conversations in a way we haven’t been for the last thirty years. The last big thing we did outside of a few months of COVID was reset the country’s economics in the 90s, and since then we’ve asked less and less of our citizens despite the world getting more and more complicated. If we are to come out of this moment as one country, it will take a clear articulation of our values and our interests and a clear commitment to abide by those values and interests blindly, without favour or intentional indifference.

We sit at a crossroads, a time when the foreign and security policy decisions will be made that will change the course of the rest of our lives. I have no idea if we’ll get them right. But I know we’ll get them wrong if we are seen to play Whack A Mole with them. We need more, and better, and if we’re working with the Americans we need to be clear eyed about why.

Or else we might as well give up.

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