India, G7, And Bad Options

On Bad Choices, Every One Of Them

There is not always a good solution to a problem.

In the aftermath of COVID and the rising prices that time period brought, it became a truism of a certain kind of person that the government needed to Do Something about price increases, especially grocery prices. Push in any way, and the concept of “Do Something” fell apart, because the underlying assumption was there had to be a good solution. The idea that there really just wasn’t anything to be done infuriated people, because they want to believe that there is always a good solution to problems. The problem is, there’s not.

We face a similar conversation in foreign policy all the time. In the face of the new American reality, Canada has to make choices it has long ignored about who they can rely on and where the bulk of our diplomatic and security relationships should be. Right now, we face an unenviable quartet of options - an unreliable American president who changes his mind more frequently than a squirrel on LSD, European allies in managed decline and unable to show any capacity to deal with that fact, an Indian government that killed a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil, and a Chinese government that kidnapped two Canadians as retribution for a legitimate arrest and who the Canadian Parliament has unanimously said is committing genocide.

There is no good outcome.

We can stick our heads in the sand, embrace a greater relationship with Europe, and mostly achieve nothing. We can try and trust Donald Trump’s word means anything (yeah, right) and make irreversible strategic decisions with the Americans while he’s in office, though that sounds about as appealing as straight porn to a gay guy. We could forgive the Genociders with a terrible human rights record that held two of our people for over a thousand days, but the idea of pivoting to China when our House of Commons has proclaimed them guilty of genocide is too brazen even for realpolitik. Which leaves the Mumbai Mobster. (I know he’s not from Mumbai, but come on, the name is cool as shit.)

Much of the criticism of the decision to let Modi come to the G7 comes from a sincere place. In a vacuum, there is no place on Canadian soil for Modi unless he’s coming to apologize or coming to be arrested, I get it. But we don’t have the privilege of looking at these issues in isolation. What’s our better option? Genuinely, if we’re going to continue to shun India because of their heinous behaviour, what the fuck is our better option?

Maybe people with a short term memory will think it’s China, but the problem with any pivot to China even ignoring all of the moral problems is that we would royally piss off the Americans with it, and induce many more problems than China can actually help us solve. You want to see those CUSMA tariff exemptions go away? Have Mark Carney rock up to Beijing with a smile on his face and announce a reset of relationships. And again, as abhorrent as Trump is, and the current state of his authoritarian crackdown is. China is still far more repressive, and that hasn’t changed just because one repression is live-streamed for us every day.

The Europeans are the (mostly) moral choice here, even if it would make my World War 2 veteran grandfather roll over in his grave to see headlines about the Germans rearming being viewed as a good thing. The problem is, the Europeans have been talking a big game about taking their security more seriously for most of my own life, and the results have been … pedestrian is too kind, so let’s go anemic. There have been individual moments of progress, but no structural progress or improvement. And that’s the motto on the European economic front too, a textbook example of managed decline.

Now, I can only imagine being a member of the Indian diaspora in Canada right now. There would be understandable frustration with this decision, and it’s not for a white guy to say that this is the way it is and lay down the law. It’s not. But it’s also worth the critics of this decision laying out an alternative solution that is acceptable, instead of pretending that good choices are on the table if we just want it badly enough.

The reason nobody is actually making an argument is that making the positive case for rapprochement with India is really fucking hard to do. I feel slimy even writing this column, but at the end of the day we have to be honest about the choices we face, and the ones we don’t. There is no moral choice that can deliver needed economic diversification, a truth understood by Justin Trudeau when he spent the first few years of his time in office trying to make as many deals with China as possible. Seeing people who chose to work for the man who once said he admired China and their “basic dictatorship” doing a media round about how Carney has somehow failed is more than a little ironic. (It’s especially ironic given the level of animosity many ex-Trudeau staffers have towards those of us that were right about the now ex-PM, but I digress.)

There’s no good choices here. That doesn’t make detente with India a good choice, but it does mean the burden is pretty high on what the better option is. It is a form of privilege to assume that their priority is so important that there must be no compromise, a race to the bottom that achieves nothing but alienating countries we need. How would we treat someone arguing that Canada shouldn’t support Ukraine because they’ve banned gay marriage and same-sex couples from adopting? Pretty fucking badly, I hope, because in that circumstance we (correctly) understand there is something called a greater good.

Whether detente with India is actually worth it for the greater good is eminently debatable! I’m not a foreign policy expert, and I’m not going to pretend to be one. But unless you’re having the conversation about the G7 invite in the broader context of the situation we find ourselves in, it’s nothing more than grandstanding moralization and a childish understanding of global realities. Everybody knows India doesn’t deserve detente. They very obviously don’t. Tell me your better option, cause I can’t find one.

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