Justin Trudeau is not the free world’s best hope
In all the eye-rolling and the uproar attending to the glamour treatment lavished upon Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the cover of this month’s Rolling Stone magazine, there’s one thing that has been conspicuously overlooked in each of the obsessively forensic deconstructions of the gushing 7,000-word profile that accompanies the magazine’s stylish portraiture. There is nothing in it that even comes close to answering the question posed in its headline: “Is he the free world’s best hope?”
As a public service, then, here’s the short answer. If Justin Trudeau is the free world’s best hope, then the free world is doomed.
On a scale that exceeds anything since the darkest moments of the Cold War era, a belligerent authoritarian internationalism is corrupting the world’s democracies and undermining the institutions of freedom and the rule of law from Hong Kong to Hungary and from Washington to Warsaw. It is a state of affairs that may not yet require any defiant Churchillian oratory of the “let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground” variety. Still if the free world’s foremost champion is to be a glamorous, tousle-haired scion of Canada’s soft-palmed class, this is exactly what you will get, in Trudeau’s own words: “I mean, the image of Canada, the way people look at you as ‘Oh, you’re Canadian, but you’re here to help, you’re not here for oil, you’re not here to tell us how to run our country.’ ”
Americans, at least those who still take the once-vital Rolling Stone magazine seriously, will grin at that line. But that is also exactly what the free world’s most determined enemies want to hear from us. Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, Iran’s Hassan Rouhani and Turkey’s Recip Erdogan do not want us telling them how to run their countries, not by any stretch. Neither does Syria’s Bashar Assad, nor the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro or any of the other theocrats, gangsters and generals whose systems of kleptocracy, mass murder and oppression are soaring in the ascendant at the moment, everywhere.
It is possible to muster sympathy for Americans who look to Trudeau as some sort of dreamboat idol, now that their own Putin-fancying president has reduced the White House to a kind of dysfunctional reality-television hybrid of Survivor, Jersey Shore and The Sopranos. It is not easy to face that fact that 16 U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russians, by hacking and subversive disinformation, interfered in the presidential election that put Donald Trump in the Oval office. It can’t be exactly reassuring that Dan Coats, Trump’s own director of National Intelligence, insists that despite what Trump claims, the Kremlin is actively “trying to undermine western democracy.”
It is not a stretch to imagine Donald Trump as the free world’s worst nightmare. But Trudeau as the free world’s best hope? To be fair, Germany’s Angela Merkel, who is more frequently talked up as the best understudy to tide us over until America’s crippling convulsions are behind us, is no better. But what intimacy has President Trump afforded Russia’s gangland elites that Prime Minister Trudeau has not abased himself by serving up to China’s parasitic ruling class?
Unlike Trump, the preponderance of evidence suggests that Trudeau is one of the world’s good guys. He is a mammal among reptiles. But he is still not so much a prime minister as Canada’s first postmodern prime minister: a mascot. He is pleasant to look at, he attends all the right parties and he marches in all the right parades. But his leadership in the twilight hour of rules-based globalization amounts to a charming but wholly unconvincing celebrity endorsement of everything that went wrong with neo-liberalism. If you want a “Dear Leader” figure to reassure you that everything is proceeding according to plan and everything is going to be all right, Trudeau is your man. Not to say the Conservatives or the New Democrats necessarily have something better on offer, but if you want someone to lead Canada by building sturdy global alliances in defence of liberal democracy, Justin Trudeau is exactly the wrong person for the job.
Neoliberalism’s great hope — the hubris that still animates Trudeau’s Liberals — was to imagine that the institutions of global capitalism could accommodate tyrannies, that despotism would wither as globalization swept away the borders, the bedlam and the anti-democratic barbarism of the 20th century. It hasn’t turned out that way. Wherever police states have been admitted,
The preponderance of evidence suggests that Trudeau is one of the world’s good guys. He is a mammal among reptiles. But he is still not so much a prime minister as a mascot.
wherever they have been “engaged,” they have brought their corruption with them. The rot starts at the top.
Last November, Beijing was pleased by the election of Meng Hongwei, the regime’s vice-minister of public security, to the presidency of Interpol, the international police body. On April 15, the New York Times published the results of an investigation revealing that it had confirmed some of the most astonishing corruption claims made by the absconding billionaire Guo Wengui, who vowed there was more to come. Within days, Interpol issued a warrant for Guo’s arrest on corruption charges.
In 1997, Vladimir Putin’s Russia was admitted to the Group of Seven countries, which then became known as the G8. Putin returned the favour by annexing the Chechen Republic, re-establishing Soviet-era control and installing a pseudo-Islamist government. In 2008, Putin invaded the Georgian Republic, carving out South Ossetia and Abkhazia as Russian satrapies. Ditched from the G8 after invading Ukraine and annexing Crimea in 2014, the Kremlin parlayed U.S. president Barack Obama’s acquiescence to Bashar Assad’s chemical weapons atrocities into a licence to bomb Syria’s revolutionary democratic opposition into oblivion, in alliance with Iran. And then the Kremlin waged its cyber war and fake-news campaign against the United States.
Khomeinist Iran, meanwhile, has parlayed the nuclear-weapons program hiatus it negotiated with the administration of Barack Obama into a licence to rampage with impunity across Syria, arm Houthi rebels in Yemen, strengthen Hezbollah in Lebanon and further persecute Iran’s women, minorities, democrats and dissidents.
The advantage Turkey’s Recip Erdogan has taken from all this: a war waged against Turkey’s Kurds, a centralization of strongman power in a rigged constitutional referendum, the blackmailing of Europe over Syrian refugees, the jailing of 50,000 Turkish dissidents, the shuttering of 49 Turkish news organizations, the closure of 2,000 schools and universities and the firing of 120,000 civil servants, judges and teachers.
Turkey remains a NATO member, and still formally proposes to join the European Union, but is nonetheless in the process of joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. Two months ago, India and Pakistan signed up, and Iran is next up on the to-join list. The 10-country Russian-Chinese SCO initiative was established in 1997 as a counterweight to NATO, and to specifically oppose intervention by democracies in SCO members’ internal affairs “on the pretexts of humanitarianism and protecting human rights.”
What these police states hear from Trudeau, consistently and unceasingly, is that there are Canadian values, and there are other countries’ values.
Their happy response in each case is, as Trudeau himself described it, accurately enough: Well, lovely, “you’re not here to tell us how to run our country.”
You’re Canadian. You’re here to help.