Don’t screw over your friends

It’s not often that a Canadian foreign affairs minister says anything important. But Chrystia Freeland did Wednesday when she told Americans point blank that their days of global hegemony are numbered and that they would be wise to keep the allies they have.

“You may feel today that your size allows you to go mano-amano with your traditional adversaries and be guaranteed to win,” Freeland told a friendly audience at the Foreign Policy forum in Washington.

“But if history tells us one thing, it is that no one nation’s preeminence is eternal.”

She noted in particular China’s rise as an economic power. role that American self-interest played in establishing the postSecond World War order and glosses over the corrosive effects of what used to be called U.S. imperialism.

But it is essentially correct in its description of how America and its allies created international institutions and rules designed to increase trade and encourage global capitalism.

In the early years, these rules unambiguously favoured the U.S. and its multinational corporations. The International Monetary Fund, for instance, was used to impose fiscal discipline on developing nations and force them to adopt policies that benefited foreign capital. Freeland didn’t talk about that.

But the postwar order did have rules. And as long as the U.S. played the lead role in setting these rules, it was happy to follow them.

When the Cold War ended, countries that had been ideological enemies of U.S. capitalism, such as China and Russia, joined the rules-based order - and enriched themselves by doing so.

China in particular demonstrated that a liberal, marketbased economy could thrive in an authoritarian, undemocratic state.

Meanwhile, in advanced countries such as the U.S., a reaction to globalization was growing among those who had been left behind.

Freeland didn’t mention Trump’s name, but she clearly had him in mind when she talked of the false lure of those who would do away with the postwar order.

My own view is that Freeland is too quick to equate trade protectionism with authoritarianism. Canada’s supply management system in dairy products is protectionist. Yet Canada is not an authoritarian state.

Conversely, China’s embrace of freer trade has not lessened the dominance of its ruling Communist party.