Freeland dares to look at a dark future
The great failing of political speechmaking and its reporting has been the deletion of context. Once a vast and useful canopy, it has gone missing at a time when citizens have never needed it more.
Columnists want a headbanger Orwell-essay intro. Reporters want a sound bite, the more emotional the better. Politicians want a slogan: “Buck-aBeer,” “Make America Great Again,” “Are You Thinking What We’re Thinking?”
They’re using shorthand to collar their audiences but citizens need more, a backgrounder in why this economic and political mudslide happened to them, their town, their nation, their allies. Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chrystia Freeland, provided exactly that context as she gave a stark, extraordinary speech in Washington on Wednesday after receiving a diplomat of the year award at the Foreign Policy forum.
The speech was more of a drawing of a global map over a colour wash of political history. There was a glance at early 19th century European inwardness followed by the 20th century building of an international system of rules — the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, World Bank and United Nations — that welcomed emerging powers and liberal democracy, and in the 21st century, a worrying retreat from modernity.
Then came dark splashes of discord. Countries moving to democratic capitalism, most notably Russia, abruptly turned back. China, the next global ruling power, cannot encompass democracy. Wealthy Western nations, Freeland said, are seeing “homegrown anti-democratic movements ... neo-Nazis, white supremacists, incels, nativists, or radical anti-globalists” while “authoritarian regimes are actively seeking to undermine us with sophisticated, wellfinanced propaganda and espionage operations.”
Freeland, who once saw Russia’s terrible national descent up close, wrote two books, Sale
of the Century in 2000 and Plutocrats in 2012, about the corruption-riddled morphing of Russia after perestroika. Now such things are going global.
At no time did she mention Donald Trump, but she hardly needed to. “The technology revolution and globalization” offered wealth plus an undertow, she said. The hollowing-out of the middle class helped create angry populism. People quite rightly feel insecure about education, health care, good jobs, and pensions in retirement, she said, but this could be warded off in the 21st century by realizing that “capital is global, but social welfare is national, (ensuring) that each of our countries has the durable tax base necessary to support the 99 per cent.”
Imagine that, mentioning “tax” as an essential in a nation that has been demonizing tax for generations. We have long seen Freeland’s self-discipline in trade negotiations — the minister cannot be thrown off course — but had we seen such daring in action before? Once you win the award, perhaps they give you a friendly pass on your speech.
Freeland was speaking to an audience that respects diplomacy in a nation that is destroying its own capacity for it, as Ronan Farrow’s new book, War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence, makes alarmingly clear.
The U.S. State Department is emptying, intellect is despised and back-channel talk among diplomats is considered a waste of time. Farrow summed it up with an eerie, Khmer Rouge-like phrase: “Then the firings began.”
The global solution to our problems, Freeland said repeatedly, is “the rules-based international order” and a Western alliance, plus Japan, that emerging powers could and did join. It’s the kind of structure where “Facts matter. Truth matters. Competence and honesty, among elected leaders and in our public service, matter.”
I get the distinct feeling that Freeland was taking aim at a certain person here, a certain political team, a vanishing system of reliable government.
I never quote from The Second Coming as it contains at least eight distinctive clichés — this is hardly Yeats’s fault — but Freeland plucked out a phrase and flipped it expertly. “We need to summon Yeats’s oftcited passionate intensity in the fight for liberal democracy and the international rulesbased order that supports it.”
Americans should work with traditional allies, she said, presumably referring to Trump’s threat to punish Canadians and his courtiers’ crude, violent remarks.
Otherwise we will see “a ruthless struggle between great powers, governed solely by the narrow, short-term and mercantilist pursuit of self-interest.” And then she embarked on something sinister, something that sounds like a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be reborn. “No one nation’s pre-eminence is eternal.” Cue a tolling bell. There you go down the hole of history, American exceptionalism.
Perhaps these flashed through your brain as you heard this: the collapse of the Incas; the Mayans; the Thousand-Year Reich; the British Empire; Little Britain’s retreat from the EU; the once-mighty Soviet Union and its minions; the Arab states using up oil; climate change creating world carnage.
Freeland’s speech ended with luminous quotes from Ronald Reagan’s 1989 “shining city on the hill” speech, a vision of a welcoming nation with open ports.
She expressed hope that the U.S. would return to friendship with the allies it appears to be discarding.
She also handed a copy of her speech to U.S. trade negotiator Robert Lighthizer that evening. Will it be his bedtime reading or just another pile of paper used to mop up a kitchen spill?