Canada must expand beyond Trump’s America

In the matter of one Donald J. Trump, Canada is faced with two wicked paradoxes. First, we must renegotiate NAFTA with a president who may not last four full years, or even another 12 months. Second, we must parry the political tumult of Washington at the same time as we diversify away from our American brethren in order to better think for ourselves and carve our own path.

How have we managed these paradoxes thus far? Answer: We’ve done so well in implementing a full-court press in the American theatre that we’re at great risk of missing the boat entirely on the longer-term imperative of making Canada a real difference-maker, not in bilateral relations with the U.S., but in the human condition globally.

Consider the many current and potential conflicts in the world today, from the Middle East to Africa, the Americas, Eastern Europe, Northeast Asia, South Asia and Central Asia. With all the global goodwill our country enjoys at this moment, how can it be that we do not lead a single peace process or table in any part of the world?

The new French president, Emmanuel Macron, young enough to be my student, has already insinuated himself, perhaps with outsized audacity, into peacemaking roles in Libya and Ukraine and between Israel and the Palestinians. If he overshoots, then we are surely undershooting.

Making a difference beyond our borders requires resources, relationships and planning. It takes time. But most of all it requires of us our own strategic imagination and vocabulary.

For now, these are still largely absent. For just as we proclaim to be laying the foundation for a post-American future, we are, given the number of official political and policy-maker visits made to the U.S. over the last year, arguably more immersed than ever in the American reality.

And this, if we are honest with ourselves, is probably our comfort zone, for it is a reality that we know better than all other countries, and one in which we’ve invested a great deal. Most of the Canadian school of international relations is, self-consciously, a school of Canada-U.S. relations, full stop.

And yet we must know that if Trump is today’s American “thesis,” then his “antithesis” in the coming year or years will be equally unstable and possibly also extreme, with no stabilizing American “synthesis” in sight. It would be foolish, then, to presume that things in America will calm down or “normalize” when Trump makes his exit, and foolhardy to believe that the world will not have been further destabilized, including possibly in nuclear terms, by the time he does make his exit.

But how can we think and act for ourselves if we continue to rely on our brilliant and at once mad American brethren — their media, their academy, their companies and, yes, their political leaders — to supply the basic terms and framework for our thoughts and actions (even as we proclaim to be making a clean break)?

Answer: like the Fathers of Confederation 150 years ago, we must be extremely hard-headed in asserting a different framework for our national and international behaviour, and, without resorting to their fancies of moral superiority vis-à-vis the Americans (for we manifestly are not), we must think big and place some big bets (presuming that some of these will pay off over time).

Start with the travel of the prime minister, foreign minister and federal cabinet. It is not the circuit travel to regular international summits and conferences that matters for purposes of getting Canada ahead, but rather the off-circuit travel that counts. Outside of the U.S. and the familiar West, Canada has very underdeveloped relationships, embassy presence and, consequently, clout in too many parts of the world. Let’s get cracking in building up our world networks in the national interest.

In foreign intelligence, Canada’s capabilities remain exceedingly limited and excessively beholden to American assets, analytics and, most dangerously today, American judgment. This can no longer stand. Whether we do it quietly or publicly, it is time to invest in world-class capabilities, on our own terms and according to our own objectives and mental map.

Finally, returning to the multiple conflicts burning and brewing on our planet. We must pick a conflict — indeed, any conflict. And let’s lead the international charge to solve it. If not us, then who? If not now, then when?