Purposeful American foreign policy needed today more than ever

The joint reaction issued last week by China and Russia to the additional sanctions and public criticism by the new Biden administration and the European Union signals a welcome reset in foreign policy by the principal powers of the Euro-Atlantic Alliance. Four years of Donald Trump’s empty bombast, wink-and-nod diplomacy with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, self-inflicted economic wounds through, inter alia, tariffs on Chinese imports, and loosened ties to former allies and multilateral institutions, has left the United States in a weakened position and the world’s liberal democracies without an effective champion. Europe on its own has not even been able to rein in the illiberal instincts of Hungary’s Victor Orban and Poland’s Law and Justice Party. China and Russia have taken full advantage and been strengthened in the process. Both share a common objective (an objective which many conservative populists in western liberal democracies seem willing to tolerate if not accept), namely assuring that their hemispheres remain as racially and ideologically homogenous as possible—a white, orthodox Christian nation dominating from the Urals to the Baltic states, and a Han-dominated greater China unencumbered by the religious and political aspirations of those in Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, or Taiwan. The collectives of 27 European member states, of a confederal Canada, and a United States of America, all characterized by linguistic, religious, political diversity and constantly enriched by immigration, represent the antithesis of how Russian and Chinese leadership view the evolution of their societies. Indeed, the very presence of liberal democracy as a governing model that values diversity, practices religious and political tolerance, and free speech, while protecting individual as well as collective human rights, constitutes an existential threat to their visions of the world and to the only governing model that will enable them to achieve that vision, namely an authoritarian state effectively ruled by one man or one party. In the case of Russia, this has been enabled by Putin’s constitutional gymnastics of July 2020 that effectively neutralized the previously mandated two-term presidential limit and now enables him to remain in office until 2036, assuming he continues to win the next two elections. With his principal political opponents either dead or in prison for the next several years, his victory seems highly probable. Calling him anything but the “killer” he is—as U.S. President Joe Biden has done—only serves to legitimize him and his authoritarian form of governance. Suggesting that his behaviour and governing model are the moral equivalents of America and its governance, as Trump and several of his Republican acolytes have done, is an obscene distortion both of reality and of America’s national goals and values, imperfect though their application has at times been. As for China, the Communist Party has tightened its grip over the past four years using force and coercive methods where necessary—as in Xinjiang and in Hong Kong—as well as applying the pretext of anti-corruption to nip in the bud any incipient departures from party orthodoxy, including against business powerhouses like Alibaba’s Jack Ma and Gong Daoan, Shanghai’s former security chief. Even Marxist-inspired youth movements that question China’s growing income inequality are not tolerated. And like Putin, Party Chairman and Supreme Leader Xi Jinping in 2018 broke from the tradition of two-term limits, allowing himself to rule indefinitely. No surprise therefore, that both governments have refrained from any criticism of the military takeover and brutal crackdown by the military in Myanmar while refusing to allow a UN resolution condemning what one senior Chinese party official obscenely called a mere “cabinet reshuffle.” What these recent power shifts reveal, therefore, is that political leadership within the members of the Euro-Atlantic Alliance can no longer afford to act under the delusion that both Russia and China are open to live-and-let-live policies and an uncontested coexistence—a naive notion driving the so-called “realists” of western foreign policy establishments. They are not. While we need to co-operate and find common ground with them on globally existential threats such as climate warming, pandemics, and nuclear proliferation, we also need to recognize that we are in a war of governance models in which the growth and dominance of liberal democracies and universal human rights, by their very nature attractive to digitally savvy young people, constitute a threat to the authoritarian governance of the Communist party of China and the so-called “redemptive” leadership of Putin. The former remains deeply conscious of both what happened in South Korea, their southern neighbour, in the 1970s and early 1980s when a student-inspired movement led to the overthrow of a military dictatorship, and of the demographic challenges their governance model faces in having to respond to the economic demands of a rapidly aging population and a digitally inspired youth hungry for knowledge and greater freedom of expression. By explicitly exposing the brutality of both China’s and Russia’s leadership and governance models, Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken are signalling that America’s rose-coloured glasses are off and that through a renewal of trans-Atlantic ties and a more-proactive presence in multilateral organizations, both existing and fledgling liberal democracies will be supported whenever opportunities present themselves. The message is pretty clear. Giving China free rein to establish evolving norms in international financial institutions, as they have sought to do with some success during the most recent American presidential terms, while at the same time allowing Russia to erode NATO solidarity and resolve through sinister moves in the Western Balkans and the Baltic states will be countered with both strength and a collective response by all members of the Euro-Atlantic Alliance, hopefully, Canada included. Joseph Ingram is the chairman of Capitalis Partners, a former president of the North South Institute, and a former World Bank special representative to the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. He is an expert adviser to the Global Growth Dialogue and a fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. The Hill Times

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Purposeful American foreign policy needed today more than ever

The EU, Canada, and the U.S., all characterized by linguistic, religious, political diversity represent the antithesis of how Russian and Chinese leadership view the evolution of their societies.

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