Canadians should read Freeland’s speech and embrace her strategy

David Crane’s recent article, headlined “Canada needs to address the biggest issues facing humanity, and not help the U.S. start a Cold War,” (The Hill Times, Oct. 17) is naïve and dangerous. Crane describes the recently released U.S. National Security Strategy as a “march to folly” and claims Canada, based on a speech delivered by Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland on Oct. 11 at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., is a party to “wrong-road thinking.” The essence of his argument is that we should not confront a bellicose China with its wolf warrior diplomacy (and by implication Russia) because we need their co-operation to fight climate change. Almost everyone recognizes that climate change is an existential threat to humanity and that it constitutes a dire threat to global security. We are seeing evidence every day on every continent of the damage that is being wrought by rising temperatures with droughts, floods, more violent storms, melting ice mass, and rising sea levels. But global leaders must be capable of addressing a range of critical priorities simultaneously at any given time. In addition to climate change and pandemics, our foreign policies must also address the matter of armed conflict. Crane’s analysis of current American and Canadian foreign policy without a single reference to Ukraine, Russia’s aggression and the “friendship without limits” between Russia and China is a mind-boggling omission. Moreover, Crane’s suggestion that the United States is seeking to start a Cold War is simply preposterous. It was not the U.S. that started this ball rolling. Russia shattered the peace that Europe has enjoyed over the last seven decades, and China is escalating its threats to Taiwan and its neighbours in the South China Sea. And so, the winds of war are gripping Ukraine and are buffeting its neighbours—Poland, Moldova, and the Baltic states—while ominous storm clouds continue to gather over Taiwan. A real march to folly would be to pursue climate change objectives while completely ignoring the vicious assault on the rules-based international order by Russia and China. We cannot and should not retreat from our defence of western values of democracy, the rule of law, human rights, a free press, independent judiciaries, and pluralist societies. The existential threats to authoritarianism are not precision-guided munitions, M-777s, HIMARS, Javelins or Stingers, but our values. Whether intended or not, Crane’s failure to confront the hard realities and aggressive intentions of Chinese and Russian foreign policy places him by implication firmly in the appeasement camp. That is not where Freeland is. In her remarks, she outlined a very cogent and logical strategy to address how relations with countries like Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran should evolve in the years ahead. Her speech plainly states that we should continue to trade and talk with these regimes. To quote her directly: “That means first and foremost continuing to work together on tackling the pre-eminent threat of climate change.” Her speech clearly implies a very creative use of both hard and soft power. It was a tour de force by any objective measure. The Brookings Institution moderator immediately called it “one hell of a speech.” Canadian politicians are not known for delivering thought-provoking and visionary speeches at pivotal points in world history. However, it is not unreasonable to believe that Freeland’s comments on the new strategic environment may be read in the same vein as George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” or a certain speech given by a British politician in 1946 at Fulton, Missouri. Freeland identifies three pillars to underpin a future approach: strengthening connections between democracies; improving relations with “in-between countries” of the “non-geographic west” in Asia, Africa and Latin America; and rethinking our relations with authoritarian regimes. The first of these pillars is critical. Some of the most powerful democracies in the world—both militarily and economically—are within NATO. Those democracies have an obligation both morally and strategically to collectively push back against Putin’s bloody revanchism. And that is precisely what they, and we, are doing. While Freeland did not specifically mention the term allied solidarity, it underpins much of what she said. In modern history, allied solidarity has been critical to defeating militarism—from Klemens von Metternich and Lord Castlereagh during the Napoleonic wars, to Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Second World War. NATO institutionalized allied solidarity and has been the linchpin for international peace and security for over 70 years. Former U.S. president Donald Trump demonstrated how fragile an alliance can become when there is a leadership void. NATO and the West must increasingly turn their attention not only to the ongoing security priorities, but also to strengthening democratic resilience and building societies that address social and economic inequality. This interconnection seems to lie at the heart of Freeland’s speech. To suggest as Crane does that Canada as a “middle power” should gallop off in a different direction is both foolhardy and perilous. It is a recipe for foreign policy irrelevance at a time when allied cohesion and coherence is paramount. Rather than reject Freeland’s approach as Crane has suggested, Canadians should read her speech and embrace her strategy. The Freeland Doctrine, as some are calling it, could and probably should form the basis of a Canadian foreign policy review which arguably should be done alongside a defence review update. Freeland has also laid out some very convincing arguments, which, taken to their logical conclusion, should result in increases to the defence budget. After all, it is one thing to diagnose a problem, and quite another to equip yourself with the tools to deal with it. One hopes that it is not too late to argue that a combined foreign and defence policy review would go a long way to clarifying for Canadians and our allies how we propose to do our share to address the very volatile and dangerous age of uncertainty the world faces courtesy of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. David Pratt is a former federal minister of national defence under prime minister Paul Martin and the principal of David Pratt & Associates. The Hill Times