Samuel Duncan: What is the realistic alternative to Davos?
Canada's national interest is not served by Mark Carney’s dreams of European-led internationalism.
Elbridge Colby’s announcement that the Pentagon is pausing American participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defence should not be dismissed as a symbolic rebuke or another passing irritant in Canada-United States relations. It is a warning that, in the new era of hard power politics, rhetoric must be matched by action and a clear sense of who Canada’s allies and adversaries are. For decades, Canada has presumed that geography, goodwill and historical partnership would guarantee American patience. This thinking prevailed despite Ottawa failing to make the investments required to defend Canada and to contribute credibly to continental security, while allowing Chinese influence to grow within Canada.
It is notable that this announcement came from Elbridge Colby, who is one of the intellectual architects of the American New Right’s foreign policy over the past decade and one of the few holdovers from the first Trump administration. Mr. Colby’s 2021 book, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict, argues that U.S. foreign and defence policy should be focused on the challenge to American interests posed by China, especially the risk that China could dominate the Indo-Pacific region. His book sets out a strategic framework for a multipolar world and the return of great-power politics, where control over the Indo-Pacific region by China could threaten American power globally. Given Mr. Colby’s focus on China and his explicit reference in his social-media post to Prime Minister Carney’s Davos speech, he has taken note of Carney’s renewed relationship with China and is concerned about Carney’s analysis of how Canada ought to behave in this post-international world order.
Canadians need clarity about how to navigate this post-liberal international order and combat what Carney himself identified, when asked to name Canada’s biggest security threat, as ‘China’. That clarity is not to be found in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech or his desire that ‘international order will be rebuilt, but it will be rebuilt out of Europe’. It can be found in an unlikely and controversial source: Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s address to the Munich Security Forum.
Canada must understand that the Americans view our foreign policy and defence strategy as misaligned with our own national interest and the greater North American security and defence interests. We must push aside our emotional and reflexive anti-Americanism and look at whether our American friends might provide a better framework for how Canada ought to act in the world.