For all of the confusion about where the Ottawa-Washington meltdown will lead, one thing seems certain. The big winners of this diplomatic collapse will be China and other repressive dictatorships eager to become our new “strategic” partners and further undermine the world’s stabilizing democracy bloc.
Opinion piece by Charles Burton, former diplomat at Canada’s embassy in Beijing, senior fellow at Sinopsis.cz, a China-focused think tank based in Prague, Czech Republic. He is and author of ‘The Beaver and the Dragon: How China Out-Manoeuvred Canada’s Diplomacy, Security and Sovereignty’.
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Beijing in particular wants to inherit Canada’s economic dependence. Establishing such a broader North American beachhead will only further President Xi Jinping’s resolute goal of displacing the U.S. as a global hegemon, and cementing a China-dominated world order whose very foundation is the rejection of democratic freedoms and human rights.
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If Canada ever reaches a point where attacks on our economy put families’ livelihoods at stake, then standing firm on our moral principles will give way to tolerating – or at least ignoring – human rights abuses in exchange for restoring Canadian prosperity through trade and investment with the likes of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and China. As someone who has been sanctioned by both Beijing and Moscow for standing up for Canadian democratic and civil values in global affairs, this prospect is deeply troubling.
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When Mr. Xi makes a landmark trip to North America next month, it is expected he will add a Canadian stop, the first time in 16 years a Chinese head of state has visited this country. And this at a time when there have been calls for Ottawa to scrap restrictions on importing Chinese-made EVs, to locate Chinese auto factories here, and to even encourage Canadians to buy “Great Wall wine” instead of Californian.
In contrast to the belligerent threats that Canadians have been conditioned to expect from Washington, the Chinese President will project dignity and a tone of respect and goodwill toward Prime Minister Mark Carney and his Canadian business associates, who will be offering a warm welcome to the Chinese delegation.
But like Howitt’s “Spider and the Fly,” in which a cunning spider uses seduction and manipulation to lure a fly into its web, Canada should be wary of those who wield flattery and charm to disguise other intentions. Rushing to embrace China’s expansionist and calculating totalitarian regime will never work out well for Canada’s overall interest.
In the current hostile landscape, Canada could find itself deeply regretting coming out of an American frying pan into a Chinese fire.
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And I guess they didn’t expect it to so fully work, because then they fought against them, as well.
I mean, the idea of voting, sure. And literature directly on it doesn’t survive, as far as I know, but somebody definitely looked at it and said “why can’t we decide everything this way?”. (Obviously, there’s plenty surviving on Athenian democracy, but that was voting within a very aristocratic elite)
The strong democracies that exist now came about either gradually, through a republic that allowed more and more suffrage, or by intervention from a foreign democracy (Germany, for example). And then there’s all the sort-of-democracies.
It could be that there was more voting than typical in the pre-modern Anglosphere. Certainly, the ideas were around enough that the American revolutionaries decided to go the way of a republic, once they won.
Might want to read up on the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Soviets brokered a peace with the Central Powers mere months after taking power.
Uhh, okay, I have to resort to Duckduckgo for the exact timelines, but members of the Central Powers definitely did fight the Soviets, and the Soviets definitely did withdraw from WWI, because that’s the main issue that drove the revolution.
So, the February revolution was in March 1917, there’s various stuff that happens in the year before the treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on March 3, 1918, and then the treaty of Versailles is on the 28th of June 1919. That leaves another year and a bit where things like the German protectorate of Georgia happened. The terms of Brest-Litovsk ceded Russian control of Finland, and many of what are now the post-Soviet states, and basically the Central Powers would have liked that to be actually respected. It looks like there’s a page on it.
I dunno, it’s fair to say the revolution was good news for the Kaiser and friends, in light of the bigger threat of losing the war, but the USSR was still at odds with everything they represented, and they were in conflict again immediately afterwards.
Maybe the big take away is just how crazy busy the period was. This is the second time I’ve had to go down to months and weeks in this kind of discussion. The diplomats of Europe must have been just constantly swamped with tons of weird events.
It’s the October Revolution of 2017 that brough the Bolsheviks into real power. The February Revolution forced the Tsar’s abdication, but failed to produce a new stable government. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic wouldn’t officially form until November of 1917. And they negotiated a ceasefire with the Central Powers in December.
The German Aristocracy was already hollowed out and crumbling from years of total war. And while the Germans certainly had their own domestic communist uprisings to deal with, it clearly wasn’t where the country’s political fortunes landed.
A classic historical “Cool Zone of History”. Very fun to read about. Maybe not so fun to live through.
Yeah, but the Bolsheviks and Trotsky were part of/shared power with the provisional government, as well (although it is itself complicated and confusing), so I went with February. If you go with the more famous October, it doesn’t really change much.
I have to wonder if the waning days of Germany can tell us about modern Russia. It was the same static and attritional kind of warfare, and IIRC they kept going for like two years after they’d clearly lost.
Sure. In the same way the Democrats are currently sharing power with the Republicans.