As Donald Trump rampaged about in his first term, leadership of the free world was transferred, by general liberal acclamation, to Angela Merkel of Germany. She was cast as the embodiment of internationalist virtue: prudent, broad-minded, diplomatic, multilateralist and expertise-driven above all.
Then Trump left office, Merkel left office, and suddenly it was possible to notice that her leadership of Germany had been well-nigh disastrous.
The mismanaged eurozone crises that followed the crash of 2008 and her open door to Middle Eastern migrants both contributed mightily to the collapse of the very firewall against far-right parties she was supposedly maintaining. Much worse, she accepted, for enlightened environmentalist reasons, her country’s deindustrialization and an ever-increasing reliance on Russian oil and gas. And when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, it suddenly became clear that Merkel’s legacy wasn’t a strong alternative to Trump’s America; it was a weak European core threatened by and dependent upon an authoritarian rival to its east.
The lessons of the Merkel era came to my mind this week watching the praise for Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, after his speech in Davos declaring partial independence from an American-led order.
There was much to admire in the speech. Carney’s words were remarkably free of the cant upon which most politicians nowadays depend. He told some important truths, stressing especially the ways in which the liberal international order was always defined by power and self-interest as well as idealism. He was correct to cast Trump’s recent return to power as part of a “rupture” with the post-Cold War order and to emphasize great-power competition as a key feature of this age.
Finally, his not-so-veiled threat to the United States, the suggestion that middle powers like Canada need not be constrained by their traditional American alliance, is an understandable response to some of the absurdities that Trump has visited upon our northern neighbor — the “51st state” jibes (Canada, of course, will bring at least 10 new states when it joins with us someday), the excessive trade warring and the Greenland gambit.
But as with Merkel, it’s worth considering where the logic of Carney’s vision of world order might lead. Certainly middle powers can sometimes work together against greater ones. In crucial areas, though, the new world order is not truly multipolar, and its middle powers are ill equipped to bandwagon. Rather, they often face a binary choice, in which the more independence they assert from the United States, the more they risk subordination to China.
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In the military arena, for instance, on paper Europe and Canada are rich enough to rearm and form some kind of third force between the Trumpian United States and the Sino-Russian quasi-axis. In practice, though, path dependency and old age are powerful forces. Disentangling from the American alliance is incredibly technically difficult, and ramping up spending while your welfare states cope with aging populations is incredibly politically difficult. And achieving the first without achieving the second leads, in most scenarios, to increased accommodation with Moscow and Beijing.
In the realm of artificial intelligence the choice is even starker. American companies and their Chinese competition dominate the tech frontier, and it’s very hard to imagine a future where the architecture of A.I. isn’t forged by either American nerd-kings or Communist scientist-apparatchiks. It is possible that either A.I. future could lead to our destruction. But there is not some third, nonaligned A.I. path, and I don’t think Ottawa is going to find one.
Finally, and most controversially, I suspect the same “if not America, then China” logic applies to political ordering as well. The United States under Trumpian conditions has allowed populism to come to power, bringing chaos and authoritarian behavior in its train. Recoil from that by all means — but recognize that it happened through democratic mechanisms, under freewheeling political conditions.
Meanwhile, the modes through which Europe and Canada have sought to suppress populism involve harsh restrictions on speech, elite collusion and other expression of managerial illiberalism. And what is China’s dictatorship if not managerial illiberalism in full flower? When European elites talk about China as a potentially more stable partner than the whipsawing United States, when they talk admiringly about its environmental goals and technocratic capacity, they aren’t defending a liberal alternative to Trumpian populism. They are letting the magnet of Chinese power draw them away from their own democratic traditions.
Or, one might counter, they’re being pushed in that direction by Trump himself. World leaders are flesh and blood, and it’s hard to ask them to keep faith with America when the American president is insulting and threatening them, not just telling impolitic truths.
So even though I am still betting on the American future, I wouldn’t ask Mark Carney or any other leaders to simply keep the faith. I would just ask them to consider every step away from us in light of the potential destination and the powers waiting there.
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