Thinking After Trump: Canada and US Foreign Policy

 On August 15th, the UN Security Council voted against a US motion to extend the international arms embargo against Iran. The US government then accounts it would use provisions of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (2015) as a way to “snapback” those sanctions for, what it views, as Iranian non-compliance with the original agreement. The problem, of course, as JCPOA members quickly told the US, it had already withdrawn form the agreement in 2018 and was now a non-member since it had, in effect, already rejected the provisions of the agreement two years ago. There are a series of serious issues that go along with this current situation that relate to the extension of US power, the shape of the world environment, and exactly how this situation should be assessed as part of US foreign policy. Virtually no members of the UN Security Council, for instance, supported the US move to re-impose sanctions and European powers were quick to tell the US it had not standing with the JCPOA. 

The question I want to address in this blog is different: what does this tell us about the issues facing Canada on the world stage and Canada’s relationship with the US. After the most recent US aluminum tariffs, I listed to a number of commentators say something like “what Canada needs to do now is simply wait until the coming US election which see the replacement of the current administration with a more reasonable one.” I know the issue is more complicated than that but, at first, I tended to agree.  What I am thinking about now is that there might be a way to Canada to build a new foreign policy relationship with the US in a post-Trump era. I don’t necessarily think this will be easy but I also think that there may be a range of Americans who are interested in the subject even if will undoubtedly be controversial in the US. 

At the heard of the Trump election strategy was the slogan “Make America Great Again.” These words carry with them an at least implicit foreign policy because they assert an international pre-eminence. The Trump administration’s foreign policy has sought this greatness even if its approach been far from consistent. Despite the fact that Trump has drawn on Republicans to direct it, his administration has disavowed many of the key aspects of his own party’s approach to world affairs. One should not have a lot of nostalgia here. The War on Terror, neo-liberalism, rejection of international environmental standards, among other things, were all hallmarks of Republican foreign policy. 

Historically, pre-Trump Republican foreign policy has not been popular either internationally or within Canada. But, key foreign policy thinkers associated largely, if not completely, with conservative politics have tended to argue that Canada needed to follow the lines laid down by the US. These people tended to self-style themselves as “realists.”  They tended to advocated hard power, close military and diplomatic connections to the US, and support for US foreign policy goals. They tended to reject what they saw as “moralism” in foreign policy, arguing that the only standard against which foreign policy should be measured was interests of state. This close connection to the US, they tended to argue, was good for Canada for three reasons. (#1) The US was the pre-eminent power in the world. By having a good relationship with the US, Canada gained power on the world stage, as it were, by riding on US coattails. (#2) Canada needed the US on its side because of the degree to which the Canadian economy was dependent on the US. The US could, should it have wanted, cripple our economy. (#3) The US was right most of the time anyway. Its opponents were terrorists and military dictators or authoritarian communist countries. 

Against this way of thinking about the world – Canada as a subservient ally of the US – was a different way of thinking about the world that is associated, in some measure, with the peacekeeping ideal. This way of thinking is most closely associated with liberal intellectuals and, to a significant extent, with the Liberal party, but that requires some nuance. The basics of this way of looking at the world were that Canada should have its own international identity and that there was nothing wrong with being on the side of the angels; that is: there was nothing wrong with morality. Indeed, it was good for Canada’s international reputation and good for Canadians who were well liked (at least compared to Americans) on the world stage. Canada found its foreign policy identity through constructive international engagement and multilateralism that allowed it to work together with other countries to accomplish positive ends and hedge in the power game. In other words, Canada’s aims were a stable, peaceful, and constructive international environment that limited the ability of “might makes right” politics by setting up international institutions that operated according to the rule of international law and some measure of global democracy (with votes vested in the nation-state).

I have no special clarity with regard to the Trump administration’s foreign policy. It seems to me that when its history is written, studies will see it as based in a series of factors that include:

• An effort to further free the US from multilateral and international commitments to extend its ability to use its own might makes right policy approach. That is: to have more of a free hand with regard to international affairs and not be bound by alliances, agreements, and the like. 
• A belief in the power of personal relations with world leaders to address issues (say, by establishing a direct personal relationship with the Putin and Kim-Il Jong) as a way to address problems
• A focus on economic deal-making, employing retaliatory threats, particularly with allies, in an effort to gain an edge. Allies and partners (say, Canada) were, in particular, viewed with suspicion.  The goal of US economic relations with Canada was not to further common goals. Instead, it looked more like neo-liberal mercantilism. The goal is to get something from, as an example, Canada. 

We don’t need to go over these points and I recognize that there are other considerations that need to be included to have a fuller discussion. What it does, however, is highlight the degree to which even Canadian conservatives will have a hard time buying into their formerly near unconditional support for the US international agenda. There are two key reasons for this. 

#1) Conservatives used to argue that bad relations with the US were a problem and they tended to fault Liberal-minded PMs (PET, Jean Chretien) for it. Their overt anti-Americanism, for instance, conservative thinkers and politicians argued, poisoned the relationship with the US and endangered both the Canadian economy and Canada’s international standing with it. It is now impossible to make this argument. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a government that has been more sensitive (the odd mistake to one side) and more concerned with not offending the US government than Justin Trudeau’s. Even at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, Trudeau refrained from any public criticism of the United States and its government. During intense trade negotiations when US figures publicly hammered Canada, Canadian political leaders and trade negotiators were, more or less, silent. Yet, this silence has bought noting and cannot by anything because the current US government is not looking to get any support from Canada for anything. Canada’s support is, in fact, irrelevant to it.  What it wants from Canada is not agreement but, as it were, increased regulation of the Canadian economy. IOW, the result of being nice to the US is not economic gain but economic decline via production limitations. 

#2) It is impossible to pretend that the US has the global power and influence it had a number of years ago. Indeed, even a number of years ago that power was waning. US power and influence are not things of the past. I’ve read studies that talk about historical shifts in international affairs as if they were some sort of cycle. They are not. But, the US no longer commands the world stage the way it did during the Cold War or the New World Order eras. Economically, US domination is challenged not by a single country (although China gets a lot of press) but by an expanded international regionalization of power. Countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, China, Indian, Russia don’t wait for US permission for anything. They might be world leaders or they might aspire to this but they are in the process of carving out their own regionalized and international spheres of influence. The US finds itself as one of a series of global regional powers and that is the reality with which it has to grapple. 

I don’t expect that grappling to be easy. I don’t expect a lot of Americans will want to embrace it. And, I suspect that lot of Americans are looking simply to see themselves as “great again,” regardless of what that happens to mean. For Canada, however, it means that one end of a long-standing debate in Canadian foreign policy is over. There are good reasons to have a good relationship with the US and I will spell these out later, and the US economic connection is still important for Canada. But, whatever happens next for conservative approach to the US and Canadian foreign policy, it cannot be a return to the subservient ally approach of past days. What is equally important, I will indicate in my next blog, that the liberal alternative might also be inoperative. If history has moved past Canadian realism and its design to be close to the US, it might also have moved past its liberal alternative as well. 

Iraq: The Best of Intentions?

The war in Iraq is a key flashpoint of American politics … and it should be. The war is a disaster. The American and British invasion of Iraq was both a massive failure of intelligence operations and, almost certainly, conducted knowingly under false pretenses. It was ill considered and poorly conceived. Moreover, its continuity trivializes the lives of those who are in the line of fire, civilians, “insurgents”, and American and international personnel. Moreover, the current conflict in Iraq can be traced back directly to the ineptness of the current American political leadership, their ideologically-induced blindness, and their callous disregard for even American lives. This war should be an embarrassing affront to any American citizen who honestly believes the ideals and principles upon which the United States was founded and for which most ordinary Americans stand. There is no other options: the United States government must begin an immediate withdraw from Iraq.

Easy to say? It is. I’m safe in Canada, a non-combatant, as it should be. I don’t have to answer to the US public for the utter waste of lives and resources. I don’t have to answer to the Iraqi public for the destruction of their country, the waste of their lives, the covert support for extremists in an effort to buy peace, the corrupt of the occupational administration, the disregard of the international community, and so on. There is a lot that the current administration of the United States has to answer for that it is almost ridiculous. So … yes, it is easy for me to say this because I don’t have to apologize for any of these wrong-headed, silly, corrupt practices that have guided the policy of the Bush administration with regard to Iraq. Note, by the way, that I am talking about the Bush administration and the pro-war sympathizers not the American people who don’t seem to want this war any more than anyone else. A supporter of the war might argue, however, that it is easy for me to say the US should leave Iraq because I am callous, because I am not considering the future. After all, the standard line runs now, even if the US was wrong to enter the Iraq, it can’t leave now or problems will get worse. What would happen, pro-war apologists ask grimly, if the US were to leave? Usually no answer is provided and we are left to imagine a worst case scenario.

Let me address this question (what would happen if the US were to leave?) and one other, perhaps more pertinent to this blog: what should Canada do with regard to Iraq. First, what would happen if the US were to leave? Is the US occupation of Iraq actually doing anything to promote peace? Is there any evidence that any Iraqi’s life has been saved by the US military occupation of Iraq? One does not want to count bodies as if ethical decisions could be made on the basis of body counts, but this is, in fact, the issue raised by the question: what would happen if the US were to leave Iraq? The implicit answer is that more people would die and, ergo, the US occupation of Iraq is legitimate because it is saving lives. Is it? Is there any evidence that the US occupation of Iraq has saved lives? If so, how many? I don’t mean a statistical “might happen if” model here, by the way (sort of like the kind used earlier this year to justify capital punishment as a life safer), but real evidence, empirical evidence that can show people whose lives have actually been saved by the occupation. That is: people who are alive today who otherwise would have died but for the occupation. And, after that, what would need to be done is to show that this number is greater than the number that would otherwise have lived if there were no occupation. The whole exercise, I admit, is morally offensive but then I didn’t make up the question -- the pro-war people did - I’m just trying to answer it.

The truth of the matter is this: we have no evidence that the occupation is doing any good. What we have is a belief that if left to their own devices, Iraqis are incapable of governing themselves and so the US must impose a government on them. That is not evidence. It is bias. It is a belief formed around a stereotype and, like any stereotype, it is worth exactly what any stereotype is worth: zilch.

If we ditch he biased imagine the worse case scenario argument and ask the proponents of the war in Iraq to actually provide evidence of their worst case scenario imaginings so we can assess them in light of evidence and reason (as we should do with any serious proposition) then what is, in fact, one of the key argument in favour of maintaining the military occupation of Iraq begins to falter in the face of a complete absence of evidence in support of it.

Second, we often hear from those who support the occupation that those who oppose it have done nothing to suggest alternatives. They are not, we are told, constructive. They are pandering to the enemy. They are suggesting a course of action that will embarrass the US. I disagree. Those who support peace have been -- as I am -- making clear and direct suggestions at to courses of action to follow. They are making suggestions that will improve the situation. They are putting forward argument that for the proponents of occupation to defend their arguments with evidence and reason so that, as a democratic society, the American public can assess them. The argument that the opponents of war and occupation, then, have offered nothing is, in fact, wrong. Those who support the war don’t like what they have to say but they are putting real ideas on the table that will hopefully advance the case of peace, help promote a better Iraq, and save American and Iraqi lives. Any suggestion put forward with these goals -- which, without evidence, I will take to be common self-evidently good objectives -- deserves consideration. To subject it to simplistic attack -- such as pandering to the enemy -- is to dismiss the idea serious debate can occur in a democratic society (like the US) and that what is needed is slogans as opposed to discussion. I, btw, reject this suggestion.

I’ve made two points so far: there is no evidence that the occupation of Iraq is producing constructive results and that those who oppose it have, in fact, put forward positive constructive suggestions that are intended to work in everyone’s interest (improving Iraq and saving Iraqi and American lives). The idea that what I am suggesting -- really re-iterating -- is easier to say then do is true (particularly for a Canadian) but one further point I have been trying to make is that this is not completely true. If we have confidence in American democratic institutions, if we are committed to saving lives, if we want to see a stable and peaceful Iraq, then what I am suggesting is not discourse but the grounds upon which these ideals can become realities.

Two other points are worth noting in closing that might also be subjected to the same accusation. First, peace will require that the US government give up one of its other objectives for Iraq: control over the government. Peace might actually bring an anti-US government to power in Iraq. This is not something one would wish for but it is a possibility. The US government needs to be willing to accept this possibility. It needs to be willing to accept the fact that it could be viewed negatively by a future Iraq government and that its control over that region of the world will be weakened as a result. This may be a price of peace. I will not provide any evidence to sustain my contention here because what I am saying is necessarily speculative but I would argue (if I had more space) that this is a price that the US should be willing to pay. In the short, medium and long run it is a small price that can be recouped.

Second, is there a role for Canada? I don’t know. I don’t think so. It would be easy to pretend that there is a role for Canada in training police forces, providing educational support, establishing humanitarian relief and providing medical support, etc., and there might indeed be a role for Canada in this regard. However, Canadians also need to be acutely aware that their own abilities to provide what Iraq needs are limited. We should take a public international stand for peace and for withdraw. We should endeavour to do what we can to support a future, post-occupation government, to promote stabilization, etc., but we also need to be aware of the fact that a lot of Iraqis may not want us. They may be tired of westerners telling them what to do and telling them that we know what is best for them. Iraqis may want to strike out on their own course. If so, this is something we would need to accept.