The World We Live in Now
INTRODUCTION
Canadians wanted sunny ways when they voted for Justin Trudeau in October 2015, shortly after my first essays were written for the Globe and Mail. He won the most remarkable election victory in Canadian history – starting as a far-behind third party and ending with a solid majority. The rising global warning signs at the end of possibly the most positive era (1945–2018) of human history foreshadowed what has since been happening: the collapse of the Soviet Union; the rise of Islamic terrorism; Brexit; Trump’s United States; and a more assertive China. The post-war forces of integration at home and abroad had lost momentum and the centrifugal counterforces were asserting themselves within and between countries.
In recent Western history, bad eras have followed good ones – and vice versa. The bad Napoleonic era was followed by the good 1815–1914 era, then the bad 1914–45 era, and finally the good 1945–2000 era. We do not know yet if we can break this alternating bad/good pattern in our current emerging era. Whether we can is the great issue of our time. It also has meaning for two of my early essays on Canada’s role in the world and on Trudeau’s optimism in relation to the emerging world of every nation for itself.
The world that is emerging is not one where Canada can effectively play the possible role I foresaw in August 2015. Moreover, Trudeau’s sunny ways are out of step with what is happening in the rest of the world and are not strong enough to overcome them. Canada’s world at home is under regional stresses, but not at the level of the existential and identity threats it was under between 1960 – the beginning of the Quiet Revolution in Quebec – and the defeat of the minority Parti Québécois government in 2014. Canada has faced one growing urgency since 2006 and the election of a minority Harper government – to address its “living-beyond-its-means” problem and the loss of its global goods and services supply competitiveness. Looking ahead, Canada faces a different, more challenging global economic and geopolitical world as well as rising political stresses among the regions at home. Right now, no political party has a reality-based approach for any of these issues.
1. A NEW ROLE FOR CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES IN A WORLD OF PERSISTENT MENACE*
Mutual accommodation – the willingness to compromise, if required, to settle a dispute or move forward – may not always work, but it should always be an option. Even when circumstances don’t seem promising, we should keep in mind the impact that flexibility could have.
Canada’s story shows that mutual accommodation is one of the better ways to conduct human governance. Non-violent resistance is another. It sparked the great achievements of Mahatma Gandhi in India, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Martin Luther King in the United States – which ultimately also became achievements for those who opposed them, those who initially resisted before giving up ground rather than resorting to drastic measures.
Non-violence is a particular way of achieving mutual accommodation, but since 1945 the Western world has developed other effective techniques for avoiding war and achieving peace and prosperity:
• collective rather than unilateral action;
• broadening the inclusive order both at home and abroad; and
• containing (rather than defeating) what cannot be included at any particular time.
At the same time, three new threats to the inclusiveness and scope of the global order have emerged:
• Vladimir Putin’s Russia;
• the multidimensional mess in the Middle East; and
• an expansion-minded Iran.
Each has emerged, in part, because the United States has forgotten what has worked so well for it and the rest of the world since 1945.
Mike Mullen, the admiral (now retired) who served as chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2007 to 2011, recently criticized his country’s triumphalism and lack of assistance to Russia after the Soviet collapse. The United States would have been better to approach the diminished Russia the way it did Germany and Japan after the Second World War, even if the two situations aren’t comparable. In fact, Russia, like Iran and the Islamic State, has two traits that make it hard to handle – a thirst for revenge and a desire to reconstruct a lost “empire.”
These narratives look backward, not forward. They get in the way of seeing a better, more collaborative, and safer way ahead. The approach taken by these states makes it extremely difficult for other countries to work constructively with any of them. The United States, more than most countries, is seeking paths forward that strengthen the global order (though both President Trump and the Brexit referendum have suddenly changed this position). By contrast, these three danger zones have expansionist ambitions that threaten their neighbours and undermine that order.
A forward-looking expansionism that takes the needs and interests of others into account – that operates through mutual accommodation – can exist within a peaceful and prosperous world order. But a fixation on vengeance and lost empires is more likely to respond to a strategy of containment, of “disintertwinement,” than to the increasing inclusiveness of the world order.
This fixation demands uncompromising stands and decisive actions rather than the small steps that mutual accommodation allows – steps that feel less risky for all participants because whatever is done requires consent. During the Cold War, this kind of limited accommodation happened more than once in key areas such as arms control.
Russia, the Islamic State, and Iran are each of special importance right now. They pose huge, immediate, and imponderable risks to the global economy and to long-term global security. Their strong geopolitical drivers are not a good fit for what they and the world need right now.
Let’s begin with Russia. Vladimir Putin had a real opportunity to become a major player in making the global order better in ways that also worked for Russia. So far he has not followed that route, but he or a successor can still do so at some future date. Looking backward no longer works in a world that, since 1945, has been on a fast and powerful track forward. Both the Soviet Union and China lost ground for decades because they did not acknowledge that fact. Now Russia, from a weaker position, seems back into the same kind of overreach that plagued the Soviet Union before it collapsed. It may have some early success, but over time it will further weaken Russia. The sooner Moscow acknowledges that it must collaborate with Europe, the better it will be. Europe and Russia need each other.
Neither Iran nor anyone else in the Middle East has given any indication of being ready to become a positive participant in the inclusive global order. By its very nature, the Islamic State could never be a partner, but Iran could be – if it set its sights on that goal. Unfortunately, though, in the Middle East and, to a lesser extent, Iran, the revenge and reconstruction stories are reinforced by cultures that have found modernization difficult. Countries in the Middle East cannot overcome these backward-looking drivers any time soon. There are simply too many obstacles preventing them from moving forward. In Iran, however, a large part of the population is looking to the future or is already there.
The West and these troubled places have only one constructive way forward – mutual accommodation. Given their complex history, that is not a natural way for any of these three places to think or operate. One good thing about mutual accommodation is that it is hard to do. It requires minimal illusion among all parties. That same quality makes it safer to try, and safer once it is accomplished.
President Barack Obama and Iran’s leaders were right to try to find a mutual accommodation on the contentious nuclear file. That is so, even if the deal fails to achieve its goals. The nuclear talks are limited in scope and aspiration, which is good. Although the purpose is big – to forbid any additional nuclear weapons in the Middle East – it, too, is limited in scope. After fifty years of distrust between the countries, an agreement will not in itself bring trust or peace, but it could be the first step along the way.
Iran may or may not be open to a different way of going about achieving its aspirations. It has a significant population that is attracted to the West, but some of its key players are stuck in the past. Now that a nuclear agreement is near, the West needs to think about the longer-term benefits for both sides in the dispute if Iran can be persuaded that a more collaborative approach will be both safe and productive. In the meantime, policies and active efforts to thwart destabilizing Iranian behaviour will be needed.
At the same time, the United States itself remains a potential global risk due to its hyper-partisan, no-holds-barred politics, which reflect a lot of divisiveness within US society. If that divisiveness were to derail the agreement with Iran, the ramifications would go far beyond nuclear weapons and the rising risk of military action in the Middle East. It would be the United States turning its back on the other four permanent members of the UN Security Council as well as Germany. It is hard today to get other countries on the same page. To get the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany on the same page with China and Russia does not happen often or easily. Having the United States refuse to go along because of what the world sees as its dysfunctional politics could not fail to weaken Washington’s ability to attract international support for other geographical and economical challenges.
The Fading US Presence
All three of these troubled places would be better off, as they look forward, if they could view the United States as a less dominating threat than it has been in recent years. In fact, the United States is withdrawing, not because of weakness but because of overreach. This withdrawal is making the country stronger and, simultaneously, less dominating.
There will always be geopolitical dangers in a fast-moving world. The most striking feature of the Cold War and the twenty-five years since the collapse of the Soviet Union has been how containable big crises, including high-risk moments such as Cuba in 1962, have been. In the past, similar events have led to catastrophe. If we consider some significant “moments” in the past two centuries – the bad Napoleonic wars (up to 1815), the good Western Europe era (1815 to 1914), the bad Western Europe era (1914 to 1945), the (on average) good global period (1945 to 1990), and now the post-Cold War era – we have to conclude that we are currently back in a “bad” era. It is not clear where the world is headed. Almost certainly, though, it is in a more manageable state than it was in the first fifty years of the last century. So far, extreme outcomes are being avoided.
Major countries like Russia and China do not consider the current world order suited to their needs. They see it as something imposed by the United States. For that reason, the inclusive global order will be less inclusive and less global. At the same time, no major country wants either the economic or the security foundations of the global order to collapse. Both China and Russia seem to worry about the social and economic risks they would face from a weakening global economic order, even as they build their security strength opposite that of the United States.
In principle, today is not very different from the postwar era that ended in 1990. Both Russia and China are strong military countries with clear borders, and their governments are in control of their territory. The big difference is that they are more intertwined with the global economy, so the idea of containment is not as simple today as it was in 1950. And disintertwinement is a central and difficult-to-implement part of any containment strategy.
Russia could become a second fifty-year containment challenge. There is little immediate prospect of becoming a positive player. That is just not how President Putin sees Russia’s future. Western policy has to figure out how to deal with that reality in a way that avoids extreme outcomes.
The several failed states in the Middle East present a completely different set of problems: Islamic State’s absolute brutality, the absence of functioning states, the huge number of refugees, the thousands of immigrants fleeing from Africa, all alongside the poor, stressed middle classes and the unemployed youth everywhere. This set of challenges has no real historical precedent. It will be a fundamental challenge to all Western countries and require action from both governments and private institutions.
The United States faces a new and difficult world, one that has never been more connected yet so disconnected at the same time. It is in the late stages of withdrawing from ground it can no longer hold to more limited ground it can hold. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, it lived in the two-superpower world that marked the years after the Second World War. Then, for a few years, the United States was the only superpower.
But a superpower is not what it used to be. America is bumping up against challenging limits it has yet to think through. Other countries also need to rethink the current global realities as the United States withdraws. It is still a superpower, but it has definite limits on its effective reach. It is still indispensable, but not as pervasive as it used to be.
In Superpower (2015), political scientist Ian Bremmer, a consultant and active observer of political risk, has outlined three broad choices for America’s role in the world. All non-Americans, including Canadians, should think about his arguments carefully. No country will be more important to the world over the next few decades than the United States. It needs to get the part it should play as right as possible, but its divisive politics will make that very difficult. Just as war is too important to be left to the generals, America’s role is too important to be left to the Americans.
A Canadian Contribution
Great powers usually don’t feel any particular need for mutual accommodation as they go about their business. But without it, lesser powers like Canada cannot make much progress on anything. To thrive, Canada needs to rethink its role, that of the United States, and how, together, the two countries can use their individual strengths in a world that desperately needs fresh thinking, more vision, and greater collaboration. This reconsideration should be at the top of the new government’s to-do list after the federal election in October 2015.
Canadians in the past have chosen a peacekeeping role, but there’s now little call for that. Canada will be most useful if it commits its resources and experience to disintertwinement and long-term, humanitarian-based broadening of the inclusive global order.
North America has seen the creation of two improbable countries: the United States in the eighteenth century, driven by freedom and individualism, and Canada in the nineteenth century, driven out of necessity by mutual accommodation and collective action. Now may be the moment when these two neighbours, who are very different but share many values, can work together in a new way. It is possible that Canada’s talent for accommodation could join the economic and military strength that are the fruit of US freedom and science – and thus become a dominant and indispensable force in the twenty-first century.
2. CAN TRUDEAU’S OPTIMISM SURVIVE IN A WORLD OF EVERY NATION FOR ITSELF?*
Canada is feeling very good about itself and its new government, especially now in the immediate afterglow of this week’s warm Washington welcome for the prime minister and his family. The state dinner at the White House was the first for a visiting Canadian leader in almost two decades, and the media embrace was over the top. “Justin Trudeau,” asked the Christian Science Monitor in a lengthy cover story, “is he Canada’s J.F.K.?”
But the honeymoon may end in a hurry if the economic challenges Canada faces both at home and abroad are not dealt with, realistically and promptly. The optimism that Mr Trudeau and his team generate is hard to find anywhere else. Witness what happened when G20 finance ministers met in China recently for the very first time, supposedly in a collective bid to rescue the world from the economic doldrums. And how did they fare? Not very well, according to David Loevinger, a former China specialist at the US Treasury Department. “Investor hopes of coordinated policy actions,” he said afterward, “proved to be pure fantasy.”
Canada has taken 150 years to consolidate itself as a coast-tocoast country, a journey made far from the world’s troubled places under the protection first of Great Britain and then the United States. Its growing capacity for mutual accommodation brought Canada through its growing pains and made it one of the world’s most successful countries – a fully fledged young-adult nation.
This independent Canada now enters a world whose disturbances are no longer thousands of miles away but impinge on the everyday life of its citizens. So, less than eighteen months after it finally emerged from almost forty years of existential crisis focused on Quebec, Canada must now face a world it could not have been expecting. It is a world that is fast-moving and prone to extremes and anomalies – the oil price collapse, the Chinese stock-market selloff, and the Republican Party in utter disarray even as it enjoys the biggest majority in both houses of the US Congress it has had in eighty-five years.
What is really going on? We need a better fix on the problem, which begins very close to home.
Across the Great Divide
Despite the world’s political troubles and weak economic climate, Americans have by far the world’s best economy. Yet their domestic politics are dysfunctional. Just as tribalism and populism are making the world more difficult to lead (as well as more dangerous), they (along with nativism) make it increasingly difficult to bring the United States together. More and more observers are seeing a rise in authoritarianism in the American population. Even after the dust from the presidential election in November 2016 settles, a political honeymoon is unlikely.
As well as battling each other, both major parties are increasingly divided within themselves. In fact, the challenge for the Republicans is existential. The primary reason isn’t even the parties or the political leaders; it’s Americans themselves. John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio who placed an unexpected second in the New Hampshire primary, has some idea of what has gone missing. “Slow down,” he tells his audiences, and “take time to listen” to what others have to say. But his is a lonely adult voice at odds both with his party’s angry, hyperpolarized base and with a country that is evermore divided.
Not that divisions are unique to the United States. The ruling British Conservative Party is seriously split over staying in the European Union. Anti-immigration feelings and parties have gained strength in Europe and could create an identity crisis for the European Union, alongside a British exit, if not a threat to its very existence. The big question is: Will the centre hold?
A Brave New World
The hardest post-9/11 lesson for the West is that the world does not revolve around it, despite what Francis Fukuyama, usually a smart political scientist, naively concluded in The End of History, his 1990s paean to the American way. There have been so many opportunities for young Western people that a sense of entitlement has understandably emerged; they expect to be able to do what they want. The reality is that those who get what they want must usually play a big role themselves. Now more opportunities are opening for people from other nations, and the major danger in the United States and Europe comes from people – and politicians – who refuse to accept that.
Meanwhile, the West faces some new key political challenges: security and identity issues. But even the economics landscape has changed, with two big serious changes at work.
First, oil – one of the world’s most important prices – is currently affecting financial markets and the real economy. Not only have oil prices collapsed (for some time) but so has the supply-demand structure. Saudi Arabia no longer acts as a swing producer, and the OPEC cartel no longer has pricing power. Demand growth is slow, and excess supply will be difficult to run down. Any price improvement will immediately bring more US shale oil back into the market.
Second, central banks are now out of fashion: The change started for me after 1985, when monetary policy in Japan proved no substitute for needed structured change. Now financial markets are losing confidence in central banks. In fact, in his excellent book The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse (2016), Mohamed A. El-Erian, chair of the US President’s Global Development Council, says that overreach on the part of central bankers is the primary source of the current instability. As the former chief executive officer of the US investment manager PIMCO (and now an adviser to the parent company Allianz), he sees another major collapse within the next three years if reliance on central banks is not reduced. Canada seems about to move that way – but it will be hard to do.
The Banks Became a Problem
That overreach came from global imbalances that emerged in the 1990s and culminated in the post–Lehman crises. By the 1990s, the world was back in the 1930s, with inadequate consumer demand and more savings than available investment opportunities. This slump lasted as long as Americans used foreign savings to consume more than they earned, much as Canada has done since 2010–11. (This situation happens when a country like China wants to earn more than it wishes to spend, which required the United States to spend more than it could earn. That imbalance was possible because, due to its export surpluses, China was willing and able to lend it the money.) Fortunately, the world is now back to the 1990s, but with a more prudent US consumer.
Two central questions: How do we get more global consumer demand and more global investment opportunities? If things go badly, two big issues will emerge: how to reduce inequality without undermining savings and incentives, so consumers have more money to spend; and how to use long-term public investments in big transit and communication and in large-scale university-centred scientific research infrastructure. These issues will provoke political challenges – something the United States in its present mindset would find hard to handle.
Simultaneous Journeys
One way to look at what is going on as well as our best way forward is the reality and metaphor of journeys. Humans have always been driven to move on – initially for food, but then for dreams of glory and power, and for better ways to live. One could say Adam and Eve were the world’s first refugees – pushed out of their Garden of Eden home by God himself. We are all immigrants who move from one place to another; from accustomed lands and families to places where other languages are spoken and different cultural ways are the norm. By choice or necessity, virtually everyone chooses or feels forced to move on from where they are in every kind of way. It can be very unsettling and provocative.
The challenge of this pervasive mobility in almost every aspect of life is that we all find ourselves in spaces where we are not yet comfortable – a version of the Tower of Babel. Who can know the way ahead in this uncharted world of changing geographies, sophisticated technologies, and political upheavals to engender the genuine trust necessary to lead? Science and mutual accommodation are likely to be at the heart of what we will need.
Every individual, society, and country is always on a journey. We are all explorers of possibilities, confronted by limits that require creative solutions. Even the greatest of these explorations – geographical, scientific, intellectual, cultural, or spiritual – must proceed one step at a time. Journeys go best when purpose, strength, boldness (when needed), and determination are present. Canada’s mutual accommodation ways, along with freedom, science, and compassion for others, are the four best ways that humans have found over history to go about things. The more an individual, group, society, or country can move on all four fronts together, the stronger each will be – the only bearable path forward.
What It All Means
Canada has a massive array of strengths to work with. It has reached an independent adulthood that can help at home and abroad – and be useful to the rest of the world.
We need to understand and see these strengths well and also to comprehend what the outside world requires. The twenty-first century will be dominated by two massive sets of forces:
• the huge numbers of desperate people with not enough safe places to go; and
• the proliferation of every kind of way forward, with vastly different ideas about where and how to go, and at too fast a pace for necessary balance and stability.
So far, Canada has found ways to provide safe places, accommodate different ideas, take multiple ways forward, and achieve longer-term balance and stability. The Trudeau government is listening and seeking guidance. But it also faces a severe challenge with the domestic economy which would be easier to get wrong than get right, even without all the campaign promises it made.
Family therapists note that the shocks and setbacks we undergo are often external but also can come from within. As well, some, such as adolescence, are paradigm shifts, and others, while painful, are less pivotal. If, however, you are being shocked simultaneously inside and outside, as well as experiencing paradigm shifts, as Canada now is, you have to ask what you must do as well as what you want to do.
By year’s end, the Trudeau government will almost certainly recognize that this is where it’s at – and its immediate priorities have to be the economy, security, refugees, and the Indigenous people. Together, these challenges are more difficult than those most governments have to face. They demand two major sets of decisions:
• Apart from what the government campaigned on and wants to do, what else must it take on in the current economic and political circumstances?
• Given what those “no choice” items will demand in terms of money, political capital, and stamina, how many promises can the government delay or cut back, without paying an unacceptable political price?
The year 2017 will be primarily about how the federal government answers these questions, and what comes at it from an increasingly unsettled world.
No White Knights
The prospect of help coming any time soon from anywhere other than the United States is unlikely. So, rather than wait, Canada must do what it can for itself, and the best outcome right now is to keep things from getting worse. That means improving its overall policy and business performance, but it is unlikely that much of what needs to be done can be done in this month’s budget or even in the rest of the year. The required shift away from monetary policy and growth-driving structural change are both too big and too bold to really get going until next year.
Meanwhile, the government has a lot to absorb about the world in which it must govern and how its aspirations can be made to fit the economic limits it faces. The previous government did not comprehend what was happening in the rest of the world, and so it missed the economic-policy boat.
Above all, the Trudeau government should not allow its domestic inspirations to get in the way of what Canada must urgently do, both at home and abroad, to cope with an economic world that is still becoming harder, even as it struggles to leave the post–Lehman crises behind it. Or as David Loevinger put it after the G20’s meeting in Shanghai: “It’s every country for themselves” – an approach that has real limits for today’s world.
3. IDENTITY AND CULTURE: THE NEW DRIVING FORCES
The wonderful Harry and Meghan (Duke and Duchess of Sussex) wedding showed the world that making room for the cultures and identities of others – in their case, the British and African-American – diminishes neither one and enhances both. The inclusiveness of the wedding was reinforced by a bride and groom who had gone through very personal hard things and come through whole; who had real achievements in challenging professions (the military and acting); and who genuinely embrace humanitarian causes.
Identity and culture are the new driving forces of the twenty-first century. They change slowly, and they always matter. They have an impact on the dominant military, political, and economic forces. They shape aspirations and anxieties; they divide countries and societies. They also bring them together. Canadians and Americans share the New World of North America, but are very different. The United States has been shaped by force: slavery – later race, minimum compromise, and seizing what it sees as opportunities without limits. Canada, in contrast, has been shaped by persuasion, accommodation, and overcoming limits.
Culture is how we go about things – how we face challenges and conflict, seize opportunities, and live and dream. Identity gives us our sense of difference and who we are – of borders and feelings that separate us from others – tempered by how we live and work with others. The new global world is so intertwined that separatist nationalisms and nativism are delusions. The more we are able to accommodate other’s differences, the stronger our own identities. The choice between inclusive and exclusive identities is central to the future. Alongside the economy and internal and external security, that choice will shape the next decades.
Culture and the Human Imagination
Culture is paradoxical: it is about inner and outer factors that must always be reconciled. The outer is the uncaring horizontal world of nature, technology, markets, rights, and democratic majorities (exemplified by the United States). The inner is the vertical world that, at its best, recognizes and cares for what is special in individuals (as in Japan). In the West, the impersonal horizontal has been steadily gaining on the personal vertical. It has given the West tremendous dynamics and power. But the lack of balance may explain why so many feel left behind. It has also contributed to the horrors of the twentieth century and today’s populist and authoritarian dangers.
The West was born in the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden before the Fall, when the inner and outer worlds were one. Nature cared for man within the Garden, but not outside. God made refugees of us all when he drove Adam and Eve out of the Garden. Canada’s Indigenous people have a different image – where spirit and nature are always one. In the Western way, the two are separate; in the Indigenous way, always somehow together. The world needs both ways.
Culture as Redemption
Adults assert themselves in ways that enhance the ability of others to do the same. Asserting oneself is perhaps more masculine; seeking to enhance others more feminine. A culture that survives and thrives must accommodate both masculine and feminine traits.
The universal appeal of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s novel Anne of Green Gables comes from a human Garden of Eden (Prince Edward Island) that appears to care for its residents. Although individuals assert themselves in ways that adversely affect their own happiness and so divide their society, the world ultimately redeems itself. Everyone is reconciled and reunited. This dream is set deep in human hearts. Canada has always leaned toward mutual accommodation as the way – all parties get some of what they want. Compromise and inclusion make Canada different from the United States and China, the world’s most powerful countries.
The Challenge Today
The half-century following the Second World War focused on jobs, social security, and peace. Since 9/11, the challenge has been different: to help those who cannot keep up; to reshape an inclusive global order; and to find safe places for desperate people everywhere. This enormous and vital task requires new visions, ideas, projects, and help from every country and individual. The divisions from the old producer-dominant world do not fit the new consumer-dominant world.
The United States is much more patriarchal than Canada. Michael Adams, head of Environics Research Group, found that, today, 50 percent of Americans believe men should dominate at home; only 23 percent of Canadians share that idea. Now, the “MeToo” movement (against male sexual overreach) and the youth protest following the mass shooting at the Parkland, Florida, high school (the maleness of guns), since followed by more and more mass shootings in the United States, could over time bring a less patriarchal US culture and more mutual accommodation. If so, these developments could lead to changes, first in US politics, and then in policies. If the United States cannot become less patriarchal, its current identity crisis could at some point lead to an existential one.
The Flight from Freedom
The disruptions of our era risk repeating Germany in the 1930s – the “escape from freedom” described in Erich Fromm’s book of that title published in 1941. Our culture and identity must prove able to fight for, rather than flee from, freedom. If they are not based on fact, we are doomed.
Pope Francis brings compassion to a Catholic Church in desperate need of redemption. This kind of compassion and Canada’s mutual accommodation ways are two culture and identity beachheads for the future. We must also learn and teach each other how being inclusive of others’ differences can strengthen, not weaken, our identities – the overwhelming message of the Harry and Meghan wedding. The old maxim “United we stand, divided we fall” is still true within countries; it is now also true for the whole world.
The culture wars are back in the United States. The Trump midterm politics in 2018 dictated a fire-up-the-base strategy over one of the best post-war US economies. He continues on this track as he heads toward the 2020 presidential election. A new book – Prius or Pickup? How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America’s Great Divide (2018) by Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler – lays out how deeply entrenched the drive toward division is in the United States. It goes back to its original sins: force in its creation and preservation, excessive individualism, post-slavery racism, and too much fear of collective action – a phrase used by Henry Kaufman, the insightful Salomon Brothers chief economist, who predicted the US bear stock market in the 1980s
The United States has already had one existential civil war over slavery. The elevation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court could create a new existential crisis over culture and the patriarchy. This court is very unrepresentative of the American population, as is the Senate that appointed it. There may or may not be a majority in today’s court to overturn the Roe v. Wade 1973 Supreme Court decision that protects the right of a woman to have an abortion. Chief Justice John Roberts may yet have to put the public opinion legitimacy of the court ahead of his own social conservative views by supporting the precedent on the abortion front. It is difficult, for example, to see New York and California accepting any decision against this long-established right. Canada has, for the moment, put its great existential and identity crises over separatism in Quebec behind it – but it took Canada almost forty years to get there. Based on US past performance, it would take the United States a lot longer – if the deeply divided Americans can do it at all.
The geopolitical struggle of the next decade will be between the United States and China. Who does best will depend on technology and on the success of an inclusive society. The United States started this century with a huge edge on both, but its identity fearfulness is rapidly undermining that edge. A major pivot from divisiveness to mutual accommodation is the American challenge of the next several decades. It has made big socio-cultural-political pivots in the past, so it can do it again if it once makes the collective decision to follow that route. It can also stay stuck for very long periods – racism and force over compromise and persuasion, division over inclusion.
Religion has been a source of division and inclusiveness and of comfort and anger or hatred. The Judeo-Christian religion – especially the Old Testament part – has a strong (but not exclusive) focus on the power and glory of God. I have started to wonder if that is the best focus. Using my language of separateness and connectedness as a central way to look at things, power and glory emphasize human separateness from God. But what if He is not primarily about power or someone to be glorified? What if God is both limited and without limits at the same time? What if, regardless of one’s own particular religious tradition, we should now explore a more God/man inclusiveness (both/and) alongside the traditional separateness (either/orness) of things?
The most important new idea from Christianity may be that of a suffering God – that the most amazing thing about God is not how powerful or glorious He is but that He is a fellow sufferer and embracer of joy, vulnerable, and, like all who love, He too needs to be loved – perhaps more to be loved than adored.
What if my idea of separateness and connectedness and of both/and and either/or in everything should also apply to the God of all religions? This idea suggests to me that, while physical and institutional power still matter at the heart of things, real progress to a better world may require a God who is both separate from us and connected to us. Exploring the idea of a suffering God, who not only loves us but wants us to love Him, could be what brings the biggest positive potentials to a world where authoritarian societies are once again reasserting themselves. It will be hard to fight the dangers of political authoritarianism if our religions are also authoritarian.
The power of military force, strong economies, or hierarchical status will not disappear from the world. They are likely to prove durable, with both positives and negatives. If identity and culture are indeed already the new driving force of this century, do they also have to become the latest war zone of new culture wars, or can they become a shared source of inclusiveness?
I have said elsewhere that God’s ejection of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden made refugees of us all – it separated us from the Garden of Eden but did not disconnect us from God. Separateness (free will) means that God’s power and omniscience has limits, though they remain far more vast than the power and knowledge of humans.
What if God is like us and keeps learning? What if, like us, not knowing everything and not having all power makes things better for Him and more amazing for us? Further, what if the only way that He is without limits is in his love for us and his world? What if the world’s religions could further explore themselves along this line? Might that bring more of what we need more of – mutual accommodation and compassion? If all religions could explore these possibilities alongside the essential elements of their own religion by making room for other identities, they might find greater strength in inclusion and less identity fearfulness. (I am indebted to Dr Charlotte Stuart for the core idea explored in these final paragraphs. See Appendix B.)
Further Reading and Viewing
Michael Adams, Could It Happen Here? Canada in the Age of Trump and Brexit (2017).
Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (1950); Identity, Youth and Crisis (1968); Identity and the Life Cycle (1980).
W.A. Macdonald, Culture: The Driving Force of the 21st Century (1997)
A Place to Call Home (Australia TV drama series – 58 episodes).
Far from Home (PBs, Dick Nielsen: Canada in the First World War – 3 episodes).
4. FRAMING THE NEW WORLD WE LIVE IN
As we look ahead in the new world we live in now, I see three sets of ideas to consider:
• monopoly is a good way forward – if acquired and gone about in the right way;
• framing better ways to look at what is going on is essential if we are to cope with the complexity and rapidly changing dynamics of this new world; and
• Canada’s second “Sir John A. Macdonald moment” needs to match the first moment’s huge Confederation and nation-wide railway achievements with comparable building achievements to shape a different great Canada for a different world.
Monopoly
After the speeches at our oldest son’s fiftieth birthday celebration, a lawyer nearing his mid-sixties told a few of us assertively how very competitive he was. He then paused and, looking at me, continued: “I guess you’re competitive too.” I paused before answering, “Not so much. I’m more into monopoly myself.” I have always been looking to know more beyond the law than my competitors did, and to bring to the table something not brought by others. This strategy has served me well over my forty-three years as a lawyer, and even better in my last twenty-eight years as a consultant.
The reason I am more into monopoly than competitiveness is obvious. I was an only child, so throughout my childhood I had an unearned monopoly at home. I naturally did things my own way because my way was the only one on offer, without the influence of a sibling. In my high school graduation year-book, my favourite expression was said to be, “I have a better proof, sir.” It seems I always wanted to take my own approach to whatever was going on. Once I became a lawyer, I sought to be competitive on the narrow legal task at hand, and, at the same time, to bring something more of value to my basic legal services.
I started going to Ottawa to seek federal policy changes for companies over sixty years ago. I began with approaches that would work for all affected: the country itself, the particular government of the day, the industry competitors, and, finally, the particular client I was acting for. I later worked for the Ontario provincial government on a wide range of large public policy challenges. Over the same period, I started two different CEO groups, one over forty years ago on Canadian public policy, and another over thirty-five years ago on the global economic environment.
Monopolies can be good for both the monopolist and the customer/client so long as you earn them and keep renewing them. They come from knowing more about what is important to your own vital interests than anyone else – including governments and competitors. The keys are knowledge and relationships, on knowing more than any other relevant person as the one way to stay ahead of others – to keep your monopoly.
Framing Better Ways for Our New World
In the fifty years following the end of the Second World War, the United States led the Western World in developing an inclusive global order within and between countries and containing those countries that could not be included. This project gave the world the most peaceful and prosperous era in history. The positive momentum of this era ended with the arrival of global terrorism on 9/11 and the great balance sheet recession of 2007–08. How should we prepare for the new world ahead?
Eras start with a new momentum and direction that overwhelms the counterforces until the prevailing momentum weakens, the counterforces strengthen, and the old momentum and direction are replaced by a new momentum and direction. Since the Napoleonic era, bad eras have alternated with good eras. A bearable future for the world depends on breaking this good era/bad era pattern and finding a way to follow the good 1945–2008 era with several minimally good eras.
The rising populist and centrifugal force of the last fifteen years threaten a new bad Western era – this time coinciding with the first global moment in history. This first global moment marks the end of the Western era that started when the Middle Ages and Renaissance were followed by six centuries dominated by the inflexible (either/or) forces in the world – freedom and science. Now the either/or forces need to be better balanced by the inclusive (both/and) forces of mutual accommodation and compassion. The East and Indigenous people everywhere have for the most part thought more in both/and ways; the West since the Renaissance has operated in more either/or ways.
Great powers tend toward overreach. The great American Eastern Europe diplomat and scholar George Kennan saw this danger when he served in the US Embassy in Moscow immediately after the war as the Soviet Union was taking on more than it could manage in Eastern Europe. He foresaw that this extension would leave the Soviet Union with insufficient political energy for the necessary internal domestic changes. He did not foresee, however, that it would lead decades later to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. Now Vladimir Putin’s Russia is heading toward its own new overreach, failing to use the US withdrawal from overreach as an opportunity to become a co-shaper with the United States – and later potentially China – of a better balanced new global order – the best way forward for Russia to regain its sense of lost respect.
I foresaw the need early in 2001, before 9/11, for the United States to withdraw from geopolitical, economic, and political ground it could not hold to ground it could hold. Unfortunately for the United States and the world, instead of that starting to happen, George W. Bush took the United States further into multiple overreach (Afghanistan, Iraq, and the post–Lehman Brothers financial crisis). Donald Trump, like Barack Obama, understands that the United States needs to withdraw from every kind of overreach. Unfortunately he does not see his own overreach and seems to know that the best way to accomplish this goal is by preserving US alliances and agreements as it pulls back. He prefers disruptive and disorderly withdrawal to orderly withdrawal (the Obama way).
Each of the United States, China, Russia, the European Union, and the United Kingdom faces pivotal moments ahead, but none of them have demonstrated any ability recently to manage the upcoming big challenges they face. This ignorance will make for a global environment of increasing danger, as many major countries need to change how they go about their basic political business in a world that is demanding big pivots from them all.
The post-1980 era of US overreach led to the Obama era of increasing US political turmoil, which was accompanied by the growing division and rising breakdown in political leadership in the United Kingdom. That has led in turn to the associated existential and identity crises in both the European Union and the United States – the result of the deep structural imbalances that have grown in the West since the end of the Renaissance. US political turmoil did not originate with Trump. It preceded him – goes back to the very beginning of America – one might call it America’s original sin. It has been made worse by Trump and will be highly dangerous for the peace and prosperity of the world until he departs. The United States is currently undergoing an identity crisis. At some point it could end up in an existential crisis.
The best thing for Canada is that it has already undergone its identity and existential crises – from 1960 to the defeat of the last PQ government in Quebec in 2014. Quebec still has a left-over identity crisis. But it shows no signs of returning to separatism as the way ahead. Francophone Quebeckers are thriving, not just surviving, so in all likelihood, cultural fearfulness will continue, slowly, to lose political salience in Quebec.
Domestic politics in Western countries were, until some twenty-five years ago, dominated by divisions in class and between left/right and socialist/capitalist. Those splits have now largely changed in advanced Western economies, primarily brought about by the shift from a producer-dominant world governed by scarcity to a consumer-dominant world in which scarcity is no longer the primary driving force of economies (see Chapter 22).
The post-1945 world has moved from a fifty-year Cold War to a multipolar world in which many see China as a rising power vis-à-vis the United States – a rivalry that could lead to a Sparta/Germany-like war outcome (see Graham Allison’s important book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, 2017). This comparison is a parallel but not an exact one. Several major differences make a China/US “rising power war” less likely than those historical conflicts between Athens and Sparta or, in the twentieth century, the Allies and Germany. Half the world is now middle class, so huge numbers of people have a large stake in a peaceful and prosperous global order; the degree of intertwinedness of economies was not a factor in the earlier case, but it is big today; and finally, Sparta and Germany did not depend on the economies and technologies of other countries such as the United States and the rest of the West in the way China did during its rapid rise to power. Quite simply, China could not be what it has become without the United States and the West.
China claims that the rise of populism and centrifugal forces in the West has proved that China is the model of the future. That seems most unlikely. In particular, the Chinese in Hong Kong and Taiwan do not see things that way in 2019. Nonetheless, Western countries will keep losing political ground for the way they go about things until their troubled internal situations turn around. Such a sudden change happened in Greece when it abandoned a decade of unsuccessful populism in its 2019 election.
The United States is currently going through an identity crisis – cultural white racism has been rising ever since Obama was first elected in November 2007. If there were to be an existential crisis too, it could come from a US Supreme Court endorsement of patriarchy by reversing the abortion-permitting Roe v. Wade decision. Politics will probably find a way back from that brink, but it could become a highstress political moment. The United States manages political extremes better than any other country, but it failed to manage slavery in a way that avoided war. The US political turmoil will remain, whether or not Trump wins the next election. Its main elements have been present ever since the United States was formed: force over persuasion; slavery and racism; and excessive individualism at the expense of the community.
The big global question is whether the world (especially the United States and China) can find a path that combines mutual accommodation and mutual containment. The Hong Kong protests make it clear that the one country, two systems policy is easier said than done. It is potentially good for the future of both China and the world that it is protesting Chinese in Hong Kong, not Western powers, who are putting this idea to a real test.
What could it mean that Canada is a different kind of great country for a different kind of world? It would be best if it could mean that the rest of the world gets itself on the same kind of path that Canada has been on – namely, learning to use limits as creative opportunities; to strengthen the use of persuasion, not force.
Our different world needs a different kind of greatness. My view of greatness in individuals, societies, institutions, organizations, and countries is that they make many mistakes, including big ones, but they get the most important things right. My favourite individual examples are Churchill, who got almost nothing right except the most vital of all – Hitler; and Canada’s Pierre Trudeau, who got almost everything wrong – the economy, the United States, and relations between East and West in Canada – but got the biggest issue right – Quebec separatism.
A Second John A. Macdonald Moment
Matching the scope and scale of our first prime minister’s national achievements for a second time will require real determination between now and 2040. I see three issues in particular.
First, Canada already has much of what is needed to be competitive and to attract the best people in the world to come here to live and do business. It needs two more things. One, the ability to get technology-driven no/low carbon oil from the oil sands. The other, tax change to push it over the top and put it in a class of its own – namely, a capital pool approach to capital gains taxation.
Second, Canada needs to improve its global coverage of factual, in-depth news, both international and of Canada’s place in the world. It should join the United States and the United Kingdom to bring Canadian news and public affairs television to the world as those two countries do, respectively, with CNN and the BBC. It could do so in partnership with one or more others or on its own with an international CBC service. The goal should be to present the most insightful and balanced daily assessment of where every relevant part of the world sits in relation to Canada and how the situation seems to be changing.
Third, Canada has the potential for monopoly power of the kind discussed above – a country whose access to enough facts, thinking, and important relationships is unmatched by any other country in terms of government, business, and university-level research. We need the very best of thinkers about the world we live in, in every area where what happens could be important to Canadians. The next prime minister should launch an independent group or think tank, insulated from political marketing and with broad-based strengths, which would focus on knowing more relevant international news and more key people than any other similar group, especially about anything that could matter to Canada. This group would be made up of top federal and provincial public servants along with their counterparts from the private business sectors and from universities.
The era of unquestioned Western dominance is now clearly over. There are four major players today. Two are Western: the United States and Europe; and two are non-Western: China and Russia. India may soon join them. And other big countries will increasingly matter and have to be accommodating. Europe and the United States have huge strengths in freedom and science, but they are now being challenged from within by the populism and nationalism fallout from those strengths and by the destabilized global disarray that the resulting imbalances have brought in their wake. Great powers are not quite what they used to be – but they still matter a lot. Today, great powers can do more harm than good if they primarily rely on and actually use military power. The United States and Europe together still have a much greater array of strengths than China or Russia do. The primary problem in the West is a sense of diminished strength and lost confidence amid a rising sense of increasing numbers of its citizens being left out on the economic and identity sides.
Between 1945 and the early years of this century, the West became ever stronger. Then, quite suddenly, internal and external imbalances emerged and disruptive changes from fast-moving technology and globalization undermined the cohesiveness within the West and within individual Western countries. During the last seventy-five years, the West’s record has been mixed. It helped China make an unprecedented economic leap forward at the same time that it failed on the Russia front. The United States did the opposite to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union to what it did for Japan and Germany after the Second World War. It gloated on this triumph rather than bringing Russia into the Western alliance and providing economic help. Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin also fell short. Gorbachev put more democratic politics ahead of market-driven economies, but the policy did not work. The result is a Russia that, unlike Japan, Germany, and now China and India, is looking backward and inward rather than forward and outward. Vladimir Putin sees trouble-making, not helpfulness, as the way forward that is best for Russia – to regain the respect it lost when the Soviet Union collapsed.
China is the only one of the four big powers right now that, at least on the surface, is confident and steadily looking forward and outward. It has a long way to go. It is finding that a stable path into the future for 1.4 billion people will not be easy. Right now, China feels confident in itself and in its capacity to move both forward (strongly) and outward (more cautiously and uncertainly). It has great post-war achievements under its belt. So have the United States and Europe. However, those Western achievements have produced centrifugal counterforces that threaten to undermine them.
In 2019, then, the world has four great powers alongside big troublesome powers like North Korea, Iran, and Middle East Islamic countries that have yet to find a stable and positive way forward. How these four big powers relate to each and how far they are able to work together to shape a different kind of inclusive global order is their primary challenge today. China has a great civilization to build on, but, so far, it lacks sufficient useable history to prepare it fully for the new world. The United States has the most useable history for the world that Europe launched at the time of the Renaissance. However, to fully succeed in the new world, it needs one more huge pivot toward more mutual accommodation. Pivots are responses to crises. All four big powers will almost certainly face crises that will require great pivots, but how they will handle them remains to be tested. Great countries get great things right, but they also get great things wrong.
Russia right now is in some ways nowhere at all. It is a threat to global order – not a help. It is subversive and invasive, with no outward-looking strengths. Its history has not yet found a lasting forward path. It also has no useable history for the new world. What it needs is an outward path forward that includes both Eastern Europe and China as well as an economic dynamic to match that in either Europe or the United States. Unlike China, Russia has not found a way to combine more outwardness with more reliance on market forces. Russia, under Putin, has become sullen and troublemaking toward the rest of the world, and it resents the lack of respect it feels it gets from the West. It had a huge opportunity to gain global leverage and respect as a helpful filler of the vacuum when US overreach led President Barack Obama to start the long process of withdrawal to ground it could comfortably hold. Instead, Putin’s Russia chose to be a sore loser (after the United States chose to become a gloating winner), to become blatantly anti-American, and to employ every kind of disruption. To cite some examples: Russia became physically invasive, as in the occupations of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine; it intervened to help President Bashar al-Assad in Syria; and it engaged in cyber intrusions in US elections and the UK referendum.
The question becomes, how to respond? The West needs boots on the ground to protect Eastern Europe and ever-stronger sanctions to bring Russia to the table. It also needs to begin a peaceful and globally helpful path forward that is matched by offering Russia appropriate better access to the global economy. If the United States and China can move beyond trade wars, get a denuclearized Korean peninsula deal with North Korea, and agree on a reshaped, less Western-dominated, more asymmetric but still rules-based, global order, that achievement would isolate Russia and create the potential for sufficient pressures to bring Russia over time into this new world order. The major remaining trouble spot then would be a more isolated Middle East of divided Islamic countries. They would become easier to contain and to help when they were ready to be helped.
Too many Islamic Middle East countries do not seem to have a viable and stable path forward. They have got the most global attention since 9/11, but so far they offer the least prospect for positive progress. Many cannot yet be helped very much. Mostly they have to be contained and provided with humanitarian aid to the extent that such aid can work. Progress will happen when they are in a better position to do more to help themselves. Post-2019, the path forward will not come from Russia or the Middle East, but from the United States and China. This realization underlay the Obama idea to move the American foreign policy focus from the Middle East to China – a decision that was made easier with the exploitation of shale oil in the United States.
The United States has almost always looked forward; Trump and his rear-view-mirror-looking domestic followers are aberrations. China is not historically a strong look-ahead country, but that is where it is now. Trump won the presidency by looking back. The 2020 US election will be decisive on whether to look ahead or to choose the Trump way as the path forward. When and how the United States rediscovers that it has been paying too much attention to its weaknesses and not enough to its strengths is by far the most important question of all. How China goes forward is the second most important question for the world. There is some counterproductive ideology and nationalism today in both China and the United States. Both countries have tended over history toward pragmatic realism – but not always. The sooner they find and use their realism roots, the more likely they can find a mutually agreed way forward that reshapes the global economic and trading order and makes Asia safer by denuclearizing the Korean peninsula. The world needs a successful United States and China working well together.
The two biggest immediate sources of great power strength are the military and economics. The United States and Europe still have overwhelming economic strength – and each one of them can more easily do without China and Russia than those two countries can do without the United States and Europe. Sanctions against Russia, Iran, and North Korea have shown that steadily stronger and well-conceived sanctions can be increasingly effective over time. But they have limits and are not lasting solutions. The US economy among the four is the one best able to do without the rest of the global economy. The Middle East is where Western strengths are least effective, with the possible exception of Iran on the economy. The United States and Europe should concentrate their economic strengths on China and Russia – China first, and Russia later, most likely after Putin has gone. His ways of going about things will not change, and they do not fit with what either Russia or the world needs.
Political, organizational, and societal structures are always deeply rooted in their history. They do not change easily or quickly. Changes either take a very long time or are forced by extreme levels of stress. The best structures for the long haul are usually successful blends of the vertical and the horizontal. Russia is the most vertical and centrally directed of the four big powers. Some thirty years ago I was told at a private meeting in Moscow with the head of Novosti, Russia’s international news agency, that Russians always looked to Moscow for direction. Democracy – a more horizontal way of going about things – is socio-structurally alien to Russia. It will require a difficult and historically alien pivot to get there. For this reason, Russia, among the big four powers, is the furthest removed from what the post-2019 new world requires for lasting success. It lacks a relevant past history to draw upon.
China today is a blend of the vertical and the horizontal that, for the moment, is working pretty well in the perspective of Chinese history. Its first task is to hold its 1.4 billion people together within a country that works at home and also plays a major role to help achieve a stable world order that works for it in the long term. However, if China is to move forward, its economic behaviour has to improve. It needs to follow the rule of law and act with more economic integrity and reciprocity. China must also lean less on the global (primarily the US) economy, which on the trade side it is doing gradually.
Europe and the United States are different blends of the horizontal and the vertical. The United States needs to become more compromise-oriented within its own territory. Its first task abroad is to work with Europe and Japan to find, along with China, a reshaped global path forward. Europe has to take Russia more seriously and be ready to reduce its economic dependence on Russia. China and the West can best bring Russia into a more stable global order if they work together to reshape this order as they deem necessary and apply further sanctions against Russia when they are warranted. This isolating economic pressure is probably the best way to force Russia to change its aggressive approach to the Western world. Russia deserves respect from the West, but it also needs to behave in ways that give it its own self-respect.
Right now, the greatest long-term advantage the United States and Europe possess over China is that they have more useable history for the kind of world that lies ahead. The United States and China seem set to be rivals in the twenty-first century, but the key question becomes how they conduct themselves. Will they fall into “Thucydides’s trap” – the conflict that ensues when a rising power (Athens) challenges a ruling one (Sparta), as Harvard scholar Graham Allison describes in Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (2017). The alternative is to be rivals within the limits of a reshaped global order – a win-win versus a win-lose approach. In the best-case scenario, they will build together on the post-war inclusive global order that has served both of them amazingly well by the standards of history. As Las Vegas magician Jeff McBride puts it, “accepting the limits that lead to creativity” is the best way forward for all countries.
* Published in the Globe and Mail, August 4, 2015.
* Published in the Globe and Mail, March 11, 2016.