Distracted by the Donald
There’s a wide world outside the macabre spectacle of Donald Trump’s America
It’s morbid fascination, and it’s perfectly understandable. The implosion of political and cultural order in Donald Trump’s America, its teetering constitutional integrity, the marching Nazis, the cable news shout-shows, the tragicomic delirium paralyzing even the most venerable of the Ivy League universities — it’s a macabre spectacle.
But for the truly tectonic shifts shuddering the world and Canada’s place in it, you’ll need to look elsewhere.
Even at the best of times, the calamities that afflict the United States get magnified. The havoc Hurricane Harvey has visited upon Houston, for instance, is nothing compared to the misery the monsoons have rained down throughout South Asia where more than 1,000 have been killed. But you’d never know it.
Still, these are not the best of times — not for the United States, nor for what was once known as the free world, that nebulous realm of free-market capitalism and democratic stability underpinned by American economic, cultural, political and military power.
The edifice has been collapsing for at least a decade. U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis got it right, in unrehearsed remarks to a group of soldiers surreptitiously captured on somebody’s cellphone camera and posted to Facebook: “We’ve got the power of intimidation, and that’s you . . . we’ll get the power of inspiration back . . . You just hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other and showing it.”
The nightmare will pass, Mattis reckons. This would be reassuring, were it not for the vivid imagination required to know how Americans will come to be at peace with themselves again, and how that would translate into a revival of the rules-based international order.
In the meantime, in the larger scheme of things, just one matter of greater importance is the way the People’s Republic of China is muscling in on all the political and economic spaces the United States used to occupy around the world.
The Beijing regime is an increasingly belligerent and malignant force in world affairs, an everheavier boot on the necks of the Chinese people and an admitted enemy of what remains of the liberal global order. The Communist Party of China makes no bones about it anymore. So, now would be a good time for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and quite a few of his ministers and advisers to apologize for the stupidities they have been fobbing off about China as a potential free-trade partner, a friend in the cause of coping with climate change and a generous provider of guilt-free capital investment.
For years, the Liberal party establishment and its friends in the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and the Canada China Business Council have mocked Canadians who have pointed out China’s state-owned enterprises are not the “profit-driven to their core” corporations that Margaret Cornish, Trudeau’s senior adviser on China going into the 2015 election, claimed them to be.
Trudeau was an ardent champion of the China National Offshore Oil Corp.’s $15.1-billion oilpatch acquisition of Nexen Inc., Sinopec’s $2.2-billion takeover of Daylight Energy and its $4.65-billion purchase of a big chunk of Syncrude, and on and on. They’re corporations like any other, Trudeau said. Canada should be open to the world.
Well, they’re not, Nowadays, China’s state-owned enterprises don’t even pretend to be anything less than the Chinese Communist Party’s instruments of overseas acquisitions policy.
The corporate boards of Beijing ’s state-owned enterprises were always subject to directives from the corporations’ Communist Party committees. Now a new directive, which came into effect Aug. 1, requires the party committees’ powers to be written into the enterprises’ articles of incorporation.
More than 30 of Beijing’s stateowned enterprises listed in Hong Kong have already amended their incorporation documents to place the Communist Party at the pinnacle of their corporate structures. The new rules also apply to nominally private Chinese corporations and the requirement is being extended to foreign companies operating in China.
If you enter into a joint venture with a Chinese state-owned enterprise to do business in China — it’s often the only way in — then you better be prepared to establish an internal Communist Party committee to tell you how to behave. Last week, Samsung Electronics and Nokia confirmed to the Reuters that they have complied.
Well, global warming, then. Surely China is serious about that. Environment Minister Catherine McKenna has praised Beijing for its innovations in clean power and its move away from coal-powered electrical generation. So has the Center for American Progress, a Democratic Party think-tank. “China is indeed going green,” it gushed in May. “The nation is on track to over-deliver on the emissions reduction commitments it put forward under the Paris climate agreement.”
Except it isn’t. China is now the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, so the Paris Climate Accord enthusiasts were patting Beijing on the back last January when China’s National Energy Administration announced more than 100 planned coal plants would not get the go-ahead. But as the German environmental research group Urgewald has pointed out, Beijing expanded its carbon footprint elsewhere. Chinese companies are opening at least 700 coal projects offshore, mostly in Africa, but also in Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia.
So sure, stayed glued to videos of the vulgar demagogue who slouches down the corridors of the White House, and try to keep track of his creepy friends, bizarre utterances and roaring illiteracies.
But there’s a bigger world out there.