By Conrad Black

Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke purposefully at Davos this past week about adopting a more nationalistic policy for Canada. Less persuasive was his call for a league of so-called middle powers to combine to influence the superpowers to set up what he called, in the current tedious jargon, ”a rules-based international order.”

He is vaguely addressing, without recognizing directly, the fact that the Western Alliance was established in 1949 to contain the Soviet Union which it successfully did until the USSR disintegrated in 1991 without exchanging a shot with any of the NATO countries. Since then there has been a gradual shift from a collective security-based to a national interest-based foreign policy on the part of the NATO countries, as well as the former blocks of so-called neutral states and the regional blocks in Latin America and Africa, none of which easily mobilized their combined influence or enjoyed much relevance to the course of international affairs. The United Nations and many of its agencies are just primal scream therapy for many of the most retrograde and primitive regimes in the world. Israel can be commended for taking the wrecker’s ball to the outlet of one of its agencies in Jerusalem.

Carney was effectively wagging his finger at the United States in the highest (or lowest) tradition of its so-called allies who graciously sheltered under the protective wing of American military power while attempting to collegialize all alliance decisions on the basis that the United States was a great mastiff which would do the work and take the risks while it’s European and Canadian allies held the leash and gave the instructions. The “rules-based international order” was always a fraud. It was a stability based almost entirely on the deterrent and enforcement capacity that the United States possessed because of its great military and economic power. The ideas of a group of “middle powers” grouping together to assert themselves is a complete fantasy. Superpowers don’t care about middle powers as long as other superpowers don’t invade them.

After Stalin began the Cold War by violating his commitments at the Yalta Conference to evacuate the liberated countries of eastern Europe and hold genuine free elections there, and the United States imposed its policy of containment of the Soviet Union, and President Nixon exploited the schism between the U.S.S.R. and China by triangulating the great power relationship, the Soviet Union fell like a soufflé and international communism evaporated. The United States did not exploit its position as the world’s only superpower and China, while retaining the totalitarianism of communism, saw the virtues of economic growth that only capitalism could provide and launched itself as the next challenger to the U.S. for world leadership, following the profoundly unsuccessful precedents of Nazi Germany and the U.S.S.R.

NATO degenerated into an alliance of the willing, meaning that the United States would generously guarantee the security of all of the other countries which would decide which, if any NATO project they wished to join. This was not a rules-based order. It was the dominance of a benign and generally peaceful superpower surrounded by a bevy of freeloading coattail-riders. What is happening now is not the “rupture” that Carney declared at Davos and elsewhere, but an adjustment. When the U.S.S.R. was a serious threat de Gaulle and Mitterrand and Adenauer and Kohl and Thatcher and Mulroney pulled their weight in the Alliance. In the last 30 years, as Trump has stated, NATO, apart from the United States, and the nuclear deterrent forces of France and the U.K., has been a low-rise house of cards. Carney shamefully compared the American-led Western Alliance to the Stalinist bloc and Trump was justified in calling him an ingrate at Davos.

Nor is Carney’s description of Canada as a “middle power” exact. That was a reasonable assertion by John Diefenbaker at the United Nations in 1962. But today Canada is a G-7 country with one of the world’s 10 or eleven largest economies and is one of the world’s five most resource rich countries with 41 million people in a world that has grown to nearly 200 countries. We are one of the world’s 10 to 15 most important countries and need not belittle ourselves with unctuous self-deprecation.

Seen from this perspective, Carney is absolutely right in staking out a course of increased economic independence and military self-sufficiency. But the justification for this is not because of any action by the U.S., but that Canada should finally become a psychologically complete country, and cease to fuss over why it is an independent country. There are ample historic and contemporary reasons for that based on the many distinctions between the ethos of this country and that of the United States. It is precisely because the United States has usually been a benign influence and a good neighbour that it has been so difficult for us even in our own collective thinking, to separate ourselves from it.

The United States has made the greatest effort of any nation to raise up a previously forcibly suppressed racial minority in servitude to complete equality with the descendants of its former owners. But it is still troubled by the legacy of slavery, and has a more complicated sociology, much greater racial abrasions than Canada, and a revolutionary and individualist tradition that has created a different attitude towards firearms and a much higher crime rate than Canadians would wish. Besides, we have a magnificent country, skilled and law-abiding population, and our distinctiveness from other countries will come from the distinction and the success that we earn through innovative, and responsible policy.

Carney took considerable liberties in claiming to have eradicated internal trade barriers, cut taxes, and expanded our trade relationships. But most leaders do at Davos. Instead of pining about a natural adjustment in international affairs toward a more national interest-based criterion for policymaking, we should take advantage of the fact that we are in the top fifth percentile of the most important countries in the world and make the most of it. We are too dependent on the Americans but the fault is ours; changing it will not be like falling off a log and reproaching the Americans, after all they have done to defeat the forces of tyranny in the world in the last 110 years, is no way to begin. And let’s not burn any bridges; closer proximity to China will generate acute nostalgia for the Americans.

First published in the National Post