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At a time when powerful leaders change their narratives and ignore their promises, how much benefit Canada can derive from kowtowing in either Beijing or Washington?
As America grapples to hold its swagger in a volatile geopolitical landscape, Chinese leader Xi Jinping exudes confidence that China is achieving “the community of the common destiny of mankind”, wherein the West’s glory days are past and China assumes global supremacy of “all under Heaven”.
This is the subtext of the “changes unseen in a century” slogan that Xi repeatedly utters to characterize the current era of geopolitical upheaval.
Much like Mao Zedong did, Xi anchors his speeches with allusions to China’s rich history or classic Confucian quotes. In traditional Chinese cosmology, an emperor’s right to rule — and Xi views himself as the modern heir in China’s lineage of great emperors — stemmed from virtues immersed in arts and culture, a worldview that sees China as the “Middle Kingdom.”
So, it was notable last week that, in remarks prefacing his meeting with Donald Trump, the sage who Xi cited was not a Chinese philosopher but the ancient Greek historian Thucydides.
Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, which details the gruesome 27-year war between Athens and Sparta in the 5th century BCE, concluded that “the growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon (Sparta), made war inevitable.”
Some 2,500 years later, Harvard political scientist Graham Allison has popularized the term “Thucydides Trap” to describe the structural stress that occurs when a rising power (like Athens then, or China now) threatens to displace a ruling power (like Sparta then, or the U.S. now).
During Trump’s closely watched visit, Xi sternly urged that China and the U.S. “overcome this Thucydides Trap” and create a paradigm he dubs “constructive strategic stability” where the U.S. and China will “be partners, not rivals.” Read: China now expects the West to accept the inevitability of being overtaken by China’s rise, and not challenge its power expansion in the Indo-Pacific and globally.
Xi minced no words in saying any American military move to protect Taiwan — which China could one day invade — would put China-U.S. relations in an “extremely dangerous situation.”
Washington, which avoids making promises to militarily protect Taiwan, is required by its own Taiwan Relations Act to provide enough arms for the island to defend itself. But after Xi’s bullying of the bully, Trump was decidedly less hawkish about defending Taiwan’s democracy, even warning it against making any provocative declarations of independence.
“China is very, very powerful, big country,” he told Fox News. “That’s a very small island. Think of it, (China is) 59 miles away. We’re 9,500 miles away. That’s a little bit of a difficult problem.”
Since visiting China, Trump’s rhetoric has emphasized money not supremacy, citing Beijing’s promises to buy hundreds of Boeing jets and massive amounts of U.S. agricultural commodities — a start to shrinking China’s massive trade surplus. A decade ago Trump also announced $250 billion worth of new trade after his 2017 China visit, some of which never materialized. In 2020 another set of deals, ostensibly worth $200 billion, mostly never came to fruition.
As regards opening the Strait of Hormuz, the Americans claim Xi told Trump he won’t provide military equipment to Iran. But in 2015 Xi told then-president Barack Obama that he wouldn’t militarize man-made islands in the South China Sea which today are fortified. The same year he also promised China would not engage in cyber-espionage.
Any promises that the U.S. extracts from China should be taken with a shovel of salt.
At a time when powerful leaders change their narratives and ignore their promises, how much benefit Canada can derive from kowtowing in either Beijing or Washington? Xi and Trump have no qualms about abrogating any agreement or understanding that Canada may think it has with them.
In Ottawa, it was telling that Canadian officials remained silent after the Chinese Ambassador recently threatened Canada could say goodbye to our “strategic partnership” if we continue participating in freedom of naval navigation exercises through the Taiwan Strait.
The Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi is expected in Ottawa soon. We should expect him to educate us on the meaning of “constructive strategic stability” as a one-way street of appeasement to whatever China wants from Canada.
Charles Burton is a former Canadian diplomat in Beijing; senior fellow at Sinopsis.cz, a China-focused think tank based in Prague; author of The Beaver and the Dragon: How China Out-Maneuvred Canada’s Diplomacy, Security and Sovereignty (Optimum Press).
The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.
