Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the U.S. presidential election will have profound consequences for international relations over the next four years and beyond.
While domestic issues were likely at the forefront of most voters’ minds when they cast their ballots, there is no denying that many Americans think that the world has become a more dangerous place during the tenure of the Biden administration.
And they are not wrong. The world is a lot more dangerous than it was several years ago. Regional conflicts in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia threaten to spill over into global conflagration. Authoritarianism is on the rise around the world. Democracy is under threat everywhere, including here at home, as foreign actors resort to various nefarious means to stir public dissent and undermine our democratic political institutions.
As the acclaimed New York Times columnist Anne Applebaum expounds in her book Autocracy Inc.: Dictators Who Want to Run the World, today’s autocrats are now working together, having created a vast supportive financial, technology, and propaganda network to weaken the West and undermine democracy and the liberal international order. Look no further than North Korea’s recent decision to send troops to help Russia in its brutal war against Ukraine, or the expansion of the BRICS (led by China and Russia) as a counterweight to the G7 and Putin’s plan to dethrone the dollar, to understand the trouble that is brewing.
For almost two decades, democracy and freedom around the globe have been in retreat. Freedom House finds that more countries “are losing freedom than gaining it.” Authoritarian populists are using the ballot box to attain power and keep it. Many governments around the world are using various means to “restrict freedom of movement in order to punish, coerce, or control people they view as threats or political opponents.”
How will the new administration in the U.S. respond? As with his first term, Trump will have little time for multilateralism and the niceties of a rules-based international order. He divides the world into enemies and friends, with the proviso that to remain a friend you have to pull your weight. And even friends may not avoid tariffs, as Trump seeks to rebuild manufacturing in the American industrial heartland.
Given our economic and security dependence on the United States, no country is more vulnerable to this shift in American policy than Canada. Furthermore, our failure to pay our way on defence, our large trade surplus with the U.S., and our differences on issues such as net zero will not endear us to a president who already has a well-documented antipathy to our current prime minister.
It is therefore past time for a major foreign policy reset that responds to a world that looks very different from when the government came to power in 2015. We need to think hard about these changes and what they mean for Canada’s international engagements and foreign policy priorities.
What should this reset look like? What principles should guide it?
One important point is that while we need to be closely aligned with the U.S. and the broader Western alliance in order to present a united front to authoritarian regimes, Canada can and should have a distinctive foreign policy of its own. We will get more respect and attention from the world if policy is grounded on clear values and principles, and Canada is not simply following every twist and turn of U.S. foreign policy. Canada needs to advance its own interests, reflect its own values, and think about what a truly Canadian approach looks like, given the historical moment we find ourselves in.
For us, that means grounding our foreign policy on defending the core principles of freedom and democracy that have made Canada the great country that it is, and which are so much under threat. These should be hardwired into our foreign and development assistance policies.
An honor guard marches in formation with U.S. and Canadian flags before the arrival of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Monday, July 8, 2024, at Andrews Air Force Base, Md., to attend the NATO summit in Washington. Mark Schiefelbein/AP Photo.
That does not mean rolling out the usual bromides about “making a difference” or “mattering more” that our leaders and foreign policy pundits too often peddle. Instead, we need tangible initiatives on defence and support for democracy and the rule of law that others—particularly the new U.S. administration—can rally behind. This also means strengthening the bonds between ourselves and other Western democracies so that we can work together to pursue these goals.
What would this revamped foreign policy look like in practice? Here are seven key priorities.
1. Strengthen alliances and ramp up defence spending.
Our credibility is on the line not just with president-elect Trump, but with all our NATO partners. We need to accelerate efforts to increase defence spending which will require a doubling of the existing defence budget in order to reach our 2 percent of GDP commitment. Some of that money can be usefully spent on strengthening our defence, intelligence, and security ties with our key security partners in the Asia-Pacific—Australia, Japan, and South Korea. Japan and South Korea are excellent candidates to build submarines to replace our aging Victoria-class fleet. We should also be launching intensive, bilateral security dialogues with all three countries on how we can work more closely together on common security threats.
Increasingly, national security is bound up with energy security, food security, and access to critical minerals. Canada needs to remove roadblocks to resource development to ensure that we can play our part in supplying our allies with what they need to bolster their security.
2. Stop the NATO alliance from going wobbly on Ukraine.
The fate of Ukraine now hangs in the balance. Ukrainians are exhausted by the ongoing struggle, which is now entering its third year. They have been fighting with one arm tied behind their back because of U.S. restrictions on their use of long-range weapons to attack military targets and supply lines deep inside Russia. President Zelensky’s plan to win the war has been met with polite indifference in many Western capitals.
Make no mistake, if Ukraine is defeated by Russia or forced to sue prematurely for peace by its Western backers, the global consequences will be dire. Putin will be emboldened to take a run at NATO’s Baltic members or other eastern frontline states like Poland. Exploiting Western weakness, China might try to invade Taiwan. And North Korea’s erratic and unpredictable leader could launch an attack against South Korea as he has threatened to do. Today’s regional conflicts are interlinked, and how the West behaves in one theatre will impact others.
Canada should use its key position as chair of the G7 summit next year to prepare a reinvigorated strategic plan to back Ukraine. The plan should include making full use of Russia’s hundreds of billions of frozen assets, which sit in Western financial institutions, to underwrite the costs of Ukraine’s war and help its struggling economy. Before Ukraine can negotiate, it must first turn the tide against Russia.
3. Be clear and unequivocal about our support for the state of Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East.
Israel is locked in an existential struggle with Iran and the forces of Islamic extremism; the October 7th massacre was only the latest salvo in this decades-long struggle. Unfortunately for Israel, the current government has been anything but clear on where it stands on the battle, seemingly attempting to offend as few people as possible. It is perfectly possible for Canada to be a staunch ally of Israel without necessarily endorsing its leadership or every action its military takes or being blind to the humanitarian costs of a conflict that Israel did not seek.
4. Push for G7 expansion to include two of the world’s leading democracies in the Asia-Pacific.
The G7 is the principal forum and catalyst for the world’s leading advanced democracies.
Unlike the G20, which has become mired in unreconcilable differences between democracies and autocracies, and between advanced and developing countries, the G7 has shown itself to be an effective institution. It has played a leading role in advancing domestic and international priorities on a wide range of issues such as global security, economic and financial crises, health, democracy, and cyber security.
However, the G7 is still far too Eurocentric in its membership and orientation. Australia and the Republic of Korea are stable democracies, major global economies, and trusted security partners. Korea is now the world’s 12th-largest economy, the 11th-largest exporter, and 11th in the world in defence spending. Australia is the 13th-largest economy, the 16th-biggest exporter, and 13th in defence spending (ahead of Canada). Along with Japan, both countries will play a pivotal role in checking China’s rise and growing military assertiveness.
By leading the campaign on G7 expansion, Canada could help transform the G7 into a dynamic “D” 9 (as in “democratic”) grouping that would unite the world’s leading democracies and bring additional bench strength to push back against authoritarian revisionists.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrives to the G7 Summit in Savelletri Di Fasano, Italy on Wednesday, June 12, 2024. Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press.
5. Combat grand corruption.
Grand corruption is an insidious cancer that increasingly afflicts the health of society and the polity, undermining democracy and the rule of law worldwide. Corrupt regimes are responsible for some of the world’s worst human rights abuses and forcible displacement of their citizens. Corruption is driving environmental degradation and biodiversity loss and comprising efforts to promote sustainable development as corrupt elites siphoned millions in development assistance.
Specifically, Canada should throw its full weight behind ongoing efforts—now supported politically and financially by the government of the Netherlands and to which Britain’s new government is also committed—to create an international anti-corruption court that would hold kleptocrats and their co-conspirators to account when national governments are unable or unwilling to do so. It should also have a civil chamber that would facilitate the forfeiture, repurposing, and return of funds and physical assets acquired through corruption.
Canada should also put anti-corruption at the forefront of its national policy agenda by addressing chronic underfunding of our law enforcement agencies, lax enforcement of our laws, and confusing and overlapping bureaucratic mandates. Federal and provincial authorities also need to take much tougher action to ensure that Canada is not a safe haven for transnational criminal networks and corrupt foreign officials who launder and hide their money here.
6. Ramp up support for domestic opponents of authoritarianism.
This year’s popular uprising in Bangladesh, which toppled Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s ruthless regime, is a stark reminder that autocratic regimes are not invincible. That was also the lesson of the so-called coloured revolutions of the former Soviet Union, including Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution.” But, in recent years, Western democracies have been passive bystanders in failing to adequately support popular uprisings in many countries, such as Venezuela, to throw out despots who manipulate fraudulent elections to stay in power.
Democracies need a new “playbook” to turn the tide against authoritarianism. It should include funding and training for opposition groups, expert assistance to political parties so they can run better and more professional campaigns, technical and financial assistance so that elections cannot be subverted, stronger sanctions against autocrats and their cronies (which include seizing their personal assets abroad), and direct assistance in the form of financing, investment, training, and assistance for democratically elected governments that are genuinely committed to democratic reform.
For years, Conservative and Liberal governments have shoveled out millions to support foreign institutions in the democracy promotion business—like the U.S. National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, the U.K.’s Westminster Foundation, or Sweden’s IDEA—instead of properly supporting Canadian institutions, which can do the same job, if not better, while flying the Canadian flag.
7. Make good governance and the rule of law the cornerstones of our development assistance.
In recent years, Canada’s development assistance policies have been driven by political fashion and various forms of social virtue signalling. We need to turn the dial there as well.
The three economists—Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson—who won this year’s Nobel prize in economics deserve a wider hearing in ODA circles, including the international development assistance bureaus in Global Affairs Canada. Their work demonstrates the singular importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity, specifically the importance of the rule of law and good governance. It also shows that societies with a poor rule of law and weak institutions that exploit the population do not generate economic growth or change for the better. That means we should scale up the rule of law and good governance in our development assistance programs, specifically focusing on projects that strengthen and professionalize the civil service and public administration, enhance legislative accountability and oversight, promote sound fiscal and public financial management, and which help countries mobilize domestic sources of revenue through a taxation system that is fair, transparent, and progressive.
For years, Canadian foreign policy and development assistance programs have struggled aimlessly without clear priorities. Our allies have noticed, and under President Trump, the United States will have no patience with an ally that does not pull its weight and stand up for itself.
Our foreign policy needs a fundamental reset, and as we set this new course in a turbulent and dangerous world, the defence of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law, at home and abroad, should be paramount.
