As the United States retreats from being a unipolar power, the prevailing global order is at a crossroads. For Canada, it’s time to start thinking about what comes next and what it means for Canadian policy. The Hub is running a new essay series to grapple with these seismic changes and offer a new clear-headed direction for Canadian foreign policy.
After three generations of relative peace, Canadians have been smacked by the blunt force of Thucydidean power politics. Much of our establishment is still in denial, but more and more are waking up to the fact that the world they were born into was an historical anomaly. We were lucky. They were good years, maybe the best in human history, to rank alongside “that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.” But it was never going to last.
Human nature doesn’t change suddenly, and neither does the balance of good and evil in the world. As Fukuyama predicted in 1989, the prospect of a liberal future spreading before us—sterile, endless, and forever—strikes horror in the human soul. Thumos revolts at the prospect of a technocratic peace, where “daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation” and “the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.”
Fukuyama ended his 1989 essay wondering if “this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.” The prediction was right, but the reason was wrong. The forces that move history never stopped churning because they work far below the surface level of political systems in profound needs and wants of fallen humanity, and in the ineluctable and insoluble problem of multiple claims to finite territory.
The last Cold War was only the latest chapter of the oldest human story of uneasy neighbours, which technology allowed to be written on a global scale. The Greco-Persian wars, the Warring States period, Rome and Carthage, the Hundred Years War, the clash of maritime empires, the Great Game, two World Wars: any time two empires, two countries, two families live side by side, there will be tension, at best. At worst, well, Kavanagh knew that Homer “made the Iliad from … / A local row.”
In retrospect, we can see that the end of history itself ended in the last four months of 2001, and with it the stable post-war order that had bound and sustained the Western allies during the Cold War. In the popular imagination, September 11th was the end, but when future historians look back it will be another date, December 11th, that looms larger. That was the day that China was admitted to the World Trade Organisation.
September 11th was a surprise attack that shocked the West, but December 11th was a carefully-measured, self-inflicted wound. It was at least as rash to open the West’s free markets to non-market competition from a hostile rising power as it was to extend a punitive war against the Taliban in Afghanistan into a nation-building exercise or to expand the war to Iraq, which had nothing to do with the original attack.
Those two decisions taken exactly two weeks apart were the beginning of the end of America’s brief unipolar moment as the world’s unassailable military, economic, and cultural hegemon.The Congressional vote to authorise military force was on November 27th, 2001. The beneficiary of both mistakes was China, which abused its access to global markets to get rich quick and increased its military power in real terms while the United States squandered dollars, materiel, prestige, and its will to fight in lengthy, futile, and ultimately losing campaigns.
During the same time, Canada, like most Western European countries, continued to carry on in complacent defiance of reality. We believed we could pocket the peace dividend from the end of the Cold War and keep the world safe on the cheap; we trusted multilateral institutions even as they were slowly corrupted by cynical regimes weaponising international law against us; and we hoped that hostile powers would be tamed by the invisible hand of the global market. It was a fine and foolish delusion.
In Canada’s case, surrounded by oceans on three sides and a friendly ally on the other, we had the excuse that we did not face any direct military threats. Between our fortunate geography and the shadow of the Monroe Doctrine we could be confident that, if push came to shove, the United States would protect us because doing so would be in its own interest. There was an ignoble canniness to this assessment, but it only held as long as American governments were inclined to indulge our freeloading.
The Europeans had no such excuse. They were warned for decades that choosing butter over guns would have long-term consequences. More than a decade ago, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned European countries that their failure to invest in hard military power meant eventual “irrelevance” for NATO. In 2011 in Brussels he said everything that Vice President JD Vance would say in 2025 in Munich, to deaf ears.
“The blunt reality,” Mr. Gates said, “is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress—and in the American body politic writ large—to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.”
Gates’s warning came before Vladimir Putin seized Crimea in 2014 and before the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022. What has happened since? Last month Reuters reported that “[t]he German army’s battle-readiness is less than when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.” Even when confronted with a shooting war just one country over, the wealthiest country in Europe has not just been slow to rise to the challenge, they’ve actually gone backward.
The Hub’s mission statement back in 2021 quoted Charles Krauthammer’s dictum that “decline is a choice.” Since the end of the Cold War, the Europeans have chosen genteel decline and we Canadians have largely copied them. We got soft and we stopped doing difficult things. We smothered our politics in process and allowed high-but-soft-minded judges to sap our democratic vigour. We preferred talk to action, and when eventually we lost the ability to act we reassured ourselves that talk was enough.
Trump may yet prove to be an extreme case, and after him American politics may return to the broader consensus that existed before, but I wouldn’t bet on it. In any case, in a multipolar world American politics is only half the picture, if that. Nor can we fall back on familiar multilateral institutions and alliances, which are quickly evolving or being replaced. We are an afterthought, if anyone thinks of us at all. That is the price of the irrelevance that we chose. If we want that to change, we have to change. We have to get serious, fast.
If we want to avoid the fate of those European countries stuck in a state of paralysed indignation then we have to stop talking and start making all the hard choices that we’ve been putting off, hoping we’d never have to face them. If we want to be actors rather than perpetually stunned and scrambling reactors, if we want to re-earn our place at the global table, our leaders are going to have to learn how to prioritise and the rest of us are going to have to learn to accept trade-offs. The days of comfort are over.
Howard Anglin is a doctoral student at Oxford University. He was previously Deputy Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Principal…
