In my lifetime, I have observed endless courses, seminars, and even entire schools devoted to the concept of leadership. I’ve always found this funny on two counts. First, in order to properly teach leadership, instructors would presumably have to be leaders themselves. But if so, why are they relegated to teaching instead of, you know, leading? Second, if leadership were something that could really be taught en masse, one would expect leaders to be as common as Uber drivers by now.
I thought of this in light of the Carney government’s recent forays into foreign policy. First, with Prime Minister Mark Carney’s trip to Washington yesterday, elbows firmly pinned to his side, in an attempt to cajole President Donald Trump into offering some kind of trade certainty. Negotiations have effectively stalled on that front since the prime minister’s last visit to the Oval Office, with tariffs even increasing in the meantime. Canadians, understandably, are getting antsy about when the adult in the room they elected is actually going to start delivering on his campaign promises.
Second, when reading Carney’s boisterous proclamations last week to the Council of Foreign Relations of his government’s intent to lead on the world stage. That address had the feeling of a press release format in which some new development is announced, when in fact, it is the release itself that is doing the announcing. This is to say, the government’s repeated announcing of its intent to “lead” is the form that its leadership takes.
What is particularly concerning about this tendency is how it harkens back to Carney’s predecessor, whose approach to, well, leadership tended toward appearance over reality and speech over deed.
More broadly, it is unclear exactly what the government understands “leadership” to mean in the context of world politics. Of course, political figures can exercise greater or lesser leadership within their own countries, just as certain individuals may demonstrate leadership qualities within their communities, local organizations, military units, businesses, and so forth.
But international politics is a qualitatively different domain. While certain political leaders leave their mark on geopolitics, for good or ill, they do so within the context of their own countries’ position within the global system. That position is unavoidably dependent upon a given country’s material capabilities and capacity to project force—not just talk.
The fundamental hollowness of this talk becomes obvious in the rough and tumble world of actual stakes, where the consequences of a government’s rhetoric will be tangibly felt by Canadians—say, for instance, in negotiations with the world’s greatest superpower and your country’s biggest trade partner, one who doesn’t particularly appreciate your ineffectual freelancing. While ultimate success on the trade file may not be up to Carney, poking the bear with Palestinian statehood certainly hasn’t helped matters, given Trump’s capricious nature.
It is no slur on Canada to say that, while it possesses great resources—both human and natural—its capabilities are limited, and its force projection more limited still. The pitfall here is that it mistakes its contributions, such as foreign aid disbursements and peacekeeping operations, as systemically significant. And more generally, Canada is inclined to treat political leadership as essentially a matter of rhetoric in the absence of the ability to project real power or intervene in major conflicts elsewhere.
Indeed, it is appropriate that the Carney government’s approach to leadership has thus far remained on the level of rhetoric. Admittedly, this sort of thing is now standard for secondary powers; the Europeans have elevated it to an art form. It is not a coincidence, then, that the present government has repeatedly signified its intent to draw closer to European powers following the imposition of Trumpian tariffs.
Comments (7)
Mr Polansky’s article is a real pleasure to read. It describes Canada’s quality of leadership perfectly. Virtually nobody beyond our borders cares what Canada says or does and until our hired hands in Ottawa begin to understand that and start making meaningful international contributions, Canada will remain irrelevant. They are “blowing in the wind”.