Matt Gurney: On the end of (a) world

We made a massive miscalculation about the kind of environment we were living in. And if we don't figure that out, it's going to hurt us. Badly.

Nov 29, 2024

Soldiers with 1st Battalion, 179 Infantry Regiment, Oklahoma Army National Guard prepare to board a charter flight in Oklahoma City, Okla. — U.S. Army photo.

By: Matt Gurney

So. Hey. Anything going on this week?

I kid, of course. I've been paying attention. But as I've been paying attention to, uh, all of that stuff, I've also been collecting my notes, and my thoughts, about what I heard last weekend at the Halifax International Security Forum, which I was honoured to attend as a participant again this year. (Thanks to the organizers for inviting me.)

For those who don't know, the "Forum," or HISF, is an annual gathering of military leaders, defence and intelligence experts, and others whose work relates to defence and security issues, from across NATO and the Western alliance broadly. Funded by NATO, the Canadian government and private-sector sponsors, it is something of a jewel in Canada's defence crown, a chance to bring some very powerful and influential people to a gorgeous Canadian city to wine and dine them, in hopes that they don't realize our military is a disaster that is largely incapable of contributing to our collective defence. The agenda is always divided into a mix of free time for social networking, off-the-record chats (which are generally the most interesting) and also a series of on-the-record events that can be quoted from, and which are broadcast live online.

I've got enough material to cover two columns, but in a happy coincidence, the thing that struck me the most in Halifax actually happens to be awfully damned germane to a lot of what is being discussed in Canada this week. What the hell is America going to do? And what the hell can anyone do about it?

On the latter question, I think the answer is "Not much, sadly." And, for what it's worth, the man who most perfectly summed up the problem facing all of us had to fly all the way in from Australia to do it. I'm going to shamelessly quote him, and I wish I'd thought to phrase it this way myself.

The Australian in question was Dr. Andrew Shearer. He is Director-General of National Intelligence, Office of National Intelligence for his country, and his country is one that, largely due to its geographic circumstances, has had to take security a lot more seriously than Canada. I've seen him speak before and I always find him thoughtful and, well, very Australian. That's a compliment. Aussies have a knack for blunt talk mixed with humour that I admire (we aim for that at The Line). During one of the on-the-record sessions, Shearer was asked by panel moderator James Coomarasamy, a BBC News journalist, about the rules-based international order. And what Shearer said made me sit up straighter in my chair. It was perfect.

I'm going to keep all you readers in suspense for just a moment longer before I tell you what Shearer said. I first want to tell you the context of why it was so interesting to me. It was a bit of a quirk of timing. The notion of a rules-based order is something The Line has addressed a few times in recent months. Our position, in general, is that there isn't one, and that we should be honest about that before we get crushed by reality.

In our latest episode of The Line Podcast, we discussed this at length, in the context of the ICC issuing arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his now-former defence minister. I quipped on the pod that the "rules-based international order" is a lot like the "sanctity of marriage." It's something we talk about as if it exists, and we'd all like it to exist, but it really doesn't. It just doesn't. It's an ideal worth striving for, but not actually a thing that exists and can be counted on. The Line had also previously written about our belief that there is no rules-based international order in a prior dispatch, and then ran a counterpoint to that perspective by a reader who disagreed. It was a good counterpoint! It didn't change my mind.

Shearer tackled the question directly, and so perfectly that I think his answer has changed my view of the situation. It hasn't changed my opinion, but it has changed how I'm going to describe it. Here's what Shearer said (I've tidied up the quote a tiny bit for clarity, but you can watch the whole thing around the 39-minute mark of this video). For context, the panel was about the so-called "CRINKS" — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, and the challenge they are posing to the Western alliance. I'll include Coomarasamy's question, and then show you what Shearer said that made me go "Huh."

Coomarasamy: Are we in a world now where we can't really talk about a rules-based international order, but two separate, competing ones?

Shearer: That’s a big question. I think the rules-based order, frankly, turns out to have been, in hindsight, a power-based order. It was unchallenged U.S. military power that made possible the liberal order of the last 50 years. With all its benefits for so many countries. Was the U.S. always a perfect hegemon within that system? Occasionally not. It would shift its weight around, and there were consequences from that. But overall, it worked because the United States was a relatively benign hegemon.

That's it. That's exactly it. That's exactly what I have intuitively felt in the last few years, and haven't done a good enough job explaining. I grasped it in a big-picture intellectual sense, but I hadn't been able to shrink it down into a single sentence like that. When Shearer said that the rules-based order was, actually, a U.S. military power-based order, it clicked in my brain. That's the way to articulate it.

For the last few decades, we thought we were living in a rules-based-international order, and planned our lives around that. But what we were actually living in was a global order led by a relatively benign global superpower and preserved by its astonishing military power.

And that world is ending.

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Not entirely, and not all at once, but it is ending. The re-election of Donald Trump is a clear signal that the U.S. is going to pursue a different foreign policy. It might well be broadly similar to the one that we're used to. I actually would guess, if asked, that it will be more like what we've already had than different from it. But I think that America is going to operate in its role of superpower very differently. Trump isn't going to care about the precise language in joint communiques about human rights. He's not going to have much patience the next time a Canadian PM shows up at a conference and wants the word "Progressive" shoehorned into the title of whatever treaty we're negotiating. Trump won't really be particularly interested in European diplomats explaining why the European Union has been good for continental security.

He doesn't care about that stuff. He's here to renegotiate the deal. And whether or not his America will be benign is really up to him. America's friendship can no longer be assumed. But I have a hunch it can be earned ... or, frankly, bought.

Shearer seeing and articulating this so clearly was especially welcome at a time when, it seems to me, so many Canadian politicians still haven't figured it out. You all know of my oft-repeated warning that our expectations are a problem. I think we're moving out of the "FA" stage into the "FO" era on that one, friends. (For those don't get the reference, it's to the common slang warning that those who fuck around, find out ... or, less colourfully, that actions eventually have consequences.) Canada and much of the Western alliance took a U.S.-military-power backed global order so utterly for granted that they actually, eventually, forgot that that's what it was. They came up with an entirely wrong understanding of what kind of world they were living in.

A lot of people, and it seems to me this includes just about every single person holding high elected office in this country, believed that we were enjoying a more enlightened era of history, one in which we'd all agree to abide by the rules, and that would be that. Wrong. It was never that. The liberal democracies have flourished since the Second World War because America was willing to create and enforce a global order that allowed them to do so. And Canada was probably the most ruthlessly successful of all the Western allies at adapting itself to become a creature of that environment.

But that environment is changing. I quipped with my colleague Jen that Canadians are penguins now being beamed via a Star Trek-style transporter from our comfortable Antarctic home directly into the Amazon. This is not the geopolitical environment in which we have adapted to thrive. And much like those penguins beamed right into the rainforest, a lot of our leaders right now — the prime minister, most of his cabinet, the premiers — are still stuck in the stage of looking around at all the tropical foliage and wondering, whoa. What the hell is going on? And why is it so hot?!

What’s going on is that America is changing the rules. And it can, because the important thing about those rules wasn’t the rules themselves. It was the American hard power that backed them up. American might has been the backbone of literally everything we have taken for granted in the West since the end of the Second World War: our peace and prosperity, certainly, but also the institutions we’ve built. Things like the UN. And the ICC.

If we’d ever really lived in a rules-based order, there would probably be something we could do about this. But we never did. We lived in an American-power-based order. And the Americans want a new deal. They’re going to get it, too. Because they can, and we can’t stop it. And the sooner we and our leaders figure it out, the better off we’ll be.

The Line

Matt Gurney: On the end of (a) world

We made a massive miscalculation about the kind of environment we were living in. And if we don't figure that out, it's going to hurt us. Badly.

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