We have updated our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for Eurasia Group and its affiliates, including GZERO Media, to clarify the types of data we collect, how we collect it, how we use data and with whom we share data. By using our website you consent to our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy, including the transfer of your personal data to the United States from your country of residence, and our use of cookies described in our Cookie Policy.
{{ subpage.title }}
David Johnston, Canada's special rapporteur on foreign interference, holds a press conference about his findings and recommendations in Ottawa, Ontario.
Bonfire of the Sanities: How does China win?
How Beijing wins is a question engulfing US and Canadian politics, with hysteria over spy balloons, election meddling, and Taiwan slouching toward a low-rent neo-McCarthyism. And it’s a fair question. China is spying on everyone (even their friend-with-oil-benefits Russia is busting them for some hypersonic snooping), stealing IP, beefing up their military, and, in the case of Canada, actively undermining democracy.
The wolf warriors are snarling, but these geopolitical noises are nothing new. The question is what to do about it.
In Canada, it’s becoming shambolic. PM Justin Trudeau has managed to turn the political trick of making a problem about someone else – in this case China – into an issue about himself. Self-inflicted wounds are one of Trudeau’s unique skills, but that shouldn’t stop a fair and frank assessment of the problem.
Should Canada’s intelligence agency have warned politicians earlier that they were being targeted by Chinese attacks? Yes. Should Trudeau have acted more transparently and quickly on this? Of course. Was it a mistake to appoint David Johnston to investigate everything? Sadly, yes. While Johnston has a lifetime of impeccable nonpartisan service (he was appointed as the governor general by Conservative PM Stephen Harper, for goodness sake), in the current climate where politics has been essentially criminalized as a calling, Johnston – a lawyer, intellectual, university dean – has been luridly dismissed by opposition leader Pierre Poilievre as a party lackey of the PM brought in to slap a coat of whitewash on China.
Johnston is baffled by the absurd and baseless allegations, but if his old-world naïveté resembles a man with a musket facing an army of modern culture warriors armed with rhetorical AR-15s, it’s as much Trudeau’s fault as his. In 2023, trust does not just have to be established – it has to be perceived to be established.
Trudeau, a political creator by birth, knows this all too well. Johnston’s anodyne, civic-minded associations with Trudeau and the Trudeau Foundation may have a genuine perception problem, but they don’t have a substantial ethical one. The fact that it’s impossible to distinguish between the two is one of the distinguishing characteristics of our free-for-all age. Johnston’s work so far may be perceived to be biased, but intel sources I’ve spoken with do say it’s accurate. That matters.
There is much to criticize about how the Canadian government handled the Chinese election futzing, but here’s the thing: It didn’t work. The last Canadian election, like the American one, was fair and free, and the results stand on their merit, despite all partisan squawking to the contrary. There is no substantial evidence to say otherwise.
Even the threat isn’t new, which may explain why the government looked so embarrassed when the first allegations were revealed. Didn’t we know all this already from the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians' sober and thorough report tabled in March 2020? It disappeared from public view because it was literally published the week the global pandemic was declared.
But the work of this nonpartisan group openly revealed that China was attacking Canada and gave many details on how China attacked the West. Quoting the Australian expert John Garnaut, it said: “In classical Chinese statecraft there are two tools for gaining and maintaining control over 'the mountains and the rivers': The first is wu (weapons, violence) and the second is wen (language, culture).” The report goes on: “The PRC utilizes its growing economic wealth to mobilize interference operations: "with deep coffers and the help of Western enablers, the Chinese Communist Party uses money, rather than Communist ideology, as a powerful source of influence, creating parasitic relationships of long-term dependence.”
So it was all there three years ago, with prudent redactions for society's purposes.
The fact that this is barely mentioned says everything about how politics has overtaken the principles of governing, and how the need for some secrecy around national security has been used as a negative proof point of some hidden conspiracy
So, we have known about China for years, and their efforts are not working. All good? Nope.
The Chinese are still winning because the real game is not just to disrupt elections – though they will still try. It’s to try to weaken the West internally. And are they ever getting a return on their investment ...
In Canada, the debate around China has evolved into allegations that the entire democratic system and those running it – like Johnston – are all corrupt. Don’t trust anyone. They are all out to get you!
In the US, it’s worse. Marco Rubio was on Fox this week reverting back to the Trumpian mean – declaring that Biden is mentally incompetent, America is a weak, desiccated country, and that its politics and the military are poisoned on all levels by woke culture. Ron DeSantis has based his entire Twitter-delayed presidential campaign on this same stuff. The West is broken, etc …
China is gleeful. The culture war cat is amongst the Western democracy pigeons, ripping out the feathers. China wins when debate turns into demagoguery, and democracies forget about reason, facts, and that rarely mentioned quality that lies at the heart of free societies: empathy.
When Tom Wolfe wrote “Bonfire of the Vanities” in 1987, he was torching the culture of greed and narcissism that was, at the time, both supercharging and corroding America – and to a lesser extent – Canada. Those twin traits have hardly diminished in the 36 years since. Still, they now seem like almost quaint, Calvary soldiers in the new, AI-boosted culture assaults raging over the phantom menace called “woke culture” — that gaseously defined, almost Delillo-esque “White Noise” threat that is proving to be a most convenient foil for the aria of multi-partisan, paranoid complaint that passes today for politics.
But that’s a bread and circus sideshow. The real risks facing folks today – AI, China, Russia, climate change, and nuclear proliferation, to name a few – need more genuine, reasoned debate. Too bad reasoned debate is becoming a campaign relic. If Wolfe were writing today, his book might be called “The Bonfire of the Sanities.” In fact, that’s likely the entire Chinese strategy: Burn down reason and turn a paranoid, angry West on itself. When that bonfire burns, China wins.
Fiona Hill doesn’t regret her role in the Trump White House
Fiona Hill doesn't regret joining the Trump administration, despite her acrimonious exit from the government as a result of the former US president's first impeachment trial.
“I don't have any problem whatsoever with what I did, and the decision that I made in going into the White House or the administration and National Security Council back in 2017,” Hill told Ian Bremmer.
The former senior director of the National Security Council famously testified against her impeached boss, who stayed in power after being acquitted by the Senate of abuse of power and obstructing Congress.
“I never expected to be in that position," she said, "but I think it's very important for people to stand up there, be counted, and speak out.”
Watch her full interview on this episode of GZERO World: American strife: Will US democracy survive? Fiona Hill explains post-Jan 6 stakes
Trump's chances of proving election interference are over
Jon Lieber, who leads Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, offers insights on US politics:
Is Trump out of options now that William Barr said the DOJ found no election interference?
Trump's problem isn't William Barr not finding election interference, it's that he lost the election and he lost it by millions of votes, and he lost it in the most important key states by tens of thousands of votes. Now, this was a very close election. The three closest states, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona, Trump only lost by 44,000 votes so far, and if he'd ended up winning those three, we'd have an Electoral College tie. But the election was not close enough that Trump's strategy of trying to kick this to the courts and then getting it to go all the way to the Congress, with an alternate slate of electors, it just wasn't possible. Had the election been a little closer, he might've had a shot. But as it is, his chances are over. Joe Biden's going to be inaugurated on January 20th.
Will Biden's new economic team be able to make progress on a COVID stimulus plan?
This is really out of the hands of Biden's economic team, and it's all about what Congress wants to do. We've seen a lot of progress this week, starting with a bipartisan proposal that came out of the Senate, that a bunch of House members quickly signed up for that forced Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer to come down from their $2 trillion number much closer to the compromised $900 billion number. Now the ball is in President Trump's court. If he wants to get a deal, he can send signals to Senate Republicans that he wants to move closer to that $900 billion number. And if no deal gets done, they always have the fallback position of simply extending some of the expiring provisions of the Cares Act into January or February of next year so they can come back and fight another day.
Reports that Trump discussed pardons with his three eldest children begs for an important question, what about Tiffany?
Well, poor Tiffany has always been the forgotten daughter, but I think the reality is these reports are pretty ridiculous. There's no clear crimes that any of the children have been accused of, and where this came from was a conspiracy theory by Sean Hannity that the Biden administration would retaliate against President Trump once he was out of office by going after his adult children. Unfortunately, in order to pardon them in advance, which the President could certainly do, he would need to be pardoning them of an accusation of a specific crime, and in the absence of that, there is no pardon that's available. What probably is going to happen though between now and the end of Donald Trump's term is that the President's going to use his very broad power to commute sentences and part of people to forgive high profile accused criminals, people in his political orbit, and people that are being pushed to him by lawyers like Alan Dershowitz, who's representing a known accused criminal, trying to get a pardon. The President could also commute or pardon people who are in jail for low-level drug offenses, which is something that he did over the summer and he used it to his political benefit. Watch for this to happen if the President truly wants to run again in 2024. He may think there's a new base of voters of convicted felons who are free who love Donald Trump now.
US-Russia: An all-or-nothing approach leaves US with nothing
And today, we're taking our Red Pen to an open letter titled "No, Now Is Not the Time for Another Russia Reset." It was published in Politico and signed by 33 foreign policy experts, including diplomats Bill Taylor and Kurt Volker, who both testified at the impeachment hearings, as well as a bunch of military intelligence and diplomatic figures. And as it turned out, actually, we were Red Penned here, because it's a response to this piece, also in Politico recently, that I cosigned with a different group of Russia experts, including Fiona Hill and Jon Huntsman.
Both letters talk about the road ahead for US relations with Russia. The one I signed argued that the US needs to know when there will be opportunities to work with Russia and when Washington has to push back. The central argument in this article is that there's no point in talking to Russia until Putin changes his mind. So, what we have here is an open debate about the issue. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty we agree on and plenty of places where no red ink is required.
We agree that Russia bears plenty of responsibility for the current state of affairs. It occupies territory that belongs to Georgia and Ukraine, two sovereign states. And it interfered in the 2016 US election and continues to do so as we speak. Moscow has also killed dissidents in Europe, assassinated them. So, I mean, you know, no one is trying to justify any of that belligerent behavior. And we also agree that while the United States can fine tune its policy all we want, it actually takes two to tango. Recent talks with the Russians have not been too successful, but since the red pen is here, it is time to highlight some areas of disagreement. So, here they are.
Point one, the authors argue that there's no point in talking to Russia about much of anything until Putin changes his act. They write that "by arguing that it is the United States and not Russia that needs a 'current change of course' the authors of the open letter (that's us) get it exactly backward."
If the US takes an all or nothing approach with Russia, it will end up with nothing. Look, I mean, I certainly expect and understand that we should have a more hawkish line on a bunch of things with the Chinese as well, but that doesn't mean you can't work with these countries on climate change, on space, on a bunch of areas where it's actually really important. These are still large economies. In the case of the Russians, the largest nuclear arsenal in the world along with the United States, and I would argue that leaving the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Agreement was a mistake, leaving the Blue Skies Agreement, the Open Skies Agreement was a mistake. That you have to work even with your antagonists, and that's important. That means that we should be pursuing diplomacy and cooperation where we can while also vigorously defending our own interests where we can't. This strikes me as a fairly obvious baseline understanding of international diplomacy, and I'm always surprised when people push back against it.
Point two, the authors write that the US should "maintain, even enhance sanctions" on Russia unless a long list of demands are met, like withdrawing troops from Ukraine, including Crimea, and ending cyberattacks and election interference.
Nobody is saying we should give in to Russia on any of those issues. The bottom line is that the above list of demands is already US policy. How more sanctions would change Russian behavior? Doesn't make a lot of sense. You need your allies on board for sanctions to work. And sanctions work best when they're calibrated and targeted. When they have clear benchmarks that when met, lead to easing of those sanctions. And when they're paired with diplomacy. Russia's a big nuclear armed country, unlike, say, South Africa. Russia's not going to simply be sanctioned into surrender. Maintain the sanctions but expanding them at this point strikes me as having very little likelihood of return and only marginal increase of sanctions that we could do.
Point three, the authors say that the US should not resign itself to accepting "Russia's repression, kleptocracy and aggression" as that provides no incentive for Putin to change.
Now, we agree. The US cannot accept Russian misbehavior, but we need to be realistic about what we can actually change, like stopping Russian election meddling, and what we can't, like Russia's kleptocracy. We can and should do our part to stop dirty money from coming into the US and Europe but changing Russia's domestic system is another story.
So, in conclusion, the Russians are an antagonist of the United States. Their revisionist power, they're in decline. They are trying to undermine the Americans, the Europeans, and the transatlantic relationship. All true. But I actually think that there are areas where we still need to be working with lots of states that we really don't like and don't trust, and yes, Russia is one of them. By the way, New START, the nuclear arms reduction treaty signed in 2010 by the US and Russia expires in February 2021. Open dialog right now could save it and I think it's worth saving. Let's work on that.