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Now that Joe Biden is installed in the White House, Marc Garneau, who was handed Champagne’s job in a cabinet shuffle earlier this month, will oversee additions and revisions. Some adjustments will be necessary because the new U.S. administration will seek a healthier rivalry with China, doing away with Donald Trump’s penchant for bellicosity and confrontation.
In 2019, Jake Sullivan, the new U.S. national security adviser, and Kurt Campbell, who will oversee Biden’s Asia policy, wrote an essay for Foreign Affairs magazine that argues the starting point for engaging China should be “humility” about the limits of Washington’s ability to influence decisions in Beijing. Therefore, they said, the goal of U.S. policy should be to “establish favourable terms of coexistence,” thus avoiding the “kind of threat perceptions” that were a feature of the Cold War.
That direction might disappoint some of the more hawkish members of the Canadian foreign-policy elite. A side effect of jailing Kovrig and Spavor is that it has rekindled an us-versus-them impulse among some politicians and former diplomats.
Michael Chong, the Opposition critic of international affairs, advised Trudeau this week to seek admission to the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, which also includes Japan, India and Australia; ban Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. gear from the country’s 5G networks; and quit the Beijing-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which is China’s answer to the World Bank, the international lender that is dominated by Washington and European powers.
