By his supreme idiocy, U.S. President Donald Trump has stirred up anti-American sentiment, but largely to the benefit of America’s archrival, China. Although Prime Minister Mark Carney is European in his manners and predilections, he is a charter member of the cadre of useful idiots who seem intent on imposing Chinese vassalage on Canada.
The Euro-centric economist has proposed that Canada strengthen ties with the European Union, but Europe is, for now, a spent force. Canada is more delectable for China. It has many of the raw materials that Beijing craves, with rising oil imports at the fore. Canada also has a large Chinese diaspora community, roughly 1.7-million people of Chinese descent, that Beijing seeks, with some success, to manipulate to its ends.
One would expect some Canadians to resist these trends but Carney epitomizes an establishment, including American corporations and Wall Street, that remain remarkably untroubled with Beijing’s stated aim of becoming a global economic superpower by 2049. So, while assaulting Trump for his trade policy, Canadian political leaders seem to be missing that the West’s greatest long-term challenge is the relentless Sinic mercantilism.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s attempt to appease China in order to “Trump-proof” and revive the country’s moribund economy seems more like the road to ever great irrelevancy, as is the case for much of Europe. China is trying to build a mega-embassy in London that will help it surveil and harass those who fled Communist rule for the assumed safety of Great Britain.
Trump may be a posturing maniac, but the China challenge is of a more considerable magnitude. China already dominates the industrial world; it now boasts roughly as many factory exports as the U.S., Japan and Germany combined. It is the world’s the world’s largest automobile market and the biggest steel producer. It is also investing heavily to take over the aerospace industry from leading companies like Bombardier, Boeing and Airbus.
Carney and other members of the elite cannot address these threats as long as they adhere to notions like “net zero,” an obsession of Carney and his fellow poobahs. For all his talk about building energy infrastructure, Carney’s green obsessions could instead lead Canada into a dependent relationship with solar and electric vehicle manufacturers based in China, a country that emits more greenhouse gasses than the U.S. and the EU combined.
Read the rest of this piece at: National Post.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
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