The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: China Snub – Inflation Immiseration

Episode Date: November 18, 2022

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates.  The following is a sample of the Munk Debates’ weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus.   On this week’s edition of the Friday Focus podcast, Janice and Rudyard take on four stories that got them thinking this week. First up, a Ukraine anti-aircraft rocket crashes in Poland, killing two. How do we manage the risk of the conflict escalating as the fog of war deepens? Next, Xi snubs Trudeau on camera. Business as usual for summitry or something more ominous? The donors-only second half of the program tackles the topic of whether the U.S. is another side of peak populism with positive mid-term results for Biden. Will this trend hold out until 2024? And finally, Janice and Rudyard discuss more education strikes in Ontario. How much is inflation to blame for labour unrest in Canada? This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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full-length edition of this program. Thanks in advance for your generous contribution. Hello, Monk listeners. Welcome to this Friday Focus, our usual weekly podcast where we dig into the big issues and ideas making the news with Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs, internationally renowned scholar and author who joins us this week, the 18th of November, from the Halifax Security Forum. Janice, what is the forum and what are you doing there? The Halifax Security Forum is the forum for democracies to come together and talk about

international security, but the headliners are a very strong delegation from Ukraine, as you would suspect. The president will be coming in on video as well, his wife. The deputy prime minister is here. And it is all about explaining to the other democracies why it is so important to stay the course. We have the Secretary of Defense for the first time of the United States.

Austin coming in person to make a keynote speech and then representatives literally from democracies around the world, India, Taiwan, Brazil, Mexico, as people try to figure out what the next steps are in a world that is changing at the speed of light. So and a lot of time for personal interviews and conversation, which is the purpose. Great. Well, next week's show, we're going to get you to dish on some of the behind the scenes. I will. I will. I want to start on the theme of Ukraine because this week we had, I don't know what you'd characterize as Jen as a brush, a close call, a missile that landed in Poland, tragically killing two people. a worry, a moment there, I thought that that might have been a Russian missile. Was it intentional or not?

It turned out, no, it was a Ukrainian air defense missile. Therefore, NATO's Article 5, the collective defense pact, was not going to be initiated. Instead, we opted for something called Article 4. What is that, Janice? And what do you think of just how we dealt with this brush of escalation, something we worry, we've been concerned about on this podcast for the last six months. You and I have worried about precisely this kind of incident, almost from day one here, Rudyard, and I maintain rightly so.

And this anti-aircraft missile, the Ukrainian missile that was fired to take down a Russian missile, went astray, that happens all the time. The issue was, of course, that the Russian airstrikes were against Western Ukraine very close to the Polish border. So you set up this kind of situation. This is an accident waiting to happen. And frankly, boy, were you in and I right to worry because you saw what happened in a nanosecond as soon as the news broke. President Biden, who is in Asia, disengages from what he's doing, calls an emergency meeting of the G. leaders. His national security team has put on alert and in Brussels, the heads of delegations

convened. Because had this been, there were three possibilities here, the errant Ukrainian missile, which I always thought was a real possibility. The second was an errant Russian missile, which would have been an accident. It would not have been intentional. And the third one, which I thought was least likely a deliberate strike, which would have put us in unknown territory, frankly. So look how close we are, frankly, to the line. Big story here, President Biden, who said, go with the evidence, go with the evidence. And contradicted Prime Minister Zelensky and told him, and that's not easy to do, told him directly, no, that's not where the evidence is. The evidence is this was a Ukrainian-fired missile. So, Janice, maybe it's fair to say that in this case, something worked.

You know, we didn't overreact because as we've talked about often in history, it is the mistakes, the unintended consequences, the errors of omission or commission, which then become the triggers for these larger wars. When you look back on it, you think of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Why should that plunge all of Europe into a, horrific, you know, five-year, half-decade, continental war that, you know, destroyed one empire and, you know, eviscerated Germany, Japan, sorry, not Japan, but Germany, France, England. It didn't happen this time. I guess should we be optimistic, more optimistic than

about the future and the maybe less risk of escalation because people seem to have their proverbial, you know what, together? You know, I think a lot depends on leadership. You want to talk about this all the time, Roger. President Biden is a methodical, slow, careful, deliberate leader. It's not flashy. It doesn't get the headlines. But is that the right person to have in place under these kinds of circumstances? He was relentlessly focused.

We need to understand where this came from. You know the irony, Roger. a Ukrainian missile could have Russian markings. Just think about that one, right? Because Ukraine has been gifted by many former Soviet Union countries with Russian-made equipment. So it took some time to figure this one out. For me, the bigger lesson is you do not want a situation where you're this close. to misinterpretation. The good news here is the president and his team who are professional.

And then Article 4, which you talked about, Article 4 is let's have an urgent meeting to discuss. Let's not have an urgent meeting to act. Let's have an urgent meeting to discuss. And it should always proceed any kind of action. Again, good process here. So you're right that that's encouraging. But this is, we have built a situation. And look, let's be blunt here. The Russians bear a huge share of responsibility. They are firing missiles close to the border of Poland. So I think they bear the lion share. You cannot fault Ukraine for defending itself against Russian military attacks, which are wiping out the electricity grid in Ukraine and shutting down water. So this is not the end of the story.

I don't think it's the last innocent. We'll see like this, Roger. Yeah, 50% of supposedly the Ukrainian power grid now down over the last two weeks. It's just inconscionable warfare against civilian targets and trying to encourage, you know, create mass suffering going into the winter. Janice, I want to try to on this show bounce around. because it's such a busy week that just happened. So let's go from Ukraine to the summit in Asia.

You mentioned Biden was there. There was also an exchange that many of our listeners, I'm sure, have seen recorded on video cameras by Canadian media of Prime Minister Trudeau. I mean, the only way you can put it charitably is being snubbed by Chairman Xi, seemingly angry Chinese leader, accusing our Prime Minister of leadership. leaking confidential information regarding a bilateral one-on-one conversation that they had. Janice, you've been to so many of these meetings. Well, what do we make of this?

Was Xi real in his anger and his umbrage? Was this theater that Xi was orchestrating? Was it theater, and I have a theory, was it theater that the prime minister possibly had been orchestrated? So let me get a little technical here for just a minute to walk our listeners through what the diplomatic niceties are. At the end of the summit, there is what's called an open media room at the end of the summit where the leaders kind of mingle, but they know the press is in the room, right? It's an open media room. And there's a pool reporter in there.

So any experienced diplomat who's a leader who's in that room is watching what they do and say because they know some pool photographer is going to shoot the moment. So if once we get that when Gigi Ping walks over to Trudeau and be ratum, that's frankly what it was. And berates them again for technical nicety here. They had a bilateral impromptu at Trudeau's initiative, frankly. And there was not a formal agreement about what they were going to disclose and what they were not, which is usually, or that they are going to disclose, which is usually what happened. So Shishi Ping was well aware of the fact that he was being filmed, I can tell you. Does that make it theater? He was sending a message.

Frankly, he is annoyed at Canada and at Canada's prime minister. There's no question about it. I don't really see what you're going. So why is that? Why is Xi annoyed at Canada? You know, the prime minister was criticized the week before for not denouncing the persecution of the Uyghurs in China as a genocide. Many people piled on on his answer to that direct question where he refused to use that

word. So this prime minister has done many things to try to not cross red lines that the Chinese have in terms of how other countries talk about them. Those are red lines that other leaders seem to have been very comfortable crossing over. Joe Biden seems comfortable crossing over those red lines. Boris Johnson did, you know, you can go through a long list. Our prime minister doesn't, yet G is still angry with him. I'm having a hard time understanding this.

Yeah, look, nobody ever said life was fair, first of all, Richard. but let's just look at the last two weeks in which one, our foreign minister, delivered a speech at the monk school, in which she called China a disruptive power. There was quite a strong reaction that came back from China's ambassador to Canada. I can assure you, Xi knows about that speech. There was a lot of press coverage about how Canada's policy towards China has fond. finally, long overdue shift. It is toughened up and it's more muscular.

Add to that something that you're well aware of. Canada told three Chinese companies. Sorry, folks. You may have invested in critical minerals, but we're sorry. That's not going to be allowed to go forward. Take your investment and go back. Followed just a few days later by a DPA from the United States, from the Pentagon saying that they would partner with Canadian companies in developing critical

minerals. It's not hard to trace the through story there. Trudeau goes to that summit on the heels of these two announcements. So it's not surprising. Frankly, the Xi Jinping was testy, and we don't want to overblow it. But it got tremendous coverage in the Canadian media. And there's a certain pathology among Canadian media and the public. Let me put it this way.

On the one hand, pressure, pressure for the last several years, toughen up against China. Get tougher. You know, you're soft on China. This government toughen up. Well, you're toughen up. And the president of China doesn't like it. And then what are the stories? They don't like us.

Canadians have to decide whether, in fact, They have to understand that when you toughen up. I don't know if it was that they don't like us. I think it's more that Canadians, I'm just saying it as it is. I think Canadians have a trust issue when it comes to this prime minister in China, that he has been so, in a sense, all over the place. And up into this point, so reluctant to be critical of China. I think in the way that many of his other peer leaders are League of Democracies that Mr.

Biden would like. seem much more comfortable leading into China. This is a prime minister that has consistently struggled with his narrative around China. He doesn't know whether to be hot or cold. And generally, he shies away from being declarative on China. And I don't know if that's the influence of Dominic Barton and other people that have been around him for a long time who are very pro-China. If it's the fact, Janice, that we got to acknowledge that there's a powerful business elite in this country that make a lot of money in China. and are effective lobbyists in part within the Liberal Party of Canada.

And again, I don't want to be overly cynical here, but I think prime ministers often do think about their careers after politics. Board seats are exceedingly lucrative in this country, a quarter of a million dollars or more to sit on a board. And I think certain people in Canada are careful about what they say about China because they know if they're too declarative, too critical, certain options in the future are closed to them. Those lucrative sinecures on Bay Street and within Quebec, Inc, are no longer on the table

if you are a declared China critic. So I don't know. I think there's some other calculations that have bedeviled this Prime Minister for a long, long time when it comes to China and his attitudes about Beijing and how Canada could and should, I think, be more forceful that it's criticism and its condemnation of Beijing. I actually don't think that's right. I really do not think that's right. So let's just do a quick tour. But see, Janice, I backed you into a corner because we're up against the break. So I want you to give a very short rebuttal. We can take up this debate on another day. But we've got to

move on to our other topics. Who understands that China is a major global power and every country in the world has to live with it. He came to office and part of what he wanted to do was explore, could he improve relationships. He got slammed, frankly, by China and what happened with the two Michaels, that option gradually fell off the table and he has tough policy towards China. He really has. In fact, if you compare Canada to today to the United States and Australia who were embraced by Xi Jinping at the summit, he's tougher than the other two. So I think you're wrong. He doesn't call it a genocide. Biden, the administration has Boris Johnson. He's got a testy relationship with China, then the new prime minister of Australia,

Albanese, and Biden, who walked across that stage and put his arms around Xi Jinping and hugged him. Okay? So let's be fair. Well, let's continue that debate. Something's fishy here. I don't know what it is, but follow the money. I always think there's answers. There's no money to follow. in that direction. Let's take a break. We're back on the other side. We're going to try to squeeze in two more issues. This is for our monk donors. So if you're not a donor to the monk debates, we're going to say goodbye to you here. But if you would like for as little as $25 a year, that is 50 cents a Friday focus episode. You get the full length editions of each and every show along with a charitable tax receipt if you're a Canadian resident. So we hope you'll consider supporting our efforts to encourage civil and substantive debate and discussion by becoming a donor. Back to you right after this break.

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