"Polls show that a striking number of us view our giant neighbour as an irresponsible, even dangerous, superpower..." These are the most accurate words of Marcus Gee's piece.
Marcus Gee here offers little here that warrants introducing him as an authority on world affairs. This is a dollop of thin, cold neo-con porridge.
Just as any financial advisor would advise diversifying your investment portfolio, so a trading nation must sensibly for the long-term future diversify its trading partners.
Gee doesn't even seem to be aware that Canada's close relationship with the U.S. is a comparatively new development, since WWII, not some ancient, sacred institution. And during that very time period, America and Canada have undergone great changes, in the American case, not for the better.
Iraq was indisputably a massive war crime, as is the savagery of Israel in Lebanon and Gaza which the U.S. supports and subsidizes. So are Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and the CIA’s Torture Gulag.
It isn't even an issue of whether the U.S. will decline relatively, which it certainly will do with the growth of a whole new set of powers in the world, it is a question of securing growing markets for our products and of securing markets which are doing new things with new demands for products. Also markets that don’t come entailed with a de facto loyalty oath to aggressive, unbalanced policies.
I must say that anyone who thinks China is going to be less than an economic colossus just has no understanding. China would also love to invest here, as in the tars sands. India, too, is now rapidly growing. The E.U. is an immensely important market, especially in light of its many advanced green programs. Russia is reviving and will be a giant. Even Brazil is a coming economic power.
Ties to the US also squander resources. We are in Afghanistan solely because it was judged “we owe one to the Pentagon.” The cost there is immense and not even accounted for, and it is a delusional project going nowhere.
People like Gee would have had us in the hellhole Iraq too.
A final word of warning: two developing situations are going to make the US quite hostile to our interests in some decades. One is the melting of the North. They will ignore, and already have ignored, our authority. Even worse perhaps, is the frantic pace of suburbanization in America’s Southwest, lawns and pools and three-bathroom houses in a desert as desertification increases. There simply is no water there to support this long-term. Guess where they’ll look?
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Some pretty silly stuff showing up here.
First, no thinking person is talking about "cutting ties" with the U.S.
It is a reduction in our relative exposure to both their nasty policies and economy that is a desired and sensible goal.
Second, again no thinking person is talking about the U.S. disappearing into nothingness. That won't happen.
There are many reasons - I've written a book - why a relative decline, a fairly serious one, in the U.S. position in the world is virtually inevitable.
Canada needs to diversify our risks and markets better.
The neo-con types, of course, think the U.S. is the indispensable nation, but that is sentimental nonsense and reflects the desire of those who like to see U.S. muscle used against the interests of others.
The world keeps changing, and it is now changing at a faster pace than ever. Our policies and trading practices must change with it.
Again, the two most dangerous things to Canada on the horizon are the American Southwest's profligate thirst for water and the American government's determination to use our northern waters as they wish, this last they have made clear many times, even their official maps reflect it.
We need other allies and other markets.
A post-WWII image of our relationships is just uninformed and dangerous.
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Cultural overspill or not, Canada has the resources and authorities to look to its own interests.
We don't want to become a closed society - this is actually one of the unpleasant trends underway in the U.S. where security walls, attacks on human rights, and hostility to foreigners are all on the rise.
We want to be open, but open to all the world.
At the drop of a hat, the U.S. can turn around and make new demands, just as they did with softwood, pork, cattle, and dozens of things.
A growing industrial economy like China is the perfect place to diversify our markets for natural resources.
When the U.S. is almost your only customer, you have a huge problem as new arbitrary demands are made. The U.S. behaves exactly as Wal-Mart does to its suppliers when it is capable of putting them out of business if they don't lower their prices still more.
As the world becomes more complex and diversified, the American ability to behave as the world's muscle-bound bully will diminish. Maybe it will one day become a decent, civilized place.
Regardless of America's destiny, ours does not have to be so closely tied to it.
