Canada is embroiled in a hybrid war with China and Russia, a conflict that is underway everywhere, all the time, according to columnist Terry Glavin. Writing in the National Post, Glavin warns that Prime Minister Mark Carney's recent strategic partnership with Beijing is a poisoned chalice that threatens Canada's security and economic sovereignty.
A New Kind of Warfare
The hybrid war, waged by Beijing and Moscow, confounds Western intelligence agencies and transcends borders. Unlike conventional warfare, it involves mobilizations, sophisticated operations, and devastating weaponry that lays waste to entire industries. The war relies on command structures that establish tactical objectives in pursuit of strategic dominance through espionage, sabotage, intellectual property theft, and the targeted flooding of Western markets with heavily subsidized exports.
Glavin notes that the phenomenon defies description without resorting to a lexicon barely intelligible within conventional analyses of international conflict: spearphishing, troll farms, botnets, cyber kill chains, Spamouflage, Dragonbridge, Salt Typhoon, and Raptor Train.
Reality-Distorting AI and Trench Warfare
Wholly new reality-distorting artificial intelligence manipulations are carried out at a global scale in tandem with primitive trench warfare in Ukraine, unknown since the First World War. At the same time, satellite-guided drone technology is rendering conventional arsenals of tanks, bombers, and fighter jets obsolete.
Compromised global supply chains, high-finance interdependency, and digital interconnectivity have obscured distinctions between the interests of the UN police-state bloc and NATO capitals, and between the public interest and the interests of trade-reliant global corporations and the compliant politicians they champion.
The Role of the Trump Administration
While the Five Eyes intelligence agencies do their best to keep up, the rapid acceleration of the Beijing-Moscow assault on NATO countries has been midwifed by the Trump administration's abdication of the United States' traditional role as the democratic world's primary defensive backstop. NATO disunity and a leadership vacuum in Europe have only deepened the West's incoherence.
Chinese State Subsidies and Market Dominance
An analysis by the 38-member Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published earlier this month found that nearly 60 percent of global market gains made by Chinese corporations since 2005 are attributable to state subsidies. Some European manufacturers appear willing to fight back—the European Union has proposed a 'Made in the EU' Industrial Accelerator Act. Others, like Mercedes-Benz, now partly owned by Chinese carmakers, lean toward the accommodationist approach adopted by Mark Carney's Liberal government in Ottawa.
Carney's Strategic Partnership with Beijing
Prime Minister Carney has invested much of the Liberals' political capital in the 'strategic partnership' he entered into with Beijing in January. The Ottawa-Beijing partnership consists of a series of agreements and promises, beginning with Ottawa's guarantee to allow the import of low-tariff Chinese electric vehicles into Canada, starting with a quota of 49,000 EVs a year. The deal is opposed by the three largest U.S. automakers in Canada on the grounds that the annual quota represents nearly a third of EV sales in Canada last year and the deal 'puts the North American auto supply chain at risk.' Japanese automakers in Canada have expressed similar concerns.
Glavin concludes that Carney should not drink from Beijing's poisoned chalice, as it undermines Canada's security and economic interests in the face of an ongoing hybrid war.
