Since the anti-democracy weaponization of political leadership became most egregiously apparent with the Trump presidency, global security has been hacked by a series of largely manmade crises — from a socioeconomically amplified pandemic to an economically disruptive war to the kamikaze preposterousness of Liz Truss’s Brexit-chaser prime ministership — all of which have demanded responses from a rules-based order under systemic, narrative attack. Former longtime diplomat and current Canadian Global Affairs Institute fellow Colin Robertson advises on what the free world should do next.

Colin Robertson

In setting the stage for this year’s annual United Nations General Assembly, Secretary General Antonio Guterres spoke of a world “blighted by war, battered by climate chaos, scarred by hate, and shamed by poverty, hunger, and inequality.” Guterres warned that the “geostrategic divides” between the liberal democracies and autocracies are “the widest they have been since at least the Cold War.”  

Much of the rest of the world, including the most populous nations, many of which aspire to great power-status — India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Brazil, Bangladesh, Mexico — hedge or equivocate in the titanic struggle between autocracy and democracy, committing only when it serves their own interests. 

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is the latest in a series of catalytic events including the COVID pandemic and the pressing urgency for action on climate change. That turmoil is exacerbated by inflation, debt, disruptions of supply chains, and real shortages in food and energy. As Guterres ruefully acknowledges, the key multilateral institutions established after the Second World War to prevent conflict and manage a rules-based system are seemingly inadequate to the tasks. 

After more than a decade of challenges by China and Russia to the rules-based, democracy-led world order — from China’s use of its Belt and Road infrastructure project to debt-trap and corrupt fragile democracies into its autocratic orbit to Russia’s annexation of Crimea — Moscow and Beijing seemed to be functioning on the assumption that the West could be either intimidated by coercion and belligerence or bought with trade and economic leverage. They also exploited and amplified diminishing faith in the power of our values both at home and abroad, as a propaganda asset.

For all its ambitions, the European Union has thus far failed to achieve its own strategic autonomy. The post-modern period in European security, when economic and soft power provided it with political leverage, has hit the wall of aspiring new world order tactical obstruction. European leaders had at least 16 years, starting from the first complete cut-off in Russian gas deliveries to Ukraine in winter 2006, to diversify gas supplies. Instead, they ignored the risks and increased their energy dependence on Russia. 

With the war in Ukraine moving into its eighth month and no prospect of a ceasefire, we need to keep in mind the following: 

First, hard security must be the priority for the liberal democracies. 

Hard power is the language China and Russia understand best and they complement it with cyber-intrusions, misinformation, disinformation, and other interventions in the democratic process. 

The United States remains the ultimate guarantor of security for the liberal democracies. The US provides the bulk of boots on the ground and the necessary armaments to deter and defend the rules-based order. Ukraine is a prime example. By a wide margin, the US is the biggest supplier of arms and money to Ukraine.

Joe Biden is set on restoring American leadership but it is a leadership conditioned on the allies pulling their weight and investing more in their own defence. So, the allies, including Canada, must share the burden of defence. 

It should not be a heavy lift. The aggregate military expenditure of EU members is $225 billion, twice that of Russia’s $100 billion military budget and roughly three-quarters of China’s $290 billion. Europe has the capacity, with a GDP 30 times that of Russia and three times its population. Italy’s (and Canada’s) economy alone eclipses that of Russia. 

But does the EU have the will?

Long-term stability in Europe and Asia will continue to depend on Washington’s ability to build local balances of power and promote regional orders. Despite best efforts during the Trump administration, notably by the French, Germans and others, including Canada, without the US as backstop an Alliance for Multilateralism does not work. 

Multipolarity means that the US will build ad hoc balancing coalitions like the QUAD and AUKUS. With the US main strategic focus “the growing multi-domain threat posed by the PRC”, the Europeans must shoulder more responsibility for their defence while Canada must do more in the Arctic. 

For Canadians and Europeans — especially the Germans — it means relearning the language of hard power. NATO, once derided by French President Emmanuel Macron as “brain dead”, is now the most important organization on the European continent and it will coordinate more closely with Asian partners. Its new Strategic Concept designates Russia as the most “direct threat” to the Alliance and labels China as the “systemic challenge”. Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s August trip to the Canadian North was indicative that NATO will play a role in Arctic security.

New French Ambassador to Canada, Michel Miraillet, was blunt when he recently described Canada’s defence capacity as “riding a first-class carriage with a third-class ticket” but he simply voiced publicly what his fellow NATO ambassadors say privately of Canada. Canada falls behind its NATO allies, spending just 1.36 percent of its GDP on defence, despite the 2014 commitment by all allies to reach 2 percent by 2024.

Testifying recently before the House of Commons Public Safety and National Security Committee, Chief of Defence Staff Wayne Eyre acknowledged that “readiness” in Canada’s armed forces has declined and that “the military that we have today is not the military that we need for the threats that are appearing in the future.” 

Second, Russia and China are actively seeking to increase their global influence with non-aligned and neutral nations. 

China’s Belt and Road initiative already includes 139 nations and China and Russia would like to elevate the Shanghai Cooperation Organization: China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, Iran, Egypt and, eventually, Turkey if Tayyip Erdogan gets his way. The SCO is a rough counterpart for dictators to the G7 democracies that account for 29 percent of global GDP and 11 percent of global population). By contrast, the SCO represents one-third of global GDP, about 40 per cent of the world’s population, and nearly two-thirds of the Eurasian landmass. It includes four nuclear powers. 

Weakened by the Ukraine war, Putin has attempted to compensate for his battlefield losses by threatening the use of tactical nuclear weapons. His response to defeat in battle includes his unpopular mobilization of young Russian men to form new troops, the sabotage of the Nord stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines and the forced and fraudulent referendums leading to annexation of Ukrainian territory. 

The sabotage of these pipelines — yet another example of hybrid warfare the most notable examples of which are Russian cyberattacks — should convince Europeans that they can never again become dependent on Russian energy. At its Madrid summit in June, NATO promised to boost its “resilience to cyber and hybrid threats”. It now needs to develop a doctrine of response.

Third, the anti-autocracy coalition is nothing like as strong as we in the West would like to imagine. 

The implications of a two-decade effort by China to gain influence in multilateral, especially the UN alphabet soup of agencies, are now becoming public. The UN Human Rights Council voted 19-17 (with 11 abstentions) to reject an American-led resolution to investigate a report by the UN Human Rights Commissioner alleging human rights abuses in China’s Xinjiang province.

We draw heart from the UN votes on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: in early March 141 nations condemned the Russian invasion; in April suspending Russian membership in the Human Rights Council; and on October 12 when 143 nations called on Russia to reverse its annexation of the four Ukrainian provinces.  

But when it comes to applying economic sanctions, those nations that have applied them — G7, EU, Norway, Switzerland, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand — represent only 16 percent of the world’s population.  

And when it comes to helping Europe with energy, despite Joe Biden’s fist-bump with Mohammed bin Salman and outreach to Arab nations by Western leaders, the West finds itself without friends inside the OPEC+ group for the first time in recent history following their decision to curtail rather than expand production.

Looking forward, as a first task the West must get its act together on the provision of energy and food. Otherwise, we face internal protest and more migrants from failed and failing states. 

Canada is uniquely positioned to help our European allies. We have energy, food and fertilizer but we need better infrastructure to get it where it’s needed. It will require the kind of ‘Team Canada’ effort we achieved during the Second World War and since.

The Ukraine war underlines the debate on values versus interests. Abandoning or soft-pedaling the values dimension towards Russia and China in favour of the Realpolitik of market access is a mistake. We cannot depend on Russia for energy, nor on China for critical minerals and strategic goods.

The Ukraine conflict also reminds us that leadership, intelligence, arms and allies all matter. But so do morale and the conviction you are fighting for something you believe in. Narratives are important and our messaging needs to hammer home that Russia has violated territorial sovereignty and, indefensibly, broken the rules of war in its treatment of civilians. 

If the autocracies are the external threat, the internal challenge to democracies come from home-bred would-be autocrats, among other sources. There was a hope after the Biden and Macron victories that the nativism and populism leveraged by Brexit, Trump, Modi and Bolsonaro had run its course. It now appears that the force of populism and its underlying drivers that go back to the 2008 financial crisis as well as the inequalities created by globalization and the power of social media are very durable. 

The challenge from within, encouraged and supported by outside forces, is real. It is something our increasingly borderless and well-sourced operational intelligence communities are now addressing. We have seen the value of making their intelligence public to discredit, for example, the Russian false narrative on Ukraine and on Russian interference in democratic elections. Their work should not be limited to documenting anti-democratic behaviour within our nations. They also need increase their deterrent capacities to meet the new challenges of hybrid warfare including hacking, narrative engineering and disruption. 

The defining divide of our time is not that of right versus left but between democracy – and its fundamental open nature – versus autocracies’ essentially closed systems. And the menace within is as serious as the threat from afar.   

Policy Contributing Writer Colin Robertson, a former career diplomat, is Vice President and Fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute in Ottawa.