Like so many elements of power projection, diplomacy has spent the past two decades adjusting to a context of unprecedented disruption, normalized propaganda and covert and overt threats to the rules-based international order that depends on it. Policy international affairs writer and former Canadian ambassador to Russia, the European Union and the United Kingdom Jeremy Kinsman examines the state of Canada’s diplomacy game at the most critical juncture in international affairs since the Second World War.

Jeremy Kinsman

There was a time when an ambassador could be described as “an honest gentleman sent abroad to lie for the good of his country,” as British author, politician and diplomat Sir Henry Wotton said in 1604. Diplomats were emissaries for states competing for supremacy, often agents of deception, sent to conduct secret talks in foreign courts in a non-democratic world.

Today’s diplomats are open, alive to the truth that it is the people who make history, more than potentates (are you listening, Vladimir Putin?). Canada needs its professionals with eyes and ears to the ground around the world, and leaders who have influence.

A half-century ago, an adult board game called Diplomacy was, briefly, a passion among younger foreign service officers in Ottawa. It drew from the delineations — geographical and political — of 19th century Europe, when might made right. Gamers played the roles of the seven European Great Powers just before the First World War, instructing armies and navies to invade their neighbours, or ally with others for safety. Over several hours, to the despair of orphaned partners and spouses, players cut deals (best in a house with several rooms), and then betrayed them. The effects reverberated the next day at the office. Before long, pushback at home and in diplomatic workplaces at home and abroad ended the fun.

In our real world, Russia’s throwback invasion of Ukraine has jolted humanity back to the pre-1914 world of would-be empires of coercive force that caused the carnage of the “war to end all wars.” After the postwar League of Nations failed to put an end to aggression, and Hitler’s next world war cost 126 million lives, the UN was created in 1945 to ensure “never again” and make territorial invasion obsolete.

Rules-based multilateral diplomacy became a Canadian specialty. Our diplomats became designers, fixers, and frequent chairs of innumerable committees. The tone was set at the top by internationalist prime ministers, and activist foreign ministers like Joe Clark and Lloyd Axworthy.

Their eclectic personal contacts created networks of global influencers (before the word became a hashtag) that truly covered the world, beyond vital NATO, OECD, and North American partnerships. These contacts enormously validated the access and influence of our diplomats overall. Canadians had global diplomatic reach abroad because we engaged widely from the top and locally on the ground.

Canadian diplomacy was best exemplified by Pearson’s brokerage of the 1956 Suez crisis that inaugurated UN peacekeeping. Some foreign policy imperatives became national questions d’etat, pursued in secret; managing the long aftermath of Charles De Gaulle’s call for a “Québec libre!”, recognizing Communist China, or freeing British diplomat James Cross with Fidel Castro’s help. However, more and more, domestic and political pressures squeezed the bandwidth for foreign affairs in prime ministerial attention. Now, leaders are tempted to hype moves on the international stage for media at home. Outward relationships become secondary to the domestic audience that is the dominant consideration, especially for a minority government. Canadian media, cash-strapped for representation abroad, have become overwhelmingly parochial.

A default communications position is to enfold Canadian foreign policy into chorus support for our allies. During the Cold War, Canada’s policies prioritized our alliances but their wider globalist perspective and context were additional diplomatic strengths. “Who is my neighbour?” Pierre Trudeau asked in Parliament in 1981, answering that our “neighbours” were everywhere.

The Economist urges us, in The World Ahead 2023, to face the “reality” that in our changing, troubled, and fractured world, “unpredictability is the new normal.” But it’s not new. History, like life, is full of surprises. Pierre Trudeau’s foreign policy briefing for ministers in November 1980, urged us to “expect the unexpected.” Surprises may seem somewhat crazier today, but Pol Pot and his killing fields, Lockerbie and Chernobyl remind us that events, to put it politely, have always happened.  However, we seem less well-equipped now to lift our game to meet the opportunity to operate within the wider dispersal of influence among middle powers. For example, Canadian aid workers cannot address the dangerous and growing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan because 2001 legislation labelled the Taliban a terrorist group. Other Western countries amended similar national laws enacted after 9/11 to permit humanitarian remittances in today’s changed circumstances. But Canadian bureaucratic paralysis stymies adaptation.

Canada needs agility to advance diplomatic initiatives abroad. We should valorize initiatives by professional diplomats on the ground to interpret and connect to countries that increasingly assert unique identities. Our version of “soft power” needs diplomats to be able to operate semi-autonomously in the agitated global marketplace. The excessive executive power at the government’s core needs to resist its centralizing instincts, illustrated by the Harper PMO wanting all public speeches by ambassadors to be vetted. Ottawa’s bureaucratic “centre,” has long resented foreign service separateness, colonizing Global Affairs with appointments from domestic government departments. It partly explains why we now evacuate needed diplomatic personnel from posts that become risky, as in Kabul and Kyiv. Foreign Service tradition kept diplomatic shoes on the ground even when bombs start dropping.

Today’s diplomacy is public as well as private. It relies even more on field professionals to navigate the super-charged digital communications culture of rampant social media, disinformation and propaganda. The initial wave of “one-world” democratization unleashed by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 legitimized embassies reaching out directly to citizens. It made diplomatic accreditation a virtual duality. The basic confidential relationship with the host state was paralleled by a public one with NGOs and civil society, though re-emerging authoritarian governments began painting NGOs as internal adversaries more than a decade ago to neutralize them as democracy and human rights-advocating threats to power.

Our diplomats pitch Canada’s merits and interests. The Trade Commissioner Service’s invaluable partnership with Canadian business pre-dated our entry into government-to-government diplomacy. Diplomats pursue markets, technology, finance, and defence pacts. They vaunt Canada’s internationalist, pluralist brand, connect our civil society and centres of excellence and showcase Canadian performers and artists, though the Harper government cut “all that cultural stuff,” as the late Jim Flaherty once put it to me. A dumb move, as was cutting support for universities abroad offering Canadian studies (which the Trudeau government has, oddly, still not restored). Above all, public diplomacy relies on reputational credibility. We need to stay current in our claim that we can lead, not just follow.

Our military focus has shifted from peacekeeping to supporting our allies in the unfortunate wars of the 21st century, especially Afghanistan. We still organize peacekeeping conferences, but curtail actual commitments, as in Mali.

Credible leadership is earned mostly at the top. Chrystia Freeland as foreign minister convened in Vancouver an international ministerial conference in 2018 on North Korea, where we didn’t even have an embassy, primarily to help politically endangered US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Trump dumped Tillerson a few weeks later, went his own way with “Rocket-Man” Kim Jong-un (which led nowhere), and the Vancouver conference was instantly forgotten by everyone.

Justin Trudeau’s international image is an asset to Canadian diplomacy. Foreign leaders welcome meeting their pleasant and reasonable colleague, who is by instinct and interest more substantive than Canadians know. It has not been revealed that when the secessionist crisis of Tigray recently threatened not just famine but outright war in Ethiopia, Trudeau spent a very helpful hour talking over the options with the Ethiopian PM, encouraging him in private to align with non-forceful approaches. But sometimes, the PMO’s compulsion to go public, prompted by the need to defend against “gotcha” critics, gets diplomacy wrong.

The PMO naturally welcomes the accompaniment of byline media on big diplomatic trips (they need to pay their way). But the travelling pool then has to be fed news. It comes less easily given that Trudeau is not a major player, though on today’s overriding issue of ensuring the survival of Ukraine’s democracy and the defence of the all-important post-Second World War norm against aggression, Canada has been front and centre.

Putin didn’t go to Bali for the G20 Summit for obvious reasons, but sent his Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Canada’s activism-inclined foreign minister, Mélanie Joly, briefed the Canadian press contingent that she would “not meet with Lavrov” That Lavrov hadn’t asked to meet was beside the communications point. Trudeau was then asked if he would meet with Lavrov. He said reasonably that he had no reason nor intention to do so.

The press then asked if he’d meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who was meeting Australian and Japanese prime ministers. The PM, on the defensive from opposition critics at home pushing reports Chinese consular officials had made cash advances to some candidates in our 2019 election, was stuck for an answer.

By alphabetical order, China sits next to Canada at G20s, so a short introductory pull-aside when media were in the room was hastily negotiated. The PMO then briefed Canadian media that Trudeau had pressed Xi Jinping over China’s interference in Canada’s elections. Reports dutifully emerged hailing the PM’s act of national self-defence. The next day, Xi initiated his own pull-aside to express dismay that “Everything we discussed has been leaked to the paper; that’s not appropriate,” adding that they should focus first on establishing their relationship.

Should this report have been the centrepiece of Trudeau’s rare meeting with the leader of the world’s second-largest economy, with whom our relations are in the tank? Is that “diplomacy” or grandstanding for the home audience? Shouldn’t we first deploy evidence, expel the offending diplomats, and charge alleged candidates? Yet, a few days later, under questioning in Parliament, the Prime Minister said “there has never been any information given to me on the funding of federal candidates by China.”

This example of “open and public diplomacy” in which a leader plays to the electoral audience at home, or to demographic electoral sub-sets, side-swipes professionalism and undermines credibility on which relationships depend.

Diplomacy is not about lecturing. Israeli PM Yitzhak Shamir, in a meeting on the eve of the 1991 Gulf War in his tiny Knesset office, told Foreign Minister Joe Clark that Palestinians were “animals.” Clark could have challenged him, or left. But his substantive view was clear from the fact he’d spent the previous day in Ramallah. He’d never be Shamir’s pal, but he couldn’t dump the prime minister of Israel just before a war against Saddam Hussein that would rely on Israeli self-restraint to succeed.

Prime Minister Brian Mulroney led the seminal debate at the 1990 Harare Commonwealth Summit that was meant to enshrine respect for human rights as a criterion for membership. When the heated session broke up, Kenyan autocrat Daniel arap Moi contested Mulroney’s argument in private. Mulroney told Moi exactly why we could not turn our eyes away from human rights abuse and corruption and regard them as inevitable, normal, and none of the Commonwealth’s business. The draft Harare Declaration went through the next day without objection. Did Mulroney authorize briefing Canadian media on this likely decisive conversation? Absolutely not.

When Prime Minister Jean Chretien raised in China with president Jiang Zemin the case of a young man jailed since Tiananmen in 1989 — he wasn’t Canadian, but his sister was — he was on a plane the next day, a transaction made in silence.

As a contrary example, Prime Minister Harper briefed Canadian media before a G20 meeting a decade or so ago that he would meet with China’s president to give him hell about the imprisonment of Canadian-Chinese Uyghur mullah Huseyin Celil. An ex-Canadian ambassador to China accurately predicted to me immediately that a) Harper wouldn’t get the meeting and b) the hapless Celil would have his sentence doubled.

So, diplomacy has changed in a lot of ways for diplomats and leaders. But one thing is constant: Relationships of trust are a prerequisite to getting important things done. They require perpetual investment and meticulous curation, both from the top in Ottawa and on the ground from our foreign service professionals around the world. 

Contributing Writer Jeremy Kinsman served as Canada’s Ambassador to Russia, the European Union, Italy and as High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Canadian International Council.