Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Merci.
I'm going to speak very briefly, I hope—for me that's a big challenge—and I have three basic propositions and five or six or seven things Canada can do. So I'll try to speak about those. It might be a little bit provocative, but it should at least be quick.
The first proposition is that if we believe in ourselves, there's a lot we can do in this world. I find it very distressing every time I hear Canada talked about as a middle power, every time we regard ourselves as little Canada and ask what we can do. There's plenty we can do if we believe in ourselves.
The second proposition is that the more effective we are in the world, the more we're going to be listened to in Washington; and the more we're listened to in Washington, the more effective we are going to be in the world. So an effective independent foreign policy both serves our purposes more broadly in the world and it helps us to get along on our bilateral agenda with Washington.
A number of times in the course of my career, when we went down to Washington to complain about softwood lumber or talk about an entire agenda of bilateral issues with the Secretary of State, I've seen us get.... We don't get a frosty reply; we get a courteous response, but we don't get much engagement on that. If the United States is the pre-eminent power in the world, it's a big job and they need help, and they appreciate a foreign policy that is effective.
The third thing I would say is that to be effective in that world we need to invest in diplomacy. That's one of the things we haven't been doing, and in fact we've been disinvesting, or de-investing, in diplomacy. The budgets have been going down for the foreign affairs department. There are a lot of strains on the department, and at the same time, the diplomatic challenges are getting bigger and bigger, as I'll mention in a moment.
I'll say a few words about Obama, the man, because I think we don't forget about it, but perhaps we don't credit enough just how different a person this guy is. He's the most cosmopolitan President the U.S. has ever elected, with a Kenyan father, a family still in Kenya. His mother spent most of her life working abroad with an American NGO and took him with her. He went to school in Indonesia with Muslim kids and to high school in Hawaii, which is the multicultural centre of the United States and hardly either the mainland or the mainstream. It produces a different kind of mind.
Think for a second what the alternative was. It was Senator McCain, grandson and son of admirals. He went to the naval academy and joined the navy. When he left the navy, he went into the Congress, worked in the Senate foreign relations committee. His whole career was national security. It's a very different mindset from the one Obama brings, and I think we really have to get our minds around that.
This is what Obama said, and it's a quote that I think is very apt:
If you don't understand other cultures, then it is very hard for you to make good foreign policy decisions. Foreign policy is all about judgment. The benefit of my life, of having both lived overseas and travelled overseas...is I have a better sense of how people are thinking and what their society is really like. A lot of my knowledge about foreign affairs isn't just what I studied in school...it's not just the work I do on the Senate foreign relations committee. It's actually having the knowledge of how ordinary people in these other countries live.
You could say the same thing about diplomacy. That is one of the strengths diplomacy brings. It's a worldliness, and it's part of the new world we're going to be living in.
So if the world is really changing, how does the world see the United States? It's no secret. If you look at the various polls, the Pew poll in particular—the Pew series of polls since the year 2000—the single most unmistakable finding is that the U.S. has an enormous deficit in public perceptions around the world. They've interviewed 175,000 people in 54 countries. This was not a one-day-a-year Gallup question. They've suffered everywhere, including in the major industrialized countries, where they're blamed for the Iraq war and for the way things are going in Afghanistan. They're blamed for the crisis we're in now in finance, climate change, and terrorism and the excesses of the terrorism conflict.
In Turkey, which was one of the United States' most sympathetic and faithful allies, the numbers went down to single digits in those seven years. But there is now 12% support for the United States. The recovery you're seeing--it's still not very big but it's there--is coming, and the judgment is that it's because of Obama. He is changing the way people think. Not surprisingly, the western country that was most positive about the United States and Obama, of all of the countries interviewed in an Ipsos Reid poll, was Canada.
So we now have a different situation. Where we used to have an American leader who was reviled in the world, we have now one who's admired, whom everybody wants to see succeed, whom everybody sees as an iconic figure. I invite you to listen to what comedian Bill Maher said:
The rest of the world can go back to being completely jealous of America. Yes, our majority white country just freely elected a black President; something no other democracy has ever done. Take that, Canada!
Obama is a man of his time and the world hopes for his time, but to paraphrase Bob Dylan, those times they are a-changing. The era of the single superpower is passing into history. The United States is going to be pre-eminent but not predominant.
Depending on who you listen to...if it's Kishore Mahbubani it's only for the last 200 years, if it's Fareed Zakaria it's the last 300 years. But we forget in the west that Asia not being at the centre of international affairs is the exception, not the rule. It's only been since the Industrial Revolution that Europe and the west have predominated.
There's an interesting figure in a book by Kishore Mahbubani about the Industrial Revolution. This is to give you the sense of how much things are changing:
They called it the Industrial Revolution because, for the first time in all of human history, standards of living rose at a rate where there were noticeable changes within a human life span--changes of perhaps 50%. At current growth rates in Asia, standards of living may rise 100-fold within a human life span.
We're looking at not just a sea change but a total structural transformation. This is not news to everybody, but it's worth remembering. China, Japan, and India rank second, third, and fourth in the world in purchasing power parity. Japan and China rank first and second in the holdings of U.S. treasuries. Economic power may not be shifting; it may have already shifted. Russia is back, Africa has been making progress, the Latin Americans are getting to sit at the top tables, and the European Union is still one of the richest places on earth. But the takeaway point is this: American dominance will diminish, even with President Obama. America will be pre-eminent but not predominant.
That's why Mrs. Clinton in her confirmation hearing said:
Now, in 2009, the clear lesson of the last twenty years is that we must both combat the threats and seize the opportunities of our interdependence. And to be effective in doing so we must build a world with more partners and fewer adversaries. America cannot solve the most pressing problems on our own, and the world cannot solve them without America.
Then she went on to talk about how important it is to invest in diplomacy.
Even under Secretary Rice there was an enormous increase in resources directed to the State Department. Now under Secretary Clinton there's going to be a further effort made, and I'd like you to contrast that. The U.S. administration believes that the U.S. needs to invest in its capacity to conduct diplomacy, provide foreign assistance of the kind the situation requires, reach out to the world, and operate effectively along with the military. That sounds very familiar to us in Ottawa. The challenges are nearly identical, but the response is worth looking at.
The State Department's budget is growing; the foreign affairs department's budget is shrinking. Our aid budgets are more or less static.
What can we do, then? I have five or six things Canada can do.
We can invest in our diplomacy.
We can believe in our ability to make a difference, which is why you would invest.
I don't know how controversial the following point is. We shouldn't change foreign ministers every year. And we shouldn't engage, by the way, in light-switch diplomacy every time we change a foreign minister. “Light-switch diplomacy” was coined by George Schultz and it means that you change your policy every time you get a new Secretary of State. Well, we've had that tendency as well in Canada.
If you're going to get the relationship right with Washington, we have to get the embassy right. One of the things we need is for the embassy to re-engage in American foreign policy. If you look at the way the Canadian embassy has conducted itself, in recent years particularly, it's been all bilateral. They really haven't played on the international agenda very much. And in doing that, you're basically disarming yourself, because the strongest card we have to play probably these days is Afghanistan. That may also be a controversial assertion in this group.
If we have a foreign policy and we have people in the embassy whose job it is to deal with senior Americans at a foreign policy level.... I can tell you that the British do that, the French do that, the Germans do that, the Russians do that, the Chinese do that, and the Indians do that. Everybody I can think of tries to do that, because it's all part of taking your responsibility seriously and taking responsibility for what's going on in the world.
I'll throw out a line in case anybody wants to follow up on it. I'm not a fan of the idea of a secretariat in the embassy in which we have federal-provincial representation. I think it confuses people in Washington about who's who and what they're doing and who they're speaking for.
I won't dwell on what we can do economically. I think a very important lesson is the G20.
How much time do I have left?
