Foreign Affairs Committee on April 19th, 2018

[Borys Wrzesnewskyj, Liberal, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Thank you very much, Ms. Ahn.

We'll now go to Madame Laverdière, s'il vous plaît.

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Thank you all for your presentations. Thank you for mentioning human security, an expression that we are unfortunately hearing less and less often here.

Ms. Talbot, I know that your church has asked to meet with this committee next Tuesday to talk about the prospects for peace in the Middle East, particularly in Israel and Palestine. I really hope that the committee will be able to grant your request. That said, you mentioned that, not only did the sanctions not prevent the development of the nuclear program, but that they had almost encouraged that development.

If you could expand on that, I would appreciate it.

[Patricia Talbot]

I'll respond in English, if I may.

Just to reiterate what has been said and what Christine has I think mentioned as well, the experience of the last 70 years or so has shown that when there are perceived or actual threats of hostility against North Korea, the reaction there has actually been to increase national security measures to increase repression against its own citizens.

The inverse is also true, that when the rhetoric has been toned down, when it was dialled back during the “sunshine policy”, when there have been opportunities for connection, then the actions around national security and the repression of citizens have been decreased.

Yes, I think you're right. The strategy of sanctions and isolation has not reached the desired goal; it hasn't helped with denuclearization. It has further isolated North Korea. Certainly we know that it has harmed the most vulnerable, and I don't think it's getting us anywhere closer to the goal of a more peaceful peninsula.

Certainly all stick and no carrot is not helping. In January, the maximum pressure was all stick; there was absolutely nothing there for the North Korean leadership to grasp on to. As Christine was saying, there is strong support in South Korea for inter-Korean dialogue, for engagement, for cooperation, for development of mutual and respectful engagement. Yet as we know in most of our own relationships, whether they be family, community, or otherwise, if it's all stick and no dialogue, no negotiation, it's very hard to bring people to the table.

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Talbot and Ms. Ahn, you spoke very highly of President Moon's efforts, including the peace plan he has proposed.

Ms. Ahn, could you further elaborate on his plan and what he is proposing?

[Christine Ahn]

Well, It's being ironed out right now, and today there was some news. Obviously, there are a number of complicated issues. Right now, South Korea is very much wanting to play both a central role in improving relations directly with North Korea, but at the same time, recognizing....

Moon Jae-in was the chief of staff for Roh Moo-hyun, who was the last president, in 2007, to have led the “sunshine policy” years of inter-Korean reconciliation and engagement. He knows very well that inter-Korean peace will only go so far as long as the conflict with the U.S. prevails.

I therefore believe that we will probably see a combination of policies that include the approach of cultural and civil society exchanges, as we have recently seen with artists and performers going from South Korea to North Korea; we will see a policy of family reunions, such as took place during the “sunshine policy” years; and we'll hopefully see some kind of joint economic zone, similar to what we saw with the Kaesong industrial complex.

However, 2018 is not 2007—or 2000, when the last historic north-south agreement was made between Kim Dae-jung and Kim Jong-il. We are facing a situation in which the U.S. has led a maximum pressure campaign. We are facing renewed Security Council sanctions that have made it so difficult even for humanitarian aid operations to operate in the DPRK.

That's why Patty Talbot and I are urging Canada—and you, when you go to meet with South Korean officials and civil society—to help give some relief to that inter-Korean peace process by offering the support they need at this moment from the international community and from historic allies such as Canada.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Thank you, Madame Laverdière.

We'll go to Ms. Vandenbeld, please.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Ahn, I was very interested in the conference you mentioned. I hope the clerk might be able to work out something along the lines of the invitation you have generously offered. Thank you very much.

I was also very impressed when I met with some of the women a few months ago from the Cross the DMZ program, when they were here in Ottawa. Thank you for participating today.

I want to delve a little further into women, peace, and security. I noticed, Ms. Talbot and Ms. Ahn, that you both mentioned this as a key thing that Canada can contribute. Of course, building on our action plan and Security Council resolution 1325, we now have very hard evidence that peace agreements last longer and are more sustainable when women are involved.

Ms. Ahn, you were quite correct when you talked about its being women, but Korean women themselves, who need to be part of this process.

Let me delve a little further into what you said, Ms. Ahn, about the regional mechanisms of frameworks: that this is an area in which Canada could particularly help in terms of the peace process and of supporting the women. What exactly does that look like? Could you elaborate a bit on this?

[Christine Ahn]

It's a path that still needs to be shaped, but we know that there have been a few stages of North and South Korean women engagement. In the 1990s they were actually first brought together by no other than a Japanese member of parliament. They actually had a series of dialogues in Tokyo, in Pyongyang, and in Seoul. That was from 1991 to 1994.

Then, when inter-Korean relations worsened, that obviously severely restricted their engagement, but during the “sunshine policy” years I think we saw at the height up to 500,000 North and South Koreans crossing the DMZ and meeting one another. After that period of intense engagement, we saw a return to a kind of hardline role for the past 10 years.

Being in South Korea last week, meeting with the pioneers of the South Korean women's peace movement, who really risked their lives—they were called communists and all these things—to engage with women in North Korea.... They're basically dusting off the shelves. They had to freeze all of this engagement during the last decade. You will feel it, when you are there: it's an extraordinarily buzzing and exciting time, I believe, for South Korea.

I believe South Korea is probably the most exciting democracy in the world. For that to be shared with the people in North Korea, to see the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, go to South Korea, to see the transformations in South Korea.... This is a moment.

The point I made at the close of my opening remarks was that there is a peace process right now. Hopefully it will proceed, but right now is the moment for us to be engaging. If you see images of the North and South Korean leaders' meeting, it is all men. Even though South Korea has a female foreign minister, Kang Kyung-wha, it is all men.

Where are the women? It's a fabulous process. We applaud the track 1, but where are the women's peace groups to ensure that there will be a lasting peace?

My call is for Canada, which has an amazing feminist foreign policy and has put hard Canadian dollars behind it, to support a multi-year round table of women from Northeast Asia to come together to dialogue about what should be in a peace agreement that would advance women's security.

We are not able to do it, but now, because of the opening and the fact that two North Korean women will attend a UN meeting in China that is happening concurrently with our meeting in South Korea and we have heard from the Ministry of Unification from South Korea that we have a fifty-fifty chance that North Korean women will join us for an international symposium, we are in a moment.

I hope you can be there in South Korea as we all convene, to feel and witness this transformation that is taking place.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you very much. I hope so, too.

Ms. Talbot, do you want to add to that?

[Patricia Talbot]

Just to add to what Christine said, I think that Canada is the perfect place to host a round table of women. We don't know whether it will even happen. North and South Koreans could not meet in Korea. When I have met with North Koreans, it has never been on Korean soil, of course. It has been in China, Canada, and Europe.

We hope, with this new kind of thawing and opening, that South Koreans will be able to go to the north and vice versa. But I think Canada is the perfect place to provide a forum and space for women to meet women from that region. We're trusted. I think we have a legacy from our North Korea relationships. There are not many other places that have the same kind of reputation, and I think we can use that constructively and very positively.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Building on that, Ms. Talbot, one thing you talked about was Canada's role and the way we engage. I know that under Canada's controlled engagement policy right now, there are limited spheres in which Canada can engage. You spoke about giving our ambassador more ability to do dialogues.

[Patricia Talbot]

That's right.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

[Patricia Talbot]

Yes, certainly I can.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

You'll have to keep this quite short now.

[Patricia Talbot]

As I said, when Canada established diplomatic relations in 2001, we had representation, but it was only through the ambassador based in Seoul. We had two very able diplomats, in particular, Marius Grinius and Ted Lipman. They were ambassadors there. I think Ted Lipman especially made more trips back and forth to the north and south than any other diplomat. He was well trusted, he was liked, he kept channels open. I think the current ambassador could certainly do the same.

We have never broken diplomatic relations with North Korea, and it's essential, I think, that those channels be open.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Thank you very much.

Colleagues, that will wrap it up. I want to thank all three of our witnesses. As usual, it's too short for the subject that we are endeavouring to take on, but I think it was very helpful for the committee as we work our way through the kinds of conversations we need to have in putting together recommendations in a report of this kind. On behalf of the committee, thank you very much.

Colleagues, we're going to suspend for a couple of minutes, and then we'll come back to our next three witnesses.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Colleagues, we'll bring this meeting back to order. Before us are three individuals: James Manicom, Jeremy Paltiel, and David Welch.

Colleagues, we're going to start in the reverse order of what we did with the previous witnesses.

David, you're going to start with opening comments, and then we'll get to Mr. Paltiel and Mr. Manicom.

I'm going to turn the floor over to you right away, Mr. Welch. The floor is yours.

[David Welch, CIGI Chair of Global Security, Balsillie School of International Affairs, As an Individual]

Thank you, and thank you for the opportunity to appear.

I would like to address Canada's engagement in the Asia-Pacific region, specifically in security issues.

Canada has a long history of engagement on security issues in this region, beginning with our participation in World War II, the Korean War, and our participation during the Vietnam War on the International Commission of Control and Supervision, the ICCS. We were a founding [Technical difficulty—Editor] in 1990; we were a co-organizer of the South China Sea dialogues in 1990; and we were a founding member of the Council for Security Co-operation in the Asia-Pacific, or CSCAP, in 1992.

In recent years, however, Canada has disengaged significantly from security files in the region, beginning primarily in the early 2000s. We stepped back from virtually all of the tables at which we were present earlier in a very fruitful way. For example, Canada has now lapsed from membership in CSCAP twice. At the moment, we are the only country who is not a member in good standing.

The causes of this disengagement are complex, but in my view, essentially two main factors predominate.

The first is a single-minded focus that Canadian governments have had recently on economic opportunity, beginning with the Team Canada mission to China under Prime Minister Chrétien in November 2001 and epitomized by Prime Minister Harper's trade mission to China and Japan in 2013. Additionally, resource constraints have been significant and particularly significant for the participation of the Canadian Armed Forces in routine patrols of the western Pacific.

An important part of Prime Minister Trudeau's election platform was re-engagement, captured by the phrase “Canada is back”. This phrase was greeted with great enthusiasm in the region. There is widespread disappointment, however, at the moment with Canada's performance to date. So far, Canada still has no articulated Asia-Pacific strategy. There was an effort in 2014 in the Department of Foreign Affairs—the predecessor to Global Affairs Canada—to craft an Asia-Pacific strategy, but this effort was nixed by the Prime Minister's Office in 2014.

Canada has made repeated overtures to join the East Asia Summit and the ADMM-Plus, without bringing anything to the table. While Canada's appointment of an ambassador to ASEAN in 2017 was widely welcomed in the region—as is, by the way, the recent deployment of HMCS Chicoutimi to help enforce North Korean economic sanctions—there still remains great skepticism in the region about Canada's seriousness in re-engaging on security issues and Canada's ability to play the long game.

This is a loss for Canada, and it is a loss for the region. The Asia-Pacific is unique culturally in important ways. One key cultural characteristic of diplomacy in the region is that one cannot fully engage at one table without engaging at all tables. Canada does not have the luxury of playing carte blanche politics, seeking only economic opportunities without addressing other issues of concern to the region. The Asia-Pacific is not a transaction place; it is a place where serious diplomacy, serious politics, requires sustained relational engagement. Canada squanders economic and other opportunities by not engaging more robustly on security issues.

Canada stands to lose by not engaging, and the region stands to lose by Canada's not re-engaging, because Canada has demonstrated its value to the region time and time again, as a helpful contributor to dialogue and helpful contributor to confidence building. Most recently, for example, Canadian CSCAP participation was key to preventing a second air defence identification zone crisis, this time over the south Pacific.

What is needed? Canada needs first an Asia-Pacific strategy; secondly, a long-term commitment of personnel and resources; thirdly, to leverage its considerable expertise and experience, particularly at the track 2 level.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Thank you, Mr. Welch.

We'll go straight to Mr. Paltiel, please.

[Dr. Jeremy Paltiel, Professor, Department of Political Science, Carleton University, As an Individual]

Thank you very much.

First of all, I thank the foreign affairs and international development committee for giving me this opportunity to address you. I've been studying China and Asian affairs for 48 years now, and 44 years ago I was one of the earliest beneficiaries of our bilateral relations when I was among the second group of students to go to China under the Canada-China scholars' exchange program.

Three prime ministerial trips to Asia over the last six months illustrate the confused state of our diplomacy towards that part of the world. At a time when the U.S. administration threatens the multilateral global trading order, the world's largest economy and the world's largest exporter and second-largest economy are currently engaged in a trade war. Canada's Asian diplomacy is strongly missing in action. We have no coherent strategy and no coherent plan. This is not a new problem and is not a problem of the current government only. The previous government was equally guilty.

Asia represents the largest share of the global economy, at about 35%, with China leading. North America today represents about 27% of the global economy, with Europe third at about 22%. Not only does Asia represent the largest slice of the global economy, but this slice is rising faster than the rest of the global economy. In simple terms, just holding on to our share of the North American trade through NAFTA will condemn us to an ever-shrinking share of the global economy. Furthermore, given the protectionism of the current U.S. administration, it will leave us without allies to help preserve the global multilateral trading order.

The global affairs minister's programmatic speech to the House of Commons last June 6 virtually ignored Asia as a focus of our diplomacy and gave it virtually no role in maintaining our traditional middle power diplomacy. Canada's participation in the TPP was originally defensive, intended to protect the advantages of NAFTA against the aggressive U.S. move to deepen integration with the Asia-Pacific. It is to the credit of this government and the previous one that they persisted even as the United States withdrew. However, our performance in Da Nang, with our last-minute hesitancy at the altar, undermined the trust of principal Asia-Pacific partners, particularly Japan and Australia. We may have fatally prejudiced further invitations to the East Asia Summit. I am pleased that Canada signed on to the CPTPP in January. However, this is only one step.

China's place in our economic and political engagement is controversial but at the same time indispensable. China is the world's second-largest economy and its largest exporter. Since the beginning of this century, it alone has been responsible for over 30% of global growth. The figure for last year was 34% of global growth. It is also our second-largest trading partner, but one where our performance has been continuously slipping.

Our deficit with China is larger than our exports. For every dollar we export, we import more than three. There is no question that China is a difficult market, and the political complexion and ambitions of the Chinese regime make it even more so. However, free trade negotiations, which have been on the agenda ever since we completed a complementarity study at the beginning of this decade, are probably our best hope to resolve the difficult issues that divide us. The process may be more important than the outcome. The negotiation process is the only context in which we can get a hearing on our interests. In order to do so, we must be clear about what those economic interests are, and forthright about presenting them.

If we are looking for greater reciprocity—and that's a word we often hear with regard to China—in terms of market openness, non-tariff barriers, and a whole range of issues in the government procurement and services sectors, that is where we should raise them, in the course of free trade negotiations. Moreover, we should not sign an agreement without a robust dispute settlement process.

I would further argue that the best time to engage in these negotiations is right now. Such an opportunity may not come again. As the world's largest exporter, China has a vested interest in open trade. Its continued prosperity depends on it.

Already, in January 2017 China's president, Xi Jinping, laid claim to becoming the mainstay of the multilateral trading order in his speech to Davos. Last week, in his speech to the Boao Forum, a kind of Asian Davos, he further reiterated this claim to openness and further reiterated his desire to open markets.

Many remain skeptical, and for good reason: China has engaged in a variety of mercantilist policies in its domestic market to advantage domestic firms. Nonetheless, with a trade war looming with the U.S., right now is the time that China needs to prove its commitment to an open multilateral trading order, and what better way to do so than with its first free trade agreement with a G7 country, Canada?

Negotiations will be tough, and we should not sign just any agreement China might offer, but we have a lot to gain and the Chinese have a major stake in proving their bona fides to the world at a time when the U.S. trade representative's office argues that it was a mistake to allow China into the WTO in the first place.

There are many other issues that divide us besides trade and investment. We have large differences over human rights and the rule of law as well as over many other aspects of governance. We cannot resolve all these through trade negotiations; we should consider parallel mechanisms whereby we can hope to bridge our differences. I have proposed a joint commission of retired justices and academics, which would consider areas of controversy and advise on best practices. Since China is a country that proclaims it is governed by law, its government should be open to an honest and dispassionate dialogue on questions of principle.

We need to get our house in order. Clearly, oil and gas exports could go a long way to reversing our deficit, but we need to get those energy supplies to tidewater, and the federal government has the constitutional authority to do so. Furthermore, we should explicitly tie our oil and gas exports to reducing Chinese dependence on burning coal. This would have a positive effect on the carbon balance.

We should also jointly explore devoting a percentage of the profits of fossil fuel exports towards developing green energy technologies. It is possible to be environmentally responsible and an energy exporter in the context of an energy transition, and the Chinese, who are world leaders in the technology of energy transition, are best placed to be our partner in this endeavour.

Nonetheless, we should have no illusions about the nature of the Chinese government. On a whole range of issues, its values are not our own. However, there can be no doubt about China's sincere and abiding commitment to global stability and multilateral institutions centred on the UN system. Even its retaliatory measures against the U.S. tariffs have been carried out strictly within the rules of the WTO, and Chinese leaders reaffirm their allegiance to open, multilateral trade.

We can build on this platform, and we should distinguish Chinese diplomacy from Russian moves that are heedless of global norms and disruptive of global order. China is a global competitor in every sense of the term; however, the Chinese are sophisticated global players who are willing to engage proactively to manage competition and pre-empt confrontation. Moreover, China is very sensitive about its global image. Given our own positive global image, we can leverage that to our advantage.

At the same time, we cannot engage China alone. We have a strategic partnership with the Republic of Korea and share abiding contacts with our Commonwealth cousins, Australia and New Zealand. All three of these countries have free trade agreements with China and, like us, alliance relations with the U.S. We should share information and coordinate closely with them in our engagement with China.

Furthermore, Canada, Australia, and South Korea are countries of comparable size and global reach. South Korean officials have emphasized their desire to deepen our relationship as part of the strategic dialogue. We should consider deepening our bilateral ties and finding new ways of multilateral engagement, possibly through engagement with MIKTA, the middle countries alliance, part of the G20.

Japan and India are also partners of choice. While we should avoid entanglement in the complex historical disputes of China and Japan, we have much to share and much to learn. Japan is one of our major trading partners and now a fellow signatory to the CPTPP, an ally of the U.S., and a G7 partner. India is a Commonwealth partner with a growing economy and is the homeland of a dynamic community of immigrants to Canada.

We have bungled our relationship with India in an embarrassing manner. Just to give one example, when our Prime Minister was visiting India, at that very moment Japan, India, the U.S., and Australia announced their quadrilateral response to China's belt and road initiative. Canada was neither involved nor consulted.

We need to engage India not just to secure votes from diaspora communities but to enhance our trade and global diplomacy. We should treat Indian diplomacy with respect and find ways to coordinate policies at a working group level and not just carp endlessly about the will-'o-the-wisp economic opportunities at times of ministerial or head-of-government visits.

We need a comprehensive approach to our Asian diplomacy that engages the countries I just mentioned, but also of course ASEAN, the premier Asian multilateral organization, and we should work with all these countries to both strengthen the multilateral trading order and to ensure that a growing China abides by global norms.

I do not suggest that successive Canadian governments have not recognized opportunities in Asia and have not expended resources on trans-Pacific engagement. They have. I also applaud the additional resources in the recent federal budget. Our efforts, however, have been piecemeal, discontinuous, uncoordinated, and incoherent. It is time to change that.

Australia produced a white paper, Australia in the Asian Century. We need a similar strategic document to guide our public officials on a non-partisan basis and coordinate public policy to make our diplomacy effective and to secure advantages in the interest of all Canadians.

Thank you for hearing me out. I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Thank you very much, Mr. Paltiel.

Now we'll go to Mr. Manicom, please.

Before you start, colleagues, these gentlemen have very extensive CVs. I haven't taken the opportunity to read them—it would take another 10 minutes—but I strongly recommend that you have a look at them.

The floor is yours, Mr. Manicom.

[Dr. James Manicom, As an Individual]

Thanks, Chair, and thanks for having me, everyone. This is obviously an issue of great importance.

I'm going to limit my remarks to a high-level overview of the region's security landscape, and if I leave anything out, we can take it up in the Q and A, because it's a very big region. This is to provide the context that we are going to engage in.

In my view, the security situation in the Asia-Pacific really turns on three things: China, the United States, and everybody else. I'll take each in turn.

With respect to China, I'm often asked by friends and colleagues what China wants. It might be foolhardy to try to answer that here, but I'm going to try anyway.

China has really been composed of two separate entities at its highest level. There are 1.4 billion people who live there and get up every day and go about their business, and there are 90 million members of the Chinese Communist Party. The first group, the 1.4 billion people, really want what everyone else wants, which is the opportunity to improve their lot in life. Different types of people have different degrees of advantages. An urban-dwelling person of Han Chinese descent has considerably more advantages than a rural-dwelling person of non-Han Chinese descent. However, ultimately these people all want the same thing.

The Chinese Communist Party wakes up every day and thinks about how it can stay in power. That is its only objective all day, every day, and that will not change.

The social contract in China basically asks citizens to accept the state's intrusion into certain areas of their life in exchange for the freedom to pursue economic prosperity. There's an obvious and perhaps irreconcilable tension there. As China has opened up to the world, the forces that perhaps increase individual liberty have entered the country, and these have pushed up against the state in some very conspicuous ways. When this happens, the state pushes back quite hard.

The result is that China is now approaching a surveillance state, both online, where censorship is the norm, and in the real world, where there are cameras on almost every street corner in some cities. People who express their opinions freely online are often reprimanded quite harshly, and in some cases are actually put on prime-time television the next day, issuing a mea culpa and reinforcing the state narrative.

The Chinese social contract has actually proven to have considerable staying power, but there is an argument that it's under threat. To a lot of observers, the Chinese economy needs to undergo a rebalancing. It is currently expanding on investment-led growth, and it needs a shift from investment to consumption. To make that happen, it has to let its currency appreciate, and that will necessarily bring turmoil to the average working Chinese citizen. It's going to lead to an erosion in the populace's confidence in the Chinese social contract. I think that's the origin of why you've seen Xi Jinping going to such great lengths to secure his leadership of the country for the foreseeable future, by removing term limits to his presidency.

All this is simply to say one thing about China's foreign policy and its foreign relations: China's foreign policy is a direct extension of the Chinese Communist Party's desire to stay in power. All of its foreign policy decisions have to conform with that objective. In that respect, and on a foreign policy basis, China's foreign policy needs to conform with the myths that Chinese people have been fed from the time they were born. These myths include that Taiwan was once a part of China, that the South China Sea was once a part of China, and that Tibet or the Xinjiang province were once parts of China. These are all untrue, but Chinese people insist this is the case, and so China's foreign policy has to act as if it is the case.

Turning to the United States, I'd suggest that we're actually seeing less change in U.S. foreign policy in the region than we have in other areas of the world. President Trump's foreign policy in some respects reflects a long-standing tension in U.S. foreign policy between internationalist and isolationist tendencies: the internationalist side pursuing global leadership, and at the same time the isolationist side not liking it when those consequences are too great to bear. Certainly on the latter side, the isolationists' retrenchment pieces have become more popular in the United States ever since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have drawn on.

However, there is no mistake: the United States is an Asia-Pacific power, and its military strength underwrites much of the security in the region. U.S. forces are based in South Korea, Japan, and Guam, and there's a navy base in Hawaii. All this contributes to all manner of east-Asian security contingencies, from disaster relief operations to what happens to the nukes when North Korea collapses, should that happen. That is what they think about all the time.

The United States' presence in the region is actually pretty tolerated, or accepted at least. Most of the debates in the region turn on how close China should be with the United States, not whether the United States should be in China and what its role is. In fact, it's only in recent memory that China has actually begun to overtly reject this U.S. presence, and mostly around the islands of the South China Sea, because China obviously sees these islands as its own, versus the United States, which prefers to sail through them freely.

The Chinese rejection of U.S. presence used to be limited to rather forthright interceptions of U.S. military assets, but that has morphed more recently into reclamation activities in the South China Sea that are basically trying to make little rocks in the South China Sea function as small military bases. There are runways. There are missile batteries in some cases, apparently. There's also electronic warfare equipment. The entire objective there is to make the South China Sea a very dangerous place for the U.S. Navy to sail.

The Trump administration, in this respect, has actually maintained one of the more celebrated aspects of the Obama administration's foreign policy in Asia, which is the freedom of navigation program. This is a program in which the U.S. Navy and the State Department collaborate to démarche what the United States perceives to be excessive maritime claims, and the navy goes and carries out an operation to express the U.S. interpretation of what is inappropriate conduct in that area. China, in this case, claims that a number of rocks in the South China Sea are in fact islands, and if they're islands it's entitled to more maritime space. That argument was soundly rejected by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2016.

Accordingly, the United States Navy sails within 12 nautical miles of these features to basically tell China, “No, China, this island is actually a rock and we can go up to 50 feet or 500 metres from the rock.” These missions have not only continued under Trump but actually increased in tempo.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration campaigned on a foreign policy of retrenchment. You see that in the attitude towards what we used to call the TPP, the trans-Pacific Partnership. That was probably based on a broader skepticism of trade deals generally, but it did call into question the United States' commitment to Asia.

Trade and security go hand in hand everywhere in the world, and in Asia in particular. More of one means more of the other, and this is true for the U.S. and China as well, with both articulating competing visions of regional trade architecture in the region. Time will tell how serious the Trump administration is on re-engagement with the TPP, but the region is watching with interest, and so should we.

This brings me to the third piece, which is everyone else. “Everyone else” includes Australia and Japan, which are U.S. allies as a matter of course and a matter of values in some respects; South Korea and India, which pursue the alliance with the United States for other reasons, a little more self-interested in most cases; then the countries of Southeast Asia, of which there are a number. In Southeast Asia each country plays the United States versus China along a spectrum of engagement: Cambodia on one end, and maybe Singapore on the far end of a sort of pro-China versus anti-China spectrum.

Singapore does a good job of managing its relationship. It is engaged in both of the trading conversations in the region: the TPP—the U.S.-centred, or now, I suppose, the New Zealand-centred initiative—versus the regional comprehensive economic partnership, which was seen to be China-led but really incorporates the countries of Southeast Asia, Japan, and South Korea. Likewise, it has a very good defence relationship with the United States, and it manages to stay out of the region's maritime disputes as best as it can.

Australia, likewise, has always tried to manage an economic relationship with China and a security relationship with the United States. That relationship has soured recently because Chinese navy ships have turned up in waters that are a little close to Australia, and Australia is also concerned about the impact of Chinese influence on its domestic politics.

At the strategic level, countries in the region are aware that China's vision of what the region ought to look like is different from the way it looks now. It's also increasingly clear, in my view, that East Asian countries share the perspective that the United States is an important player in the region, a perspective that China increasingly rejects.

We're seeing this manifested in two ways. First, you're seeing closer U.S. defence ties with non-traditional security partners such as Vietnam, for example. A U.S. aircraft carrier just visited there. That was unforeseen 10 years ago. I never thought I'd see that in my career, but here we are. Likewise, we're also seeing bilateral and trilateral security arrangements among U.S. allies, without the U.S. actually participating. Some of that falls apart on underlying bilateral tensions between the two countries: I'm thinking of Japan and South Korea, which have always been working on an intelligence-sharing agreement but can't get it done because of the history between those countries. Professor Paltiel referred to the quadrilateral security dialogue among Japan, India, Australia, and the United States.

In any event, there's a tacit consensus in the region that for the majority of governments in that region to pursue a flexible foreign policy, a strong U.S. presence is required. In the absence of that U.S. presence, there's no doubt that China makes the rules.

By way of conclusion, I offer three quick take-aways. First, remember that Chinese foreign policy is an extension of its domestic policy. Consequently, there can be little doubt in China's resolve to assert itself in disputes that it defines as being part of its territorial integrity—I'm thinking of the things I mentioned earlier. Secondly, the American presence as a military force, as a maker of rules, is indispensable to security in the region. This is why a change of heart in the TPP could be important. Finally, paradoxically, the demand for U.S. security presence in the region is stronger now at a time when the strength of it has never been less sure. This is the security environment in which Canada is seeking to engage.