Thank you.
I'm a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute where my focus is international security and strategic and military studies.
In the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant dislocations in the Canadian economy, politics and society. If you look into the international sphere, the pandemic has accelerated a number of long-standing trends and introduced several new challenges. Over the past decade, we have witnessed the fragmentation of political, economic and military arrangements that underpin a rules-based international order. The post-Cold War consensus has broken down and, driven in part by the growing conservativeness of national actors in international relations, Russia, China and Iran have rejected or worked to usurp this western-led order.
The fraying of the post-Cold War consensus has occurred among our close allies where populism and nationalism have emerged as powerful and disruptive forces. Their growth is variously blamed on historical lows in public trust of governing institutions, declining economic prospects and rapidly changing societies.
Manifestations include populist leaders such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. One of the clearest indications of this emerging era of global power competition is evident in the military sphere. Over the past decade, a dramatic modernization effort has been undertaken by major military powers encompassing increases in funding, reorientations of force structures and the fielding of new capabilities. The breadth of these technological advances arguably sets the period apart from earlier eras, which will affect the fundamental nature of warfare, like with artificial intelligence.