As the world shifts toward a new and uncertain world order, Canada finds itself on the front lines, caught between rival superpowers in a 360-degree threat environment.
Raquel Garbers, CIGI visiting executive from the Department of National Defence, provides insight on how globalization enabled hostile actors — China chief among them — to use illicit, unfair and illegal economic practices to corrupt the global order that has been essential for maintaining stable interstate relations.
So why are we talking about economic warfare? Why is the world suddenly interested in economic warfare? Well, to state the blindingly obvious, it’'s because the world has changed.
So at the end of the Cold War, the Soviet Union had collapsed. The United States stood alone as the world’'s sole unrivalled superpower. Into this mindset, step a group of foreign policy and economic elites and what they sell the United States and its allies on is a post-Cold War order called globalization. And what they argue is that interdependence will ensure that there will never be another war between major powers. And they make two fateful errors. They allow their militaries to fall into relative decay, and they open their societies and economies to the hostile states. Hostile states understand the opportunity
that the globalists have given them, and they spend the next 30 years nesting themselves inside the economic and social systems of the United States and its allies.
Economic warfare is about building on your economic statecraft. It is about weaponizing your entire society, and it is about building on a whole series of complementary, hostile activities that are similarly covert, illegal and well outside the bounds of responsible state behaviour.
So there’s little doubt that China is the standard bearer of economic warfare. And that really, China has reinvented economic warfare in the age of globalization.
So, for example, it’s not uncommon for a foreign company to be told, if you want access to the Chinese market to sell your goods, you are going to have to enter into a joint venture with a Chinese company. Now, it doesn’t take too long after that happens for the foreign company to find that its IP has been stolen, a Chinese champion has been stood up in the building next door and is undercutting the foreign company and selling the goods on the international market, driving the foreign company out of business. It is much cheaper, easier and faster to steal $700 billion in IP than it is to spend 20 years and $700 billion to develop that IP. It’s the cheater’s way to amass economic and military power in an illegitimate way.
China is waging an increasingly aggressive economic war that risks spiralling into a full scale war between major powers. And, in fact, the outcome of any war between the United States and China would be far from certain.
As the world transitions to a new global order, Canada’s on the front lines in the contest between the United States and China. We have the natural resources that will fuel future economic and military power. We have control over access to the Arctic, which is emerging as a strategic trade and military route. And we have unique, unrivalled access deep into the United States and its critical networks and infrastructures. China wants everything that we have.
So, what's the plan? Who’s going to develop it? And who’s going to implement it? The reality is, the government cannot do this alone. All Canadians need to understand the threat, and all Canadians need to come together to protect Canada. And that’s why CIGI has stood up the program Canada at Economic War.
You can read more about Canada at Economic War at CIGIonline.org.
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