Canada at Economic War: Being Outplayed by Beijing

Policy Brief No. 204

June 24, 2025

The United States and its allies are being outplayed by Beijing. In failing to arrest China’s economic warfare against them, they have de facto subsidized their own downfall. Beijing’s economic attacks have shifted the balance of military power away from the United States. China has secured control over critical supply chain choke points, eroded Western industrial capacity, pre-positioned attack assets in Western systems and erased the technology gap on which deterrence depends. The United States has decided to fight back. Allies that provide defence assets secured against Beijing’s economic warfare will be powerful players in the new world order. In this policy brief, the third as part of CIGI’s Canada at Economic War project, Raquel Garbers says Canada needs to make radical changes to defend itself. The wrong choices will see China aggress us, allies bypass us and the United States treat us as a dangerous liability to be forcefully managed.

About the Author

Raquel Garbers is a CIGI visiting executive from the Department of National Defence, where she held the role of director general, strategic defence policy, since April 2018. She is also a visiting practitioner with the US Department of Defense (Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies). Raquel served as the principal architect of Canada’s new defence policy, Our North, Strong and Free.