A Treatise For A Treaty On A New World Order
There is indeed something of a 'new world order.' We can go along for the ride, or we can take the lead in making it one in which we are happy to be a part.
There is opportunity in this chaos. France and Ukraine ran a sting on the United States that showed the Trump administration was leaking classified data to Russia. We know that NATO, NORAD, and any other military alliance with the United States is no longer worth the paper on which it is printed. That does not mean we are stuck.
Canada is well-positioned to lead the charge toward a new economic and military alliance that puts politics and stability centre stage, borrowing loosely from the structure of NATO.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s assertion in Beijing last week that we are dealing with a new world order is accurate. His speech in Davos yesterday explains the comment in depth, and is historic in its importance. The world order as we know it has been upended by a long, drawn-out process of subterfuge aimed at the systematic destruction of liberal democracy.
Every system holds the seeds of its own destruction, and liberal democracy is no exception. The free exchange and flow of information, “free speech,” by its very nature opens the door to misinformation. The free flow of capital opens the door to influencing that speech through media ownership and domination. The ability of any person to contribute financially to political outcomes, and at that proportionately to their wealth, opens the door to that money influencing policy to their own ends.
With speech, capital, and policy all part of a wide open society, all the dominoes are in place the moment someone with a poor money-to-integrity ratio feels like knocking some of them over, which is a vastly oversimplified explanation of how we get to where we are today.
To protect democracy over the long term, then, takes active and continuous work to put those dominoes back up. Together, a society can define the dominoes, their foundation, their limits. There is no perfect answer nor formula, and constant readjustment is essential. Many democracies are holding it together in spite of significant outside pressure abusing those weaknesses.
The new world order referred to by Carney is a world in which there are essentially three powers who dominate the world. While it had been divided between the democratic west and authoritarian east, all three players are now in the same authoritarian camp. In that world, what does it matter if we trade with the United States or China? The thinking becomes: neither is a democracy anyway and we need to build our economy.
Russia is still on the outs because of its war of aggression against Ukraine, and the European Union as a whole has yet to consolidate into a unified power. If the United States jumps in with its threatened war against Greenland and their 56,000 inhabitants — roughly the same as, say, the town of Twin Falls, Idaho — then in some ways China becomes the most obvious partner of the big three, as they would be the only one not waging a new war of aggression — as long as we ignore their existing human rights issues. Unless they attack Taiwan while its allies are off-line, of course. With the United States behaving the way they are, there is no major power that is vastly morally superior than the others to trade with. All are moral compromises.
Which all brings us back to how to regain control of the new world order within the context of defending functional democracies. For that, we need an entirely new treaty. For the sake of argument, we will call it the Defence and Economic Mutual Assistance Treaty (DEMAT).
NATO Article 2 currently reads:
The Parties will contribute toward the further development of peaceful and friendly international relations by strengthening their free institutions, by bringing about a better understanding of the principles upon which these institutions are founded, and by promoting conditions of stability and well-being. They will seek to eliminate conflict in their international economic policies and will encourage economic collaboration between any or all of them.
In the new version, it would use the word democracy, and it would include a sentence obligating the member states to be and remain functional democracies. Member nations that are not functionally democratic would be automatically suspended, using objective measures such as the Democracy Index or Democracy Matrix. Nations that devolve into full-on autocracies would be automatically expelled. But nations that are functional democracies would be welcome regardless of scale, military or economic capacity, geography, or outside considerations such as, say, whether including Taiwan might irritate China.
The much-ballyhooed Article 5 of NATO states that a military attack against any member in North America or Europe is an attack against all. I would suggest that our DEMAT treaty adopts similar wording and remain subservient to the United Nations, but with a different overall approach. The opening line would read something akin to:
The Parties agree that any military, economic, or electronic attack against one or more signatories shall be considered an attack against all.
It would also include a mutual assistance clause for natural disasters, environmental catastrophes, and any other existential threats to democracy. Incidents like Japan’s Fukushima nuclear accident, Canada’s wildfires, or flooding of tropical allies through hurricanes or tsunamis, all have the potential to impact the democratic function of those nations. Each having the backs of the rest is essential to the long-term survival of the alliance, and of democracy itself.
With the United States withdrawing its leadership on the world stage, retreating from democracy, abandoning NATO and threatening its allies, sending military secrets to Russia, and otherwise breaking the world order as all of us have known it our entire adult lives, we can see it one of two ways.
Either we can get upset and depressed, wondering what smouldering ruins we will leave for the next generation, or we can assert our leadership and bring together the world’s most stable democracies into a single cohesive alliance built on protecting the power of the people over that of the oligarchs.
The DEMAT nations would be a more fluid group than NATO is today. Any country that reaches democratic thresholds established in its creations would be welcome to join. Any member that ceases to meet those thresholds will lose their voice at the table and the mutual assistance that comes with it. And as Carney said, if you are not at the table, you are on the menu.
It would be a powerful affirmative reason to democratise. Ukraine, still low on both sample indexes referenced, would have a clearer path to DEMAT membership than they ever will to NATO, thanks to this different approach, and Costa Rica, scoring high on both, would be invited as a founding partner along with most of Europe, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand. The United States, on the other hand, would not be welcome until they are no longer considered a “Deficient Democracy.”
It takes someone to make the first move toward this interpretation of the new world order, and Canada’s leadership currently has both the understanding of the situation and the wherewithall to make it happen.
Let’s imagine a world where democracies defend each other and build each other up until they are, collectively, the fourth world power — but also give us a way to remove infections before they spread.
This is a new world order I could get behind.