PETER BRUCE | With a government like ours, the ‘middle power’ boat will pass us by

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is fast becoming the leader of what used to be the “Free World”.

This past week he compounded his growing stature by telling US President Donald Trump to go suck, abruptly ending trade talks and possibly starting a trade war with the world’s biggest economy and its president, an unhinged and corrupt madman.

Carney is a sophisticated man, a former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England. He came into office directly as a result of Trump insulting Canada by calling it the 51st US state.

Standing up to Trump’s demands that Canada drop French language requirements on its imports and clear all future trade deals with Washington has been wildly popular with Canadians.

In Davos in February, Carney made a pitch for what he called the world’s “middle powers” to stand together as Trump seeks to recast the post-World War 2 order, alienating allies, starting wars he can’t end and ending wars that barely exist. The middle powers would somehow draw close around shared values, keep their foreign policy options open and not gather around any superpower.

As a direct response to the new world Carney is trying to frame, former South African deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas launched his new Nucleus Institute this week with a seminar on our role, if we have one, as a middle power. “The idea of a ‘middle power moment’,” Jonas said, “asks what we can do to respond to the crisis, and what we should do to shape the global order and advance our national and collective interests.

There’s no place in the middle club for a country unable to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

“Unlike superpowers, middle powers cannot set the rules of the international system ... [but] they can build consent to global rules and influence the trajectory of change. They can construct new alliances and convene, mediate and build coalitions.”

Jonas is a good guy, and plainly, following him over time, he’s less than thrilled about our foreign policy being built around our membership of Brics and our claim at the same time that we are non-aligned. This, of course, is not possible.

There’s no place in the middle club for a country unable to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We consistently abstain in the UN on Russia votes, taking sides and calling it non-alignment.

And it was out of the Brics summit in Johannesburg that Iran became a full member of Brics. While Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prosecute their corrosive war on Iran, the mullahs in Tehran are getting a diplomatic break, but they’ll come out of Trump’s war stronger and more murderous (of their own citizens) than ever.

But Trump brings into sharp focus the futility of Brics to a country like ours. OK, it’s a break with the Western world’s dominance and all that if you must, but the Western world is fragmenting itself, and suddenly there are so many exciting new possibilities around.

I was in France when President Cyril Ramaphosa visited in July. It didn’t get much media, but the French made a huge fuss of him. The fact is that Europe likes us. And it likes Carney and Canada, and there’s a middle power momentum building. One of the main speakers at Jonas’s launch was the Canadian ambassador here.

But if we sup with devils like Russia and Iran, we permanently exclude ourselves from the inner sanctums of a potentially formidable and exciting democratic post-Trump world.

“Middle powers, by definition,” said Jonas, “must have the capacity to deploy some kind of power or leverage. They are not condemned to the fate of the truly powerless, to suffer what they must.

“They can build consent to global rules and influence the trajectory of change. They might broker an end to global conflicts or reach agreements that help stabilise financial markets, bring order to economic relations, and protect their commerce where it counts most.”

Exactly. And this is our dilemma. Brics or building a new democratic order? India, also in Brics, is big enough to get away with its ties with Moscow, but we aren’t. We should be Chile.

China is also standing up to Trump, which is good. US debt has just topped $40-trillion (about R647-trillion) and there’s a clamour among its creditors now to sell their dollar holdings unless US interest rates rise, which Trump desperately doesn’t want. That’s why the rand is rising against the dollar.

But cheap Chinese imports are laying waste to much of our industrial arsenal and they seem unstoppable. Ships loaded with electronic vehicles are leaving Chinese ports without any final markets for their cargo.

Flooding the rest of the world with the stuff you make because your domestic demand has collapsed isn’t the way a responsible ally behaves. We should pick our friends more carefully, but with the government we have, I’m afraid Jonas isn’t going to get very far.