Canada’s ‘middle power’ diplomacy no longer works in China

In Chinese mythology, the king of Yelang — a minor kingdom in southwest China during the Han dynasty — is portrayed as a ruler who thought that he was the most powerful man on earth. He wasn’t, of course. The point of the myth is that this petty tyrant had an outrageously exaggerated sense of his and his kingdom’s importance in the world order of his time.

The story now figures in Chinese culture as a cautionary tale, one that draws attention to the ubiquitous tendency toward parochial arrogance — to the view that one’s own provincial kingdom is somehow at the center of “all under heaven.”

This famous story aptly captures the essence of Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly’s recent visit to China.

Presented with the opportunity to engage with her Chinese counterpart, the minister had a choice: She could either spend her time negotiating some of the practical issues at the heart of the fractured Sino-Canadian relationship, or she could pretend that Ottawa actually had something significant and important to say about global and regional security issues — something that Beijing would be interested in hearing and that might even shape China’s foreign and security policy.

As with the story of Yelang, it seems that Joly might have taken the route of parochial arrogance.

Bilateral economic and diplomatic relations have become strained between China and Canada in recent years, thanks in part to Canada’s allegations that China meddled in its elections. If the purpose of Joly’s visit to Beijing was to repair relations to the extent possible, then whatever time she spent with her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, was well spent. (With the proviso, of course, that nothing said by the minister smacked of surrender or undue accommodation.)

But if Joly spent any of her limited schedule in Beijing discussing “complex global and regional security issues,” that would have been time seriously misspent. Why? Because Canada’s traditional “middle power” diplomacy is no longer effective in regards to global security issues such as the war in Ukraine and the conflict in Gaza. She would have been wasting her breath.

In an increasingly multipolar world, the siren song of Canada’s middle power diplomacy has effectively been drowned out by the noise of great power competition. The rise of China, the resurgence of Russia and the ongoing assertiveness of other regional powers have created a complex and challenging international environment in which Canada’s traditional approach is ill-suited to advance its interests.

Moreover, Canada’s middle power status has been further eroded by the declining influence of multilateral institutions, a key arena within which Canada once pursued its middle power diplomacy. The rise of nationalism and protectionism, coupled with the increasing assertiveness of non-Western powers, has undermined the efficacy of traditional multilateral forums. As a result, Canada’s ability to shape global outcomes through multilateral cooperation has been largely diminished.

Similarly, with respect to regional security issues, Canada simply lacks the standing, leverage and moral authority to engage China in a serious negotiation around Indo-Pacific security. Canada is not a consequential regional security player in the Indo-Pacific. Or, put slightly differently, Canada is not now and likely never will be an Indo-Pacific “middle power” in the current sense of that term — that is, a power defined by its rootedness in the Indo-Pacific region, by its considerable economic and military capacity relative to other Indo-Pacific states or by its historical and cultural pedigree as a member of the Indo-Pacific civilization.

This being the case, nothing Foreign Minister Joly said to Foreign Minister Wang on the topic of global or regional security is likely to have had the slightest effect on China’s grand strategy, regional policy or global military posture. If she did raise these issues, it would have been the diplomatic equivalent of, in the words of one Chinese proverb, “playing a harp to a cow.”

So, unlike during the long-past heyday of Canadian middle power diplomacy, in today’s world, no one — and especially not Beijing — pays any attention whatsoever to what Ottawa has to say about global and regional security issues.

To be sure, this is painful for Canadians to accept. But it is the hard, cold reality that they must acknowledge and embrace if they actually want to advance and defend their national interests in the real world. To cling to nostalgic notions that Canada is an indispensable middle power that punches above its weight on the international stage is hallucinatory.

I hope Joly devoted all of her time in Beijing to addressing key bilateral issues related to Canada’s narrow national interests. And I hope she did so in a way that did not make her sound like the foreign minister of Yelang.

Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., a senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, and a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities in Washington, D.C.