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Podcast: How healthy is the US-Canada relationship?
Listen: On the GZERO World podcast, Ian Bremmer delves into the current status of the US-Canada relationship. In a nutshell: it's going well — definitely a lot better than under Donald Trump — but not all smooth sailing.
Ian interviews the ambassadors of both countries, David Cohen (US Ambassador to Canada) and Kirsten Hillman (Canadian Ambassador to the US), about what brings the two countries together and the challenges that trigger political division. He also chats with Anita Anand, Canada's defense minister, about a variety of national security challenges, from Chinese spy balloons to ... TikTok.
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U.S. President Joe Biden and Canadian PM Justin Trudeau during a bilateral meeting at the North American Leaders' Summit in Mexico City, Mexico, January 10, 2023.
Biden-Trudeau talks focus on immigration and defense
Amid the pomp and pageantry accompanying President Joe Biden’s first official visit to Canada, he and Canadian PM Justin Trudeau are looking to make some deals.
Even before Biden’s arrival late Thursday, news broke that the two countries had reached an agreement on irregular migration flows across the US-Canada border, a sticking point for both governments. An influx of asylum-seekers across the Roxham Road crossing into Quebec has dogged relations, with nearly 40,000 migrants crossing in 2022 alone.
Trudeau has been asking the US to renegotiate the Safe Third Country Agreement, which requires asylum-seekers who cross select border points to be sent back to the country where they first entered. Why? Because it encourages migrants to enter at irregular crossings like Roxham Road, and once they’re in Canada they can legally make asylum claims.
The precise details of the new migration deal are still under wraps, but Canada has reportedly agreed to take in 15,000 migrants from the Western Hemisphere through official channels. The agreement also would reportedly allow both countries to turn away asylum-seekers who cross the border without authorization.
The Biden-Trudeau talks on Friday are also expected to turn to defense. Last month’s Chinese spy balloon fiasco has led to increased pressure on both leaders to ramp up security. North Korean missile tests and Russian advances in missile technology have added more urgency to North American defense.
A new Maru Public/GZERO poll finds that the vast majority of Americans and Canadians (93% and 91%, respectively) want the two countries to boost security efforts, and most Canadians favor either a joint missile-defense system or having US missiles on Canadian soil.
With both Canada and the US being behind on the modernization of the North American Aerospace Defense Command – much of its radar systems are from the 1980s – Friday’s discussions are likely to touch on NORAD investment.
Biden is expected to push Trudeau on military spending – like many NATO members, Canada lags behind its defense spending target of 2% GDP. Canadian NORAD officials complain that current military capabilities are sluggish. Last year, Trudeau’s government pledged $4.9 billion to upgrade NORAD, but Americans are skeptical about the speed at which Canada can deliver.
The war in Ukraine is also putting Arctic defense back on the map. The Maru/GZERO poll showed that majorities in both the US and Canada support a joint military presence in the Arctic. Receding ice in the region has freed up shipping lanes, portending new access to lucrative resources like oil and rare-earth minerals. The region’s security would take on even more geopolitical importance should Finland and Sweden join NATO, possibly making it a new frontline pitting Russia against the West.
There's no shortage of thorny issues for Biden and Trudeau to tackle, from defense and immigration to trade and Ukraine. For more on the presidential visit, be sure to join us on Twitter Friday at 12pm ET. We’ll be talking with Forbes' Diane Brady, Eurasia Group's Gerald Butts, and GZERO's Evan Solomon, breaking down what Biden and Trudeau need to accomplish during their meeting. Set a reminder here.
To stay up to date on crucial US-Canada relations, be sure to subscribe to our new newsletter, GZERO North.
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A woman pushes a baby carriage carrying her belongings, in the aftermath of the deadly earthquake, in Adiyaman, Turkey.
What We’re Watching: Erdogan points the finger, Xi’s conundrum, Russia’s recent losses
Ankara searches for someone to blame
As the search and rescue effort in Turkey and Syria becomes increasingly disheartening a week after a deadly 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit the region, the central government in Ankara has turned to recriminations, issuing 113 arrest warrants for people suspected of being responsible for the thousands of collapsed buildings. Engineers and building contractors are among those who have been given detention orders (though only 12 have so far been taken into custody) after 170,000 buildings collapsed or were badly damaged. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, however, has sent mixed messages on liability: After first saying that “such things have always happened” in quake-prone Turkey, he has also pushed for more arrests. Some analysts suggest that – ahead of a tough reelection battle in May – Erdogan is trying to divert blame for failing to enforce building regulations and refusing to account for the billions of dollars raised under an earthquake tax implemented after the devastating İzmit quake in 1999. Authorities say that the security situation is also deteriorating in southern Turkey, where lootings and clashes between rival groups are rife. Still, amid the devastation there is a very small silver lining: The border crossing between Turkey and Armenia opened Saturday for the first time in more than three decades to allow aid through.
Flying objects soar over North America
Another day, another flying object taken down over North America. Two contraptions were shot down after hovering in US and Canadian airspace in recent days – one over Lake Huron in Michigan on Sunday, and the other over Canadian airspace, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau giving the go-ahead to an American fighter jet to blast it on Saturday. This came after another device was shot down Friday over Alaska, which was a week after the Pentagon said that a Chinese spy balloon, capable of intelligence gathering, had been detected and shot down off the coast of South Carolina. The Pentagon has not attributed the subsequent flying objects to China, and Beijing, for its part, accused the US of sending 10 balloons into Chinese airspace last year. But still, it seems fair to ask what Beijing’s game plan is here. Some analysts have suggested that President Xi Jinping might not have even been aware that the first intelligence-gathering device was hovering in US airspace, while others say it was a miscalculation on Beijing’s part. Either way, it’s fair to assume that this drama is the last thing the embattled Chinese leader wants right now. After years of self-imposed zero-COVID chaos, Xi’s first priority is to get the battered Chinese economy back on track – and Xi knows that he needs to reduce tensions with Washington in order to do that. For better or worse, the US remains China’s top trading partner, with two-way trade coming out to $2 billion a day. As long as that remains the case, Xi will need to rein in the balloon activity.
Russia’s heavy losses
In a bombshell report Sunday, the UK Defense Ministry said that Russia has experienced the highest number of casualties over the past two weeks than at any other time since the war erupted almost one year ago. Most of the heavy fighting in recent weeks has been around the city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. While the Kremlin isn’t exactly forthcoming with war data, Western intelligence now claims that Russia is approaching 200,000 casualties all up, which would be eight times higher than all American casualties in Afghanistan over two decades of war. Lack of trained personnel and faulty equipment are two reasons for Russia’s mounting death toll and partly why Moscow is having difficulty with recruitment. Indeed, the Wagner Group, a private army of thousands of trained mercenaries owned by Putin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin, is reportedly having scarce luck convincing incarcerated Russians to join the fight in exchange for eventual amnesty. (Prigozhin, for his part, said recently that they had stopped recruiting inmates, though it seems more likely that incarcerated Russians are looking at the body bags piling up and saying, “no thanks, we’ll take prison.”) This comes amid reports that Prigozhin is increasingly at loggerheads with the Russian military over tactics and military structure (infighting is never good for war). Meanwhile, Kyiv is calling on the West to quickly send fighter jets in preparation for a Russian offensive, which it says will begin very soon.
Sen. Mitt Romney on TikTok: Shut it down
In response to news of a Chinese spy balloon floating over sensitive national security areas in the United States, Utah Senator Mitt Romney tweeted on Friday morning, “A big Chinese balloon in the sky and millions of Chinese TikTok balloons on our phones. Let’s shut them all down.”
\u201cA big Chinese balloon in the sky and millions of Chinese TikTok balloons on our phones. Let\u2019s shut them all down.\u201d— Senator Mitt Romney (@Senator Mitt Romney) 1675438961
It’s not the first time that the Senator has insisted, in no uncertain terms, that the wildly popular social media app should be banned here in the United States.
In an exclusive GZERO World interview with Ian Bremmer, Romney said, “If there is a capacity of the Chinese Communist Party to be able to spy on American citizens by using TikTok, then we have to prevent it from being used here.”
Watch the GZERO World episode: Sen. Mitt Romney on DC dysfunction, Russian attacks, and banning TikTok
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China's spy balloon chills relations with US
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here and I'm at Columbia University, just about to teach my class. I just got back to New York and a Quick Take to kick off your week.
Of course, what we're talking about right now is the balloon, which was made for television. I mean, you know, you get to watch on the map as it's traveling across the country and check the popularity ratings. Democrats, Republicans, what do you think about the balloon? The reality is this is not going to be talked about in another week, but it is inconvenient, the timing for a few different reasons. First of all, because you have the State of the Union coming up tomorrow. And as a consequence, President Biden is going to have to address it in a very public way, and therefore it puts more of a chill in US-China relations.
Secondly, it came right before Secretary of State Blinken's planned trip to Beijing that was going to include unusually a meeting directly with Xi Jinping. That's something that both Biden and Xi really wanted to get done. And now it has been postponed, frankly, without a date, at least in the near-term future, that it is going to be reset for.
And then finally, because the Chinese have been trying to engage in a charm offensive, certainly since ending the zero-COVID policy, making it an everyone-gets-COVID policy and wanting to show stronger Chinese growth, meaning opening up. And that means talking about reopening the economy, trying to ensure that people in the international markets, investments, are feeling more comfortable doing business with China. This puts a chill on all of that in the context and against the backdrop of what has been some challenging US-China politics.
For example, secondary sanctions against the Chinese company in the last week for doing business with the Wagner Group in Russia. Investigative work that has shown the Chinese have been sending more military equipment, related equipment, not direct arms and materiel, but spare parts, jamming equipment and the like that has helped the Russians with the war in Ukraine, something that the Chinese had been very wary to do in the initial months. Looks like they may be loosening there, and the Americans aren't happy about that.
And then, of course, you have the continued politics around things like Taiwan, the potential for direct confrontation there. You've got further export controls on semiconductors. It doesn't feel like it's a very happy relationship right now. And yet, President Biden and President Xi both want to put a floor under that relationship. They want it to be more stable than it's been, in part because the American private sector that spends a lot of money in lobbying for policies want to continue to do business with the Chinese, and in part because all American allies want tighter security with the US but they also want to continue to have large amounts of economic exposure to China.
Are there any lessons that are learned from here? Well, one is that China makes mistakes. This was clearly a mistake. Yes, there have been other incidents of balloons cutting across the United States for smaller amounts of time during the Trump administration. Apparently, Trump was not aware. The US was not aware of it at the time. Maybe Xi Jinping thought he could get away with this much larger balloon over the course of several days. He was badly advised. Some heads probably rolling internally in defense over in China.
Secondarily. Biden himself is constrained when this stuff gets public. We saw it before with Nancy Pelosi's trip to Taiwan. Biden had been trying to stop Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker, from making that trip. It got public, the trip got leaked, and then suddenly Democrats and Republicans are all in the crossfire of, "You can't look weak, you can't look weak on China." As a consequence, Biden had to back off, support the trip. And then you saw military escalation from the Chinese as a consequence. That's exactly what happened here.
Before the public knew about this balloon, Biden was still very much planning on sending Blinken to China and to meet with Xi Jinping. Biden knew about the balloon. The White House knew. The public didn't and as a consequence, Biden said, "I can still send the secretary of state." As soon as it became public. He had to back off. He also had to shoot the thing down, which, frankly, I suspect he wasn't going to do right before a Blinken trip if it hadn't made it into the public.
In other words, the reality of polarization in the US political system and the performative nature of, "we've got to take these guys on," can undermine US national security interests and can make escalation more likely between the two most powerful countries in the world.
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