The Daily Populous Monday January 13rd, 2025 day edition
Authored by thetimes.com and submitted by TimesandSundayTimes

In May 2016, when Justin Trudeau made his first appearance at a G7 summit, it was still possible to believe in a rules-based liberal international order. Taking his seat at the leaders’ table for a working lunch inside the Shima Kanko hotel, on Japan’s Kashiko Island, Trudeau, buttressed by winning a large majority in Canada’s general election the year before, must have felt secure.

That security was both tangible and intangible. It took shape outside the luxury resort in the form of the hulking Izumo-class helicopter destroyers of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defence Force, deployed around the tranquil waters of Ago Bay to guard the global leadership of the West.

But more reassuring than any warship was the security of being among like-minded leaders. Barack Obama, David Cameron, Angela Merkel, Matteo Renzi, Shinzo Abe and François Hollande hailed from different nations and different political traditions, but they all shared a common faith in open trade and multilateralism, democratic solidarity and co-operative security, all under the protective canopy of American leadership. Trudeau was intent on steering Canada in the same direction.

The class of 2016, left to right: Donald Tusk of the European Council, Matteo Renzi of Italy, Angela Merkel, Barack Obama, Shinzo Abe of Japan, François Hollande, David Cameron, Justin Trudeau and Jean-Claude Juncker of the European Commission KURITA KAKU/JAPAN POOL/GAMMA-RAPHO VIA GETTY IMAGES

With no chance of serious political disagreement between these leaders, the international press instead focused on the recently elected Trudeau, then the newest boy in the G7 class of 2016.

“He received glowing media coverage,” recalls Stephen Maher, author of The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau. “A British magazine called him a ‘total Mr Hotsticks’. It wasn’t the kind of thing you normally hear about the Canadian prime minister.”

Trudeau, “a feminist heartthrob” who had introduced the first “gender-balanced” cabinet in Canadian history the previous year, was mobbed by young women wherever he went in Japan. “He was a dashing Disney prince who gave the world a symbol of progressive glamour,” says Maher.

Justin Trudeau was given breathless coverage when he took office in 2015 CARLOS OSORIO/TORONTO STAR VIA GETTY IMAGES

Yet within a month of the summit, Britain had voted to leave the European Union, and within six months Donald Trump had been elected to the US presidency.

“Justin, your voice is going to be needed more,” Barack Obama told Trudeau in their last bilateral meeting, Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes recounts in his memoir, The World As It Is. “You’re going to have to speak out when certain values are threatened.” Trudeau promised Obama he would. It’s fair to say he hasn’t succeeded.

Before his resignation last week, Trudeau was the final leader standing from that class of 2016. The son of former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, over his three terms of office, Trudeau’s commitments to LGBT rights, refugees, carbon taxes began to grate with Canadian voters, especially after Canada’s slow economic recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. He also suffered during a bruising 2022 face-off with truckers protesting about vaccine mandates.

The world stage that Trudeau leaves behind is transformed; the values he promised Obama that he would defend have crumbled. Trump is back, stronger and more empowered. In Canada, Pierre Poilievre, a brash conservative, is poised to win power. “It’s as if Poilievre was grown in a lab to be the opposite of Trudeau,” says Maher.

Across the West, other right-wing populists — from Giorgia Meloni to Marine Le Pen to Nigel Farage — are either in power or surging. The elemental forces that were supposed to have vanished at the end of the Cold War — illiberalism, protectionism, spheres of influence, autocracy, territorial revisionism — have all reasserted themselves. There are more conflicts across the globe today than at any time since 1945.

On Thursday morning, I watched David Lammy give a speech in Whitehall that acknowledged this new reality. “When will things get back to normal?” the foreign secretary asked rhetorically. “My answer is that they will not.”

Lammy, once a critic of Brexit and Donald Trump, was attempting to acknowledge a changed reality. Although he still talks of being guided by “progressive realism” (which means moderating liberal ideals with pragmatism), he also recognised the primacy of security in unstable times.

“We must stop the 1990s clouding our vision. The post-Cold War peace is well and truly over,” Lammy declared as he announced measures to tackle illegal migration.

As his speech made all too clear, that picture from the G7 in 2016 now looks like a missive from a different world, one in which like-minded western leaders could — in theory at least — get together and shape events as they pleased.

“The G7 simply lacks the capacity to engineer reality from above,” said Robert D Kaplan, the author of the forthcoming Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis. “All these proclamations about the liberal world order no longer mesh with a world that is just too complex, too populated and too involved in its own struggles to really pay attention to the G7.”

The class of 2016 had their political sensibilities forged by the post-Cold War “End of History” peace, each of them governed from the assumptions of that era, even as those assumptions began to melt like ice beneath their feet.

Not only did these leaders misread the way critical issues such as mass immigration, rapid technological change, media fracture and Russian and Chinese irredentism would transform their world. But in many cases, whether through hubris or complacency, these would-be custodians of the liberal world order sowed the seeds of its destruction.

Barack Obama promised a new relationship with a nuclear-powered Iran, victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan, a closure of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and a “reset” with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

President Barack Obama in 2016, his last year in office, when he believed Donald Trump would never reach the White House PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS / AP PHOTO

In each case Obama failed. Just a few months prior to the Kashiko Island G7 meeting, he had implemented the Iran nuclear deal, which sought to remodel the Middle East and bring Iran into the international fold. Trump pulled out of this deal in his first term, and — as America’s ally Israel and Iran now flirt with all-out war — Obama’s vision for the Middle East is in tatters.

In 2016, Obama repeatedly predicted that an “unfit” Donald Trump would not win the presidency. He was not alone in underestimating his political adversaries. David Cameron arrived at the 2016 G7 summit in Japan wanting to focus on “antimicrobial resistance”. Yet at home, the Brexit referendum was entering its last weeks, with Cameron’s Remain side confident that it could ensure victory by scaring voters with visions of economic collapse.

Instead Cameron found himself washed away by a furious insurrection. His brand of bashfully liberal, centrist politics was scorned as arrogant, remote and blind to deep frustrations in British society. Italy’s Matteo Renzi was caught out by a similar anti-establishment dynamic in a referendum that proposed changes to the Italian constitution in December 2016, mere months after Brexit.

David Cameron and his family leave Downing Street for the last time, in July 2016, a month after losing the EU referendum JACK HILL / TIMES NEWSPAPERS LTD

Both Renzi and Cameron resigned after their defeats, and it’s a telling indication of how interchangeable the world views of those leaders were that both Renzi and Cameron had employed Jim Messina, who managed Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, to work on their doomed campaigns.

After Trump’s election, with Obama gone from the world stage, the western world searched for a new figurehead.

Hollande wasn’t an option. His France had all but given up the pretence it led Europe, let alone the world. Hollande’s Socialist Party has never recovered from his leadership. From being one of the two major parties of the French Republic, by 2022 the Socialists were minnows, with just 27 seats in the National Assembly, making them the sixth largest party. Hollande’s slumping popularity and failure to get a grip on jihadist terror saw him leave office in 2017.

Step forward Trudeau and Merkel. After Trump’s win, no less a luminary than Bono argued that “the world needs more Canada”. In October 2016 the cover of The Economist depicted the Statue of Liberty haloed in a maple leaf. Lady Liberty also had a hockey stick tucked under her arm, alongside the headline: “Liberty moves north: Canada’s example to the world”.

During Trump’s first term it was Merkel, even more than Trudeau, who had supposedly taken up the mantle. Politico called her “the world’s last, best hope”. When she left office in 2021, Pew Research Centre noted that Merkel’s popularity ratings in most of 16 advanced economies had reached an all-time high.

It did not take long for the picture to change completely. By the time that G7 meeting was held in 2016, Merkel too had set events in motion that would corrode her legacy.

In 2015, with the Syrian civil war driving a wave of migrants towards Europe, Merkel agreed to let more than one million refugees into Germany. It was hailed as a historic act of moral rectitude, and Merkel was given the UN’s Nansen Refugee Award. Today, the hard-right Alternative for Germany party is surging in elections as the country turns fiercely on the idea of open borders.

Angela Merkel poses for a selfie with a Syrian refugee in Berlin, 2015 SEAN GALLUP/GETTY IMAGES

In June 2015, an agreement had also been signed between Gazprom and various European energy companies to build Nord Stream 2, a pipeline between Germany and Russia that left Europe dependent on Russian gas and emboldened Vladimir Putin. The Ukraine war has left the Nord Stream project in ruins.

This is not a case of hindsight, argues Sir Robin Niblett, a distinguished fellow at Chatham House. “Angela Merkel’s support for Nord Stream 2 was highly contested, particularly in the US.”

The opening ceremony of Nord Stream 1 in 2011: Merkel and then-Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, fifth right, turn a wheel to symbolise the release of gas SEAN GALLUP/GETTY IMAGES

Unlike Merkel, whose legacy has only recently been reassessed, Trudeau leaves office a pariah. High inflation and a shortage of housing torpedoed his government. Only 34 per cent of Canadians today say they are “very proud” to be Canadian, down from 52 per cent in 2016. “He often saw politics as a vehicle for others to enjoy his princely magnificence,” observes Maher.

A picture of Justin Trudeau in “blackface” at an Arabian Nights party in 2001 emerged before the Canadian election in 2021 damaged his reputation

The biographer says that “narcissism” was the word Trudeau’s ministers deployed to describe their old boss. Maher nevertheless thinks that Trudeau’s reputation will improve among Canadians over time.

The recovery of the liberal order seems more distant. Trump’s first term saw the US systematically challenge the institutions and partnerships that it had itself led for more than 70 years. His return — with threats last week against Greenland and Panama — guarantees further challenges. What remains of the old order will be looser than it was in the pre-Trump era, predicts Professor Edward Luttwak, a strategist who has worked with the US government on foreign policy since the 1970s.

Luttwak expects a more minimalist approach to western diplomacy. “The only way to get to a ‘rules-based international order,’” he argues, “is to proceed with an absolute minimum of rules, and then apply them uncompromisingly.”

This new reality will doubtless be top of the agenda at the next G7, which will be held in June in Alberta, Canada. One thing is certain: in both body and spirit, Justin Trudeau will be very much absent.

Daniferd on January 12nd, 2025 at 20:12 UTC »

The collapse of western liberal order is primarily attributable to their terrible governance. Their own incompetence did far more harm to their electability and legacy than any Russian or Chinese propaganda.

No_Mix_6835 on January 12nd, 2025 at 19:21 UTC »

One of the main issues I see with articles like these is how easily they align leaders as rightwing or leftwing. These labels as seen through the myopic lens of the western media really needs some self-introspection. That said, nations evolve and needs of countries change. These are cycles.

TimesandSundayTimes on January 12nd, 2025 at 18:58 UTC »

From The Times:

In May 2016, when Justin Trudeau made his first appearance at a G7 summit, it was still possible to believe in a rules-based liberal international order. Taking his seat at the leaders’ table, Trudeau, buttressed by winning a large majority in Canada’s general election the year before, must have felt secure.

But more reassuring than any warship was the security of being among like-minded leaders. Barack Obama, David Cameron, Angela Merkel, Matteo Renzi, Shinzo Abe and François Hollande hailed from different nations and different political traditions, but they all shared a common faith in open trade and multilateralism, democratic solidarity and co-operative security, all under the protective canopy of American leadership. Trudeau was intent on steering Canada in the same direction.

Yet within a month of the summit, Britain had voted to leave the European Union, and within six months Donald Trump had been elected to the US presidency.

The world stage that Trudeau leaves behind is transformed; the values he promised Obama that he would defend have crumbled. Trump is back, stronger and more empowered. In Canada, Pierre Poilievre, a brash conservative, is poised to win power.

Across the West, other right-wing populists — from Giorgia Meloni to Marine Le Pen to Nigel Farage — are either in power or surging. The elemental forces that were supposed to have vanished at the end of the Cold War — illiberalism, protectionism, spheres of influence, autocracy, territorial revisionism — have all reasserted themselves. There are more conflicts across the globe today than at any time since 1945. The recovery of the liberal order seems more distant.

Read the article in full here: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/article/liberal-world-order-justin-trudeau-obama-david-cameron-53v2zhqns?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Reddit#Echobox=1736690917