The hour is later than you think (updated)
Welcome to Xi Jinping's 'Community of the Common Destiny of Humankind'.
Scratch the previous emailed version, which was garbled. This is the version that works.
First off: Happy Yanksgiving Day weekend to those of my subscribers who observe the holiday.
It can’t be pleasant for you down there, to have learned that your president’s billionaire “special envoy” Steve Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev, the boss of Russia’s $300 billion frozen sovereign wealth fund, have been conspiring with President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to dismember Ukraine in exchange for unimaginably lucrative investment favours from Vladimir Putin.
Sorry about that. Let’s get to it.
Above the paywall, the main attraction is the thing I’ve been wholly preoccupied with since my return from Ottawa last weekend (see Dangerously obsolete notions about the news). Today’s Real Story newsletter is not unrelated to all that but it’s more directly related to the huge patch of real estate I’ve taken up in the National Post this weekend.
A full front page with the tag ‘Beijing’s dismantling of democracy is occurring so rapidly it’s barely noticed’ takes you to an entire page inside under the headline China is a predator: Détente with Beijing should be out of the question. And I was only scratching the surface.
The late-breaking revelations involving Witkoff and Dmitriev have unfortunately proved the point that shows up in the second paragraph of my Post investigation - the bit about President Trump’s capitulation to Beijing’s satrapy in Moscow by way of Witkoff’s terms of Ukrainian surrender to Russia. It’s as ugly as it looks.
Below the paywall I have a look at the new field of intelligence on the cognitive warfare Beijing’s global alliance of autocrats is waging on us, as well as some background on events in Syria you almost certainly haven’t heard about that reinforce my conclusion that Benjamin Netanyahu has got to go, and soon.
On a brighter note, I have some encouraging news down there from Dublin. It’s about some welcome and long overdue resistance to the jackeens who have turned Ireland into the most antisemitic principality in Europe. The issue at hand here won’t be decided until a Dublin council meeting Monday night, and it’s a close fight. It matters. It makes me angry because it’s personal, so bear with me. I’m hopeful for a win. You’ll see.
Anyway, here we go.
Harbingers of the emerging new world order
In the Post, I run through quite a few examples of Beijing’s encirclement of the liberal democracies and its brazen incursions into the world’s shrinking democratic spaces. Do read it when you’re done here. There’s a whole raft of resources in this newsletter with links in the text, but do yourself a favour and just read through this newsletter so you don’t get bogged down (come for the story, stay for the links and references).
I shouldn’t need to point out that Canada is deeply compromised already. The Real Story archives contain a fairly complete chronicle of the predicament. An inkling: From three years ago, Is Canada already too far gone? From two years ago: Beijing’s Best Canadian Friends, Part Etcetera: When Is A Foreign Influence Operation A Liberal Policy Paradigm? and China’s “Magic Weapon” Hits Canadian Targets. From earlier this year: Does the future belong to China?
Do recall what the Chief of Defence Staff General Wayne Eyre told the House of Commons standing committee on national security: “Russia and China are not just looking at regime survival but regime expansion. They consider themselves to be at war with the West. . . They strive to destroy the social cohesion of liberal democracies and the credibility of our own institutions to ensure our model of government is seen as a failure.”
Try maintaining détente with enemies like that.
And all that’s to say nothing about the way Beijing fosters the dependency of Canada’s critical industries on Chinese state buyers in such a way as to pit prairie canola farmers against the Ontario autoworkers who are being browbeaten into accepting China’s massive overproduction of subsidized electric vehicles. Good news on that front though, from Angus Reid: Three-in-five Canadians say “missing out on development and jobs because of a lack of investment” is preferable to “losing sovereignty.”
Pipelines, Oh God Not Pipelines Again
Pertinent: All that oil that Prime Minister Mark Carney is suddenly so happy to push through Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s hoped-for pipeline, which British Columbian’s aren’t especially happy about accommodating: Where do you think it’s all going?
In the interminable national shouting matches about oil pipelines, what’s gone overlooked: Even before a new pipeline to the west coast gets built, a far greater share of Alberta’s oil being pumped through B.C. already is going to China as opposed to the United States.
After the federally-funded Trans Mountain expansion was completed last year, allowing for 890,000 barrels a day to be tubed to the coast, the average flow rates for shipments to China reached 207,000 barrels’ worth every day. That already exceeded the 173,000 barrels daily pumped through Trans Mountain bound for U.S. ports.
By last month, flows of Canadian oil to China reached record highs - about 70 percent of the oil cargoes that left the B.C. coast in October ended up in China’s stockpiles, which are already brimming with cheap, discounted Russian and Iranian oil.
Congratulations, ye hewers of wood and drawers of water! This is excellent, by the way: Canada is climbing out of Trump’s frying pan and into Xi’s fire.
Meet The New World Police
Globally, here’s just one more piece of evidence I didn’t even get around to mentioning in the Post. A Carnegie Endowment Asia Program analysis of the global expansion of Beijing’s “internal” security infrastructure over the past 25 years shows that China’s Global Security Initiative has left its mark on at least 138 of the 193 United Nations’ member states.
The “functional intensity” of China’s domestic security training now provides Beijing with a critical role in the internal security organs and policing practices of most of the world’s nation states. By “policing practices,” the Carnegie researchers explain they means the capacities of the host country’s internal security agencies, including not just law enforcement but protective services, “counterterrorism” operations, gendarmerie and paramilitary forces, and “bureaucracies engaged in internal security work.”
In the Post I point out that the Chinese Communist Party’s advances are occurring in small ways and in leaps and bounds and at such a rapid pace that half the time they’re barely even noticed anymore.
You might want to bear in mind what I reported in last week’s newsletter: There are no more than 60 full-time Canadian journalists in Canada covering “world events” even off the side of their desks these days, and 45 of those journalists work for the CBC. Not to be mean to the CBC, but apart from the occasional contribution from Radio Canada/RCI, can you think of a single instance of CBC News breaking a story about Beijing’s long reach into Canada?
I certainly can’t.
About the small ways and leaps and bounds I didn’t even mention: Critical minerals chokepoints, Artificial Intelligence, and most important, the thing you hardly ever hear anything about: Cognitive warfare.” Coming up, right now. . .