‘A foreign policy based on short memory’: Carney continues push to diversify from the U.S.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has moved away from a 'values-based' foreign policy to focus on the bottom line in an increasingly chaotic world.

If you want to understand Prime Minister Mark Carney’s approach to foreign policy, meet the chartered professional accountant he put in charge of it.

Arun Thangaraj, formerly the deputy minister of Transport Canada, was appointed to the top bureaucratic role at Global Affairs Canada on Wednesday morning.

Thangaraj’s previous stint at the department was as its chief financial officer, and his foreign policy experience also includes a time as deputy chief financial officer at the Canadian International Development Agency.

The shuffle is another data point in what we can reasonably, by now, call Carney’s foreign policy — one driven by transactional relationships, that prioritizes economic growth, and stands up for Canadian “values” only when feasible.

That might be what Carney was talking about at Davos in January, when he said Canada would deal with “the world as it is,” not as “we wish it to be.”

Canadian foreign policy over the last year and a half has been driven, inescapably, by Donald Trump’s dissolution of the U.S. as a superpower that guaranteed stability and security for its allies. Trump’s trade war has forced Canada to seek out new deals with other major economies. The alternative is economic “subordination” to an increasingly chaotic and lawless regime, Carney suggested in his much-celebrated speech.

That’s obliged Carney to try and smooth over differences with China — which just last year he called the greatest national security threat to Canada — and India, whose government Carney’s predecessor alleged was connected to the assassination of a Canadian Sikh leader in British Columbia.

Carney’s pragmatism also extends to the Trump regime, agreeing with the U.S. administration when there is little direct cost to Canada for doing so — as evidenced by the government’s initial full-throated support of Trump’s bombing campaign in Iran.