World will likely continue facing a ‘tyrannical Russia’, Freeland warns

Canada's deputy prime minister urged the world's democracies to confront the hard economic truths of a perilous new world order and seek common cause.

Canada’s deputy prime minister urged the world’s democracies Tuesday to confront the hard economic truths of a perilous new world order and seek common cause in the shared values of prosperity, energy security, protecting the planet and free and fair trade.

Chrystia Freeland delivered an eloquent obituary for the relative peace and stability of the 33 years between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Russia’s “barbaric violation” of Ukrainian sovereignty in late February of this year.

The end has been hard to process, especially after the sacrifices of the Second World War and the superpowered nuclear brinksmanship that followed it, Freeland told Canada-U.S. scholars and stakeholders at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

“It was a relief and a vindication to imagine the entire world peacefully marching together towards global liberal democracy,” she said. “It is dispiriting and frightening to accept that it is not.”

And she issued a clarion call to the countries that stand in opposition to Vladimir Putin: the dangers faced by the western world are not limited to the Russian president, nor will they vanish in the event of Ukraine’s triumph.

“We will quite likely continue to face a tyrannical Russia on Europe’s border and powerful authoritarian regimes elsewhere,” Freeland warned.

“We need to understand that authoritarian regimes are fundamentally hostile to us. Our success is an existential threat to them. That is why they have tried to subvert our democracies from within and why we should expect them to continue to do so.”

As a result, the world’s ongoing dependence on “petro-tyrants” in countries like Russia, which are vital international suppliers of oil and natural gas, simply cannot continue.