Negotiation Is Not Endorsement

Skepticism toward Mark Carney’s engagement with China is understandable.

In Canadian political debate, engagement with Beijing tends to trigger a familiar anxiety: that any deal implies alignment, endorsement, capitulation or even outright collusion. It’s a reaction that feels intuitive in a polarized world, but it rests on a misunderstanding of what negotiation is, and what states actually do.

Talking to another country is not the same thing as trusting it. And trust, in international politics, is rarely the point.

From a hard-realist perspective, negotiation has no moral valence.

States bargain based on power, leverage, and interests. Every agreement is provisional, contingent on enforcement and changing conditions.

This is not a theory confined to adversaries; it is how the United States operates as well. Washington routinely negotiates, withdraws, renegotiates, and rebalances—not because it is unreliable, but because it can. Leadership confers flexibility, not purity.

The mistake smaller countries make is assuming that realism applies everywhere except at home.

Canada is not a great power, and pretending otherwise has never served us well. But that does not mean we are condemned to passivity or permanent alignment.

Middle powers that matter tend to specialize. Canada’s advantage is not coercion or scale; it is credibility. We are most effective when we can engage predictably, enforce consistently, and maintain relationships across lines others refuse to cross.

This is not a new idea, nor a radical one.

Switzerland has built influence by hosting negotiations between states that openly distrust one another.

Singapore has embedded itself economically with competing powers while remaining clear-eyed about its own interests and limits.

Dubai represents a more contemporary model: openly transactional, institutionally reliable, and willing to engage simultaneously with the United States, China, Russia, and regional rivals.

In each case, influence flows not from moral alignment, but from usefulness.

What these countries share is not neutrality as ideology, but restraint as practice. Something arguably Canada has been able to accumulate and refine over the long history we have in proximity to the United States.

Fairness, in this context, is not a claim that all systems are equal or all actors benign. It is a commitment to consistent rules and predictable behavior.

In a world defined increasingly by rivalry rather than consensus, that consistency is a strategic asset. Refusing to negotiate with adversaries does not produce clarity; it produces irrelevance. Over-alignment narrows options until none remain.

The question, then, is not whether engaging China makes Canada complicit in China’s system. It does not.

The real question is whether Canada wants the capacity to act as a serious intermediary—or whether we are more comfortable outsourcing judgment to louder powers and calling it principle.

Confidence in statecraft looks much like confidence elsewhere: the ability to act without dramatizing every decision, to engage without illusion, and to negotiate without mistaking conversation for consent.

If Canada wants to matter as a middle power, that confidence is not optional.

It is the price of admission.