Canada’s long-awaited strategy for dealing with China and the broader Indo-Pacific region might finally be released within days.
It’s taken a while. But two sources say the Trudeau government hopes to have the paper completed and out in public before the prime minister heads to Asia later this month.
Advance clues of some of its themes, however, are available in a place where public officials have spent years obsessing over this issue: the United States.
Sources say the Canadian policies won’t entirely replicate U.S. ones, but that one U.S. politician’s speech, in particular, resembles Ottawa’s thinking on China.
Canada’s Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly, foreground, is leading the review the China policy. For clues on some of its themes, there’s a recent speech by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, left. (Blair Gable/Reuters)
The speech was delivered earlier this year by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and it advocates two concurrent paths in working with China.
A 2-track approach
Track one: to keep trading with China and co-operating where possible, like on mutually beneficial issues involving public health and the environment. Yet some trade will be curtailed.
There’s the second, more antagonistic track laid out by Blinken. It involves limiting trade with China in a pair of areas: cutting-edge technology and vital goods where Chinese state-backed companies are pursuing a global monopoly.
Blinken mentioned semiconductors, steel and pharmaceuticals as examples.
“To the people of China: we’ll compete with confidence; we’ll co-operate wherever we can; we’ll contest where we must,” Blinken said in the speech earlier this year. “We want trade and investment as long as they’re fair and don’t jeopardize our national security.”
We’re already seeing signs of that two-track approach in U.S. trade data. American imports of toys and phones are still rising from China, yet imports of semiconductors and certain IT products are plunging.
There’s far more detail on the U.S. strategy in a multitude of public documents and also a new law aimed at getting more electric car components from Canada and fewer from China.
The U.S. pressed allies for years to keep Huawei out of 5G networks. It was an early sign of what’s ahead. (Mark Schiefelbein/AP)
These official texts make for dry reading. Fortunately, more captivating copy is available.
An engrossing glimpse into the psyche of modern-day Washington comes in new books written by insiders working on China policy.
What Washington’s insiders foresee
One such book comes from the current head of China policy in the White House’s National Security Council, written before he took the job.
Its central thesis is that China spent years lulling the U.S. into a false sense of security while concealing its goal of supplanting the U.S.-led liberal order.
It says China is moving onto the final phase of its strategy — where it pushes U.S. forces out of the western Pacific; reclaims Taiwan; and re-engineers international institutions and technology standards in ways that benefit authoritarian and illiberal governments, while selling those governments surveillance equipment to squash any opposition.
Xi kicks off Communist Party Congress, calls for China’s military growth
China’s Communist Party kicked off its 20th Congress in Beijing, with President Xi Jinping calling for faster military growth. Xi also touted his government’s COVID-19 policies and refused to rule out the use of force against Taiwan.
After laying out several possible U.S. responses, Doshi urges a so-called middle path. Not friendly, nor overtly hostile — but a bit like what Blinken describes.
In summary: deny China access to cutting-edge technology; invest in scientific research at home; build international alliances; and create new, friendlier trade networks for critical products.
Book predicts big shift: a scared, struggling China
There’s an even more provocative book — enthusiastically endorsed by former defence secretary James Mattis — co-authored by former senior strategists at the Pentagon who still play advisory roles.
The central argument is that China is about to hit a rough patch — it will grow in power during the 2020s, then suffer a long, painful slowdown starting in the 2030s.
That’s because three magical conditions that enabled China’s decades-long rise are set to expire, says the book, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China.
That, says the book, triggers an entirely new threat.
“That’s when we should get really worried. What happens when a country that wants the world concludes that it might not be able to get it peacefully?” says the book. “The answer, history suggests, is nothing good.… Some of history’s deadliest wars were started by revisionist powers whose future no longer looked so bright.”
The book argues that autocracies, especially, turn more aggressive when they start doubting the inevitability of their rise. At home, they’re paranoid about threats to their rule, and in foreign affairs, they’re desperate to claim wins while they still can.
It points to examples from Ancient Greece as well as Russia in the early 1900s, Germany before the First World War and Japan before the Second World War.
Hence the name of the book, Danger Zone: it predicts we’ll enter a perilous stretch over the next few years as China sees its best, perhaps last, opportunity to seize Taiwan.
China-watchers were struck by a shift in tone from President Xi Jinping in his speech to a party congress last month, which was heavy on national security and warnings of new threats to Chinese prosperity. (Tingshu Wang/Reuters)
Reclaiming that island, the authors say, is not just an issue of patriotic sentiment to the Chinese government, but a strategic cure for its upcoming ills.
It would extend China’s military reach over the sea, provide a gigantic de facto aircraft carrier and turn over Taiwan’s world-dominating semiconductor and advanced chip industry.
In an interview, book co-author Hal Brands said any such war would primarily unfold in Asia, but he said North America would suffer the effects, from economic impacts to cyberattacks.
“Homelands will not be sanctuaries,” said Brands, special assistant to the U.S. defence secretary for strategic planning in 2015 and 2016, and former lead writer on the team that produces the U.S. National Defence Strategy.
His book offers lessons from the early Cold War, in the late 1940s, when the Soviet Union was in its most dominant position — but says the U.S. kept it at bay, through diplomacy, alliance-building and military deterrence.
The book says setting priorities is key. And a top priority it identifies should, by now, sound familiar.
It’s technology.
A role for Canada in this new world
The book argues that past superpowers were built by dominating their era’s critical technology — the British with steam and iron; the U.S. with steel and electronics; and now, China sees artificial intelligence, telecommunications and quantum computing as keys to future power.
Here’s where there’s a role for Canada. Danger Zone urges the creation of a free-world economic bloc for emerging technology, like a club for high-tech trade, or a digital alliance.
“Canada has a non-trivial role to play,” Brands said.
The U.S. is keen on greater technological self-reliance. Here, President Joe Biden celebrated a just-passed law that funds semiconductor research, at a groundbreaking ceremony in September for a new Intel plant in Ohio. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
There are signs Ottawa also sees this as an ideal niche for Canada. It’s spending billions to get a critical minerals and electric battery industry going, as are individual provinces.
Canada just forced three Chinese companies to sell their holdings in Canadian mineral firms and threatened to block future purchases by its state-run companies.
For months, trade insiders — indeed, even the Canadian government — questioned the point of signing onto that group, given that it’s not a formal trade agreement and there’s already a similar informal club of its type for the Americas.
But the Canadian business lobby urged Ottawa to sign onto the Indo-Pacific alliance, arguing Canada had to be part of its discussions involving new supply chains.
“It’s imperative that Canada has a seat at the table,” said Trevor Kennedy, vice-president for trade policy at the Business Council of Canada.
Yet there are ongoing challenges.
The U.S. sees a role for Canada in new supply chains where allies trade advanced technologies among themselves. Blinken, right, highlighted that by visiting a lithium battery-recycling plant in Montreal last month with his Canadian counterpart Mélanie July, centre. (Ryan Remiorz/CP)
One Washington critic of Canadian trade policies says Canada talks a great game about wanting to move supply chains from China, but doesn’t follow through.
Charles Benoit, a Canadian-American trade lawyer and counsel with a pro-reshoring group based in Washington, expressed disbelief that Canadian cabinet ministers would come to Washington to talk about decoupling from China.
He said it’s the United States, not Canada, that has slapped wide-ranging tariffs on China in retaliation for intellectual property theft; Benoit said those tariffs have helped restore some manufacturing in the U.S.
And he said it’s the U.S., not Canada, pushing for the highest level of North American content in cars under the new continental trade agreement; Mexico and Canada are suing the U.S. for it.
“They’re actually working against decoupling,” said Benoit, of the Coalition for a Prosperous America.
We’ll soon see Ottawa’s plans for walking this delicate line.
In a sign of the times, Canada is trying to remove Chinese state-backed enterprises from owning critical minerals, such as those that power electric vehicles and other cutting-edge technologies. (Eric Gaillard/Reuters)
Numerous federal departments are involved in the Indo-Pacific strategy, and barring any last-minute snags, it’ll be out when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau leaves for Asia.
So trade with China will continue. In fact, Canada’s product sales to China are still growing from year to year, and sources say the incoming strategy will encourage some of that, as Blinken did.
But let’s put those exports to China in context: they represent barely four per cent of Canada’s worldwide total, and that share hasn’t really budged for years.
We have a far bigger customer next door.
And the Americans foresee a world with new limits on trade with China. It appears we’re entering that world, too.
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
