Washington Is Losing Credibility Over the Canada-India Spat

Nearly five years ago, acting on a warrant from a federal judge in New York, Canadian police arrested a high-profile Chinese businesswoman, Meng Wanzhou, as she was changing planes at Vancouver’s international airport on her way from Hong Kong to Mexico City and points beyond.

The charges against Meng, the chief financial officer of Chinese mobile phone and electronics giant Huawei, had nothing to do with Canada. They involved allegations that she had knowingly used a Huawei subsidiary, Skycom, to do business with Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions against that country. In arresting her, Ottawa was merely complying with a U.S. request in accordance with standing extradition arrangements between the two countries. But it also complied for another, less tangible reason: Canada and the United States have long been among the world’s closest allies.

The economic, military, and civilian ties linking two countries with similar histories, and which stretch along either side of the world’s longest border, is so solid that one hears little hyperventilation or chest-beating about it in either country. It’s nothing like the United States’ relationship with Britain, which seems to require constant political reminders of the greatness of their partnership, or with Japan, which gets its own slightly less ritualized restatements of its importance to the United States.

In fact, Canada paid a high price for living up to its side of the relationship with Washington. Beijing condemned Meng’s arrest as arbitrary and illegal, warning Canada that there would be “grave consequences” for its actions. This proved no idle threat: Nine days after Meng’s arrest, China detained two Canadians, Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat, and Michael Spavor, an entrepreneur, on espionage charges. The two were held for the next three years, effectively as hostages, until Meng and her lawyers reached a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. government, allowing her to fly home. China, in return, released Kovrig and Spavor.

This saga, which consumed Canadian public attention from start to finish but rarely generated comparable attention south of Canada’s border, has been in my mind as I’ve watched Canada work its way through another sticky and delicate international spat. In this recent crisis, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly expressed suspicion that India had been involved in the assassination of a Sikh activist named Hardeep Singh Nijjar on Canadian soil. This drew a furious response from New Delhi, resulting in the two countries expelling some of each other’s diplomats and India suspending new visas for Canadian applicants, among other measures.

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Yet what has been most interesting about the picture of these events as we know them so far is what is missing. The United States has labored hard to keep its head low in the matter, even though it has been revealed that Washington played a part in gathering and sharing some of the intelligence that helped support Trudeau’s conclusions.

U.S. President Joe Biden reportedly spoke to his Indian counterpart privately about the killing, but the Biden administration has notably refrained from issuing a strong statement of any kind—not in support of its Canadian ally, not against extrajudicial and extraterritorial assassinations, and not in defense of freedom of speech. (Nijjar is said to have advocated separatism for his religious group.)

At the simplest level, for the United States, this feels like a case of the bird in the hand (staunch ally Canada) not being as attractive as the bird in the bush (desired ally India). Canada is an enormous trading partner of the United States, but the two countries are as good as welded together, or at least they seem to be. India, on the other hand, has recently become the most populous country in the world. Its economy is growing fast and is projected to vie for the title of world’s largest later this century. And most importantly, because of features such as these, India is increasingly thought of in Washington as invaluable counterweight to the rival power that preoccupies the United States the most: China.

India’s nominal status as the world’s largest democracy serves as yet another seductive inducement for many in the U.S. foreign-policy establishment to wish longingly for a true alliance between the two countries to develop. This, of course, would fly in it the face of many decades of Indian diplomatic and political tradition. Almost from its birth, the country has seen itself as a leader in nonalignment—seeking its own way, formally untethered to foreign powers and their ideologies.

But this is not the only striking thing about Washington’s strange loss of voice in the wake of Canada’s assassination claims. Anyone naïve enough to think that India will sign up for anything like an outright alliance to help the West face China is going to be sorely disappointed. But one doesn’t need to wait to see how that all pans out before coming to terms with another existing problem. As I have written previously, and many others have noted, India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been trending strongly in an anti-democratic direction for several years already. This has involved flirting with religious-ethnic Hindu extremism, tolerating violence against the country’s enormous Muslim minority, circumscribing rights to free expression, and many other disquieting signals.

Nijjar’s assassination has every appearance of an elaborately arranged political execution. If Canada’s assertion of official Indian involvement is true, this places the Modi government on a moral footing that is uncomfortably close to that of, say, Russian President Vladimir Putin, a Western adversary who has frequently been accused of engineering the murder of his opponents.

The rub in all of this is a classic one: What can remain of America’s claims to favoring democracy in a world where it is increasingly willing to drain that word of meaning in the pursuit of geopolitical goals? What sort of credibility attaches to one who is eager to cite the anti-democratic behavior of adversaries but unwilling to speak clearly and publicly about the democratic shortcomings of friends, especially when those friends are important geopolitically?

India is not alone in this, either. Recently, the news has been filled with reports that the Biden foreign-policy team is investing itself heavily in convincing Israel and Saudi Arabia to normalize diplomatic relations. A central payoff is said to be blocking Chinese inroads into that part of the world. What is strange here are the features that are not being dwelled upon very much. Not long ago, Biden vowed that he would make Saudi Arabia a “pariah.” This was, in part, due to the murder of a Saudi dissident, Jamal Khashoggi, in a Saudi consulate in Turkey. Sounding like the Chinese after Canada arrested Meng, Biden, in fact, said that he would make the Saudis “pay the price” for this killing.

Meanwhile, Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been widely seen as working hard to undo the checks and balances that are vital to any democracy, in this case mostly involving the power of the judiciary. His government has also built a narrow coalition on the strength of support from Jewish extremists who are committed to the greatly increased dispossession of Palestinians.

To see off a perceived threat from China in the Middle East, in other words, the United States seems as insensitive to the health or direction of democratic institutions and governance as it is with India.

I don’t think I’ve ever quoted the Bible in anything I’ve written, and I don’t do so now for any religious reason. A question that derives from it, though, has rung in my ears as I have thought about these matters: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

Moral choices are not easy to make in this world, but nations that shunt such considerations to the side in pursuit of tactical geopolitical or economic interests often end up undermining themselves—and losing hard-won credibility—in the process.