Mark Carney, then governor of the Bank of England, with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the 2016 G20 in Hangzhou/AP

By Lisa Van Dusen

October 28, 2025

The official agenda for this week’s bilateral between Mark Carney and Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in Korea may already be the least important itemized diplomatic checklist ever assembled.

While the substance of the meeting will cover “a broader set of issues than trade”, per Carney’s comments to reporters at the Association of Southeast Asian nations (ASEAN) meeting in Kuala Lumpur on Monday amid a global trade crisis, the context will be paramount.

The main element of that context is what Donald Trump, as the trade-crisis catalyst, has accomplished as a world-order disruptor in just under a year.

By the time he left office in 2021 — two weeks after an attempted coup against the United States Congress and his freely and fairly elected successor — Trump had gone a long way toward rebranding America as the basket-case superpower. But the first year of his second term has doubled down exponentially to make up for the lost destruction time of Joe Biden’s reality-resetting presidency.

Who could have predicted, a year ago, that Mark Carney would be able to say of the rules-based, democracy-led international order, as he did on Monday in French, “Even if Canada prospered under that old order, nostalgia is not a strategy.”

Which makes the next key context element of this Canada-China bilateral the fact that Mark Carney will be meeting a very, very happy Xi Jinping. Indeed, he will be meeting the happiest Xi Jinping since the one who celebrated Donald Trump’s first inaugural in 2017 with a pre-emptive victory lap at Davos as a defender of free trade and promoter of globalization three days before the “American carnage” president took office.

As it transpired, largely due to Trump’s avoidable amplification of the COVID pandemic by several orders of magnitude, America as the world’s democratic superpower has taken one election longer than planned to cashier.

A one-year endgame storyboard for that degradation narrative could not have made the timing of this week’s annual ASEAN-APEC summit swirl more auspicious for the proponents of anti-democracy change. The transformation of the postwar global trading system codified by a pre-besieged World Trade Organization that began during lockdown with the supply-chain kinks of 2021-23 has now hit fever pitch thanks to the accelerant of a reality-show autocrat American president.

The soft-power daylight between an authoritarian China and an America where the rule of law has become one more sadistic plaything is now dilating in favour of a dictator who, while displaying an unsettling preoccupation with Winnie-the-Pooh, at least hasn’t threatened to annex Canada as a third semi-autonomous special administrative region.

While the larger, systemic assaults chalked-up to the volatility of Donald Trump range from the framing of America as a dysfunctional circus whose political elite is trapped in a cult of personality disorder, to the hacking of the global trade status quo, to the menacing of the multilateral world order from the rostrum of the UN, the hourly, maintenance-level propaganda feed includes the trolling of both his own citizens and a planet of captive bully-pulpit bystanders beyond with stunt after stunt of dictatorial scenery chewing, from ridiculously rationalized troop deployments into US cities to the demolition of the White House.

For an aspiring world order that has long displayed a weakness for contrast as a propaganda tool, the soft-power daylight between an authoritarian China and an America where the rule of law has become one more sadistic psy-ops plaything is now dilating in favour of a dictator who, while displaying an unsettling preoccupation with Winnie-the-Pooh, at least hasn’t threatened to annex Canada as a third semi-autonomous special administrative region.

After the series of systemic hits that started with 9/11, segued into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was immeasurably torqued by the last contagion of man-made economic catastrophe in 2008, Trump’s second term may just be the coup de grâce that finally makes democracy and the humanity it defends the first major casualties of the new millennium — and just in time for the socioeconomic meteorite of the AI revolution.

After years of cycling through the isolationist repertoire of coercive diplomacy, hostage diplomacy, “wolf-warrior” diplomacy and its own leveraging of trade and other behaviour modification tools, China is now assuming the role of relatively sane superpower, a designation of such transcendent salvation value it is meant to supersede all other considerations (coming soon to an America near you: the political version of this geopolitical contrast narrative).

So, the Xi Jinping who meets Mark Carney in Korea will be a very happy man because China is now poised to be the unipolar superpower of a new world order (don’t believe the rumours about multipolarity — power abhors a vacuum and the unipolar-superpower vacuum will last about five minutes), and because that feat was accomplished without a single shot having been fired either by Beijing or in its name.

Indeed, it took a fatefully narcoleptic intelligence community (still, apparently, oddly un-rousable), and a massive outlay of economic leverage to flip, leader by leader, democracies to corruption-captured democracies to illiberal democracies to autocracies, all along the Belt and Road and beyond.

It also took the gradual transformation of the systemic threat of spheres of influence into one big, borderless sphere by the surveillance, hacking, misinformation and narrative disruption innovations of the fourth industrial revolution, making world domination designs once the stuff of Bond-villain delusions a viable collective enterprise.

Above all, it took all the vindictive adrenaline of the political, geopolitical and organizational players who spent the Boulevard of Broken Dreams last call of the last millennium nursing their grudges against truth, democracy, and reality — plus another 25 years of alternative power consolidation tactics — to reach this moment.

No, nostalgia isn’t a strategy. Still, it may be the next big thing.

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, Washington Columnist for the Ottawa Citizen, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, senior writer for Maclean’s and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.