Peace-peace is better than war-war

Canada has long been the largest trading partner of the United States, and the two countries have been so intertwined that President Trump spoke of it as the 51st state of the US.

In Prime Minister Carney, the Canadians have an able administrator and communicator, as witness the swiftness with which he repaired relations with India after Justin Trudeau was forced to resign by his own party legislators.

Yet, if we were to go by the rhetoric of President Trump about Canada, it would appear as though the United States and Canada were foes of each other. Trump has threatened, and indeed has imposed, a broad spectrum of tariffs on Canadian products sold in the United States, despite much of these being produced by US companies. One searches in vain for any significant gesture from President Trump to repair the damage that he has caused in US-Canada relations.

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Contrast this with his approach to the People’s Republic of China, which is a rival of the US in the race to be the premier power in the world. Even as Trump was being feted in Beijing and the gesture was reciprocated by him in Washington, young US citizens were dying each week of poisoning from fentanyl and other toxic substances brought into the US illegally by Chinese tongs, or gangs.

These have the tacit approval of the authorities in Beijing, who see in such export of narcotics payback for the Opium Wars of the past, when China was ruled by an Emperor. The “hundred years of humiliation”, as Chinese call the period of the overlordship of the country by foreign powers, mainly the US and Britain, remains a stain on the memory of the Chinese people.

Such memories have been kept alive and the embers of hate caused by them kept burning by museums, books, movies and even comic books detailing with some expertise the travail the Chinese people went through under both the Imperial rulers as well as their later Kuomintang successors by the western powers and the Japanese.

The latter are portrayed as uniformly cruel, and it must be admitted that the record of the Japanese army from around the 1930s to 1945 over the Chinese in lands conquered by them was unjustifiable in the extreme.

President Trump does not appear to be a student of history, else he would have sensed the inner resentment felt by the Chinese Communist Party leadership at their country still lagging behind the United States on several techno-economic fronts.