Carney’s Beijing Bet, the Arctic Squeeze, and the Race for Rare Earths

OTTAWA — In this podcast interview with Jason James of BNN, taped shortly before Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Beijing trip, I lay out why I expected the visit to deepen long-running elite commercial ties between Chinese Communist Party-aligned networks and Canadian industries — relationships that have shaped Liberal Asia policy for decades.

We cover a lot of ground, including heightened tensions over Greenland; Elbridge Colby’s “strategy of denial”; the United States’ race to prepare for potential conflict with China and Russia; and the parallel race to secure critical minerals in the Western Hemisphere—aimed at breaking Beijing’s decades-old effort to dominate rare-earth supply chains essential for munitions and advanced weapons.

We discuss how the fast-moving headlines and heated rhetoric of 2026 have convinced many Western citizens that President Trump is the biggest threat to world peace. I understand where those concerns come from, but I don’t believe that is the right interpretation of world events. A better reading, I tell Jason, comes from a 2023 clip in which President Xi Jinping, after meeting President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, is heard saying:

“Right now there are changes—the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years—and we are the ones driving these changes together.”

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