This article originally appeared in the Japan Times.
By Stephen Nagy, January 14, 2026
The art of diplomacy with rising powers demands more than goodwill. It requires strategic literacy, carefully cultivated leverage and the discipline to sequence engagement properly.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is in Beijing this week for a four-day visit — his first major bilateral engagement in the Indo-Pacific since taking office.
Notably absent from his itinerary: Tokyo and Seoul. Carney’s decision reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how middle powers must engage with Beijing in an era of intensifying great power competition.
Effective engagement with China begins with a clear-eyed assessment of its capabilities, intentions and strategic trajectory. As Dan Wang and Arthur Kroeber’s Foreign Affairs essay “The Real China Model” argues, Beijing’s technological and industrial strength is not a temporary aberration to be reversed through sanctions, but a permanent feature of the world economy built on deep infrastructure investments and a 70-million-person industrial workforce with unmatched process knowledge. This isn’t propaganda; it’s an observable reality that any Canadian strategy must incorporate.
The Xinhua Institute’s September 2025 report, “Colonization of the Mind,” further illuminates Beijing’s strategic thinking. The document reframes routine public diplomacy as white propaganda, democracy promotion as gray zone manipulation and intelligence activities as black operations, all serving a unified cognitive warfare enterprise. Whether one accepts this framework or not, it shapes how Chinese officials interpret Western engagement. When a middle power leader arrives in Beijing seeking rapprochement, this lens positions the visit as validation of China’s strength and vindication of its resistance to Western influence.
Canada’s policy community has struggled to internalize these realities. The assumption persists that patient dialogue will moderate Chinese behavior, that economic interdependence naturally produces convergence and that Beijing’s challenges — demographic decline, real estate troubles and sluggish consumption — will force accommodation with Western preferences.
Yet as China Briefing’s November 2025 economic data reveals, Beijing’s leadership explicitly prioritizes self-sufficiency and technological advancement over rapid growth, tolerating deflation to preserve industrial preeminence. By visiting Beijing without first securing concrete agreements with partners who have decades of experience managing the China relationship, Carney is ill-equipped to distinguish Chinese tactical concessions from strategic objectives.
India’s strategic positioning offers sobering lessons for middle powers contemplating engagement with major powers absent sufficient leverage. As Ashley Tellis explains in his Foreign Affairs article “India’s Great-Power Delusions,” despite India’s rise as the world’s fourth-largest economy, its zealous guarding of strategic autonomy and refusal to commit to alliances leaves it structurally weak when confronting China. India cannot contain China on its own, yet its commitment to nonalignment prevents the close partnerships necessary to compensate for this weakness.
Canada faces a parallel challenge with even less inherent power. Unlike India’s substantial military capabilities and massive domestic market, Canada’s influence vis-a-vis China derives almost entirely from coalition partnerships and alternative economic relationships. Without consolidated agreements with Tokyo and Seoul before entering the Beijing meeting room, Carney lacks the most basic prerequisites for productive engagement: credible alternatives that limit Chinese leverage and allied coordination that amplifies Canadian influence.
The Trump administration’s U.S. National Security Strategy emphasis on burden-sharing and burden-shifting underscores this imperative. Washington increasingly expects partners to assume primary responsibility for their regions rather than relying on American support as a given. For Canada, this means the Indo-Pacific strategy cannot consist primarily of bilateral engagement with Beijing but must center on building partnerships that align incentives and share burdens with like-minded allies.
Japan represents the natural anchor for such partnerships — the region’s most stable democracy, a Group of Seven partner and a sophisticated navigator of China relations with hard-won wisdom about managing Beijing’s economic coercion and political pressure. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who took office last October, has explicitly signaled willingness to deepen partnerships with like-minded countries on critical minerals, semiconductor cooperation and supply-chain resilience. Meeting this willingness with Canadian commitment before the Beijing visit would have strengthened both nations’ positions.
The sequencing error becomes clearer when examining recent U.S.-China dynamics. The Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to reclaim strategic assets from China reflect growing anxiety in Washington over dependencies on China in critical industries. Carney’s Beijing visit suggests Ottawa either misunderstands this trajectory or believes it can remain insulated from U.S.-China competition. Both assumptions are dangerous.
Diplomacy is fundamentally performative. The order of visits communicates priorities as clearly as any joint statement. Carney’s Beijing trip, undertaken before visiting Tokyo or Seoul, sends several problematic messages simultaneously. To Beijing, the visit suggests eagerness bordering on desperation to restore relations troubled since the unlawful detentions of Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. Chinese negotiators, schooled in strategic patience, will interpret this timing as weakness. When a middle power arrives seeking rapprochement without prior allied consultation, tactical concessions become less necessary.
To Tokyo and Seoul, the message is more troubling: Canada prioritizes accommodation with China over consolidation with like-minded partners. Both capitals have invested substantially in upgrading relations with Ottawa, viewing Canada as a valuable partner in managing regional challenges.
Japanese officials, who have carefully calibrated their own China engagement through decades of experience, now watch a Canadian leader choose Beijing as his first major bilateral stop in the region. South Korean policymakers, who have evolved from emphasizing economic ties with China to implementing stricter technology controls and deepening security cooperation with the U.S. and Japan, must wonder whether Canada understands the regional trajectory they’re navigating.
To Washington, the timing suggests misalignment at a moment when U.S. strategy explicitly emphasizes coordinated approaches to China among allies. The National Security Strategy’s Indo-Pacific section prioritizes preventing an adversarial power from dominating the region through partnerships with treaty allies. Carney’s uncoordinated Beijing visit complicates rather than advances these objectives, particularly as the Trump administration takes an increasingly transactional view of alliances.
The productive sequencing would have begun in Tokyo, where Carney could negotiate concrete economic security agreements covering critical minerals, semiconductor cooperation, supply-chain resilience and technology partnerships. Such agreements need not be framed as anti-China initiatives, but their existence would fundamentally alter the calculus in any subsequent Beijing negotiation by demonstrating that Canada possesses genuine alternatives for market access, investment and technological partnership.
A Tokyo visit would have provided opportunities for substantive consultation on China strategy. Japanese officials have developed sophisticated approaches balancing economic interdependence with security concerns, establishing guardrails around technology transfer while maintaining commercial relationships. Takaichi has expressed particular interest in coordinating with partners on economic security — precisely the domain where Canada needs both learning and leverage.
Seoul represents a complementary partner, offering advanced manufacturing capabilities and its own complex experience managing relations with both China and North Korea. South Korea’s evolution under the numerous administrations — from emphasizing economic ties with China to implementing export controls and deepening trilateral cooperation with the U.S. and Japan — illustrates the regional trend Carney should align with rather than resist.
With concrete agreements from Tokyo and Seoul in hand, Carney could then travel to Beijing from a position of strength, demonstrating through actions rather than rhetoric that Canada has options and is pursuing them. The negotiating dynamic transforms from supplication to genuine dialogue between parties with mutual interests but also clear alternatives if those relations fail to materialize on acceptable terms.
Future Canadian leaders — and their counterparts in similarly positioned countries — must internalize a fundamental lesson: Strategic literacy about great power capabilities must be acquired through sustained allied consultation, not solitary assessment. Carney’s Beijing visit may produce warm atmospherics and positive headlines about re-engagement. But absent the prerequisites of allied coordination and credible alternatives, it represents a strategic setback disguised as diplomatic engagement. The sequencing matters. It always has.
Stephen R. Nagy is professor of politics and international studies at the International Christian University. Concurrently, he holds appointments as a senior fellow and China project lead at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and a visiting fellow at the Japan Institute for International Affairs. The title of his forthcoming book is “Japan as a Middle Power State: Navigating Ideological and Systemic Divides.”
