Primary Author: Mitchell Beer

Green economies and global climate action were on the agenda Tuesday when Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland declared a new era in geopolitics brought on by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

In a speech to a group of Canadian and U.S. scholars at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, Freeland called for western democracies to connect their economies more closely while cooperating with the world’s dictators on issues—like climate change—that they can only solve together.

She laid out an approach to “friendshoring”, first introduced over the summer by U.S. Treasury Secretary Janice Yellen, in which countries “make a conscious effort to build our supply chains through each other’s economies.”

The speech cast economic cooperation among like-minded governments as an extension of the military cooperation that followed the Russian invasion February 24. “As fall turns to winter, Europe is bracing for a cold and bitter lesson in the strategic folly of economic reliance on countries whose political and moral values are inimical to our own,” she said. “Where democracies must be strategically vulnerable, we should be vulnerable to each other.”

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