In a moment of deep geopolitical uncertainty, the conversation with Dominic Barton unfolded as part strategic briefing, part leadership seminar, and part reflection on how individuals and institutions can still build bridges when systems feel brittle. Moderated by Brian Wong and Charlie Wang, the dialogue traced Barton’s journey from global managing partner of McKinsey to Canadian ambassador to China and now chair of Rio Tinto’s board, using his career as a vantage point to examine U.S.–China relations, the role of middle powers, and what it means to lead in an era without playbooks.
The recurring theme of the evening was fabric: the social, diplomatic, and intellectual ties that must be woven and rewoven if the world is to avoid stumbling into avoidable crises.
From Consultant to Ambassador: Stepping Into a Collapsed Relationship
Barton began by recounting how he became Canada’s ambassador to China almost by accident rather than long term design. After three decades at McKinsey, much of it spent in Asia, he had just left the firm, taken multiple board roles, and moved to Hong Kong to support his wife’s work at BlackRock.
At the same time, the Canada–China relationship imploded. Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Vancouver on a U.S. extradition request. In short order, two Canadians, the “two Michaels,” were detained in China, agricultural trade was throttled, and diplomatic communication essentially froze.
The existing ambassador was fired after publicly suggesting a “deal,” while the Canadian prime minister insisted on a rule of law approach. Barton initially agreed only to help through a backchannel, but when that route stalled, both Ottawa and Beijing converged on the same idea: he should step in as ambassador.
He described arriving into a vacuum. There was, in his words, “no one on the bench.” No blueprint, no precedent for rebuilding trust when a previously “golden” relationship had turned toxic in a matter of weeks. The work felt brutal at times, but ultimately became, in his telling, the most meaningful job he had ever held.
Venn Diagrams and Decision Making: Problem Solving as Diplomatic Method
Barton framed the diplomatic challenge as a giant, moving Venn diagram. Each actor had its own set of interests: China, Canada, the United States, and Huawei itself, which he emphasized was a family business with its own internal tensions.
The question, as he saw it, was not abstractly “Who is right,” but practically “Where is the overlap among these circles large enough to support a credible solution, and how do we build trust around that overlap over time.”
That meant two things. First, learning at speed, by talking to veteran diplomats, former ambassadors to China, figures like Henry Kissinger, and officials from Singapore, Vietnam, and other regional states. Second, mapping how decisions are actually made in different systems. He knew how Ottawa worked. He did not know how the Chinese leadership, the U.S. Department of Justice, or Huawei’s family hierarchy made choices, and he argued that diplomacy stalls when negotiators misread these internal decision chains.
The eventual resolution of the Meng Wanzhou case and the return of the two Michaels, he suggested, came from combining that analytic problem-solving with patient relationship building across all four corners of the square.
Canada, China, and the “Goldilocks” Role of Middle Powers
Brian Wong then steered the discussion to the present trajectory of Canada–China ties, noting recent high level contacts and tentative signs of thaw. Barton admitted he is only “cautiously optimistic,” but stressed that the relationship rests on deep historical and societal fabric, not just the last decade of headlines.
Canada, he argued, is a classic “Goldilocks” country. It is not so large that others fear its power, yet it is not irrelevant. It is a G10 economy, a center of technology and AI innovation, and a society built on immigration, with major Chinese, Indian, Italian, and other diasporas.
He placed Canada among a wider group of medium powers that will matter more in a world where globalization is not ending but reorganizing into regional and functional blocs. Australia’s recovery from its own downturn with China, the growing roles of India, ASEAN, the Gulf states, the Nordics, and Brazil all featured as examples of how “second bounce of the ball” dynamics can shift alignments over time.
For Barton, these states can both hedge and connect, doing business and cooperation even amid rivalry between larger powers, and helping to keep channels open when great power ties fray.
The Macro Forces That Will Not Go Away
Asked how he thinks about shocks and “black swan” events over his three decades at McKinsey, Barton was blunt: nobody has been consistently good at predicting the timing and scale of technology disruptions. What matters more, he said, is understanding the big forces that are not going away. He highlighted five:
- The rise or “re–rise” of Asia: Asia is becoming the center of gravity for the global middle class, manufacturing, and growth. When people ask “What is the next China,” Barton’s answer is simple: China is the next China, given the continued expansion of its middle class.
- Relentless technological disruption: From the internet to AI, quantum computing, bioengineering, brain computer interfaces, and space technology, innovation is the constant. He referenced Amara’s Law: we tend to overestimate the impact of a technology in the short term and underestimate it in the long term. In his view, the long term is compressing. What used to unfold over twenty years may now arrive in five to ten.
- Climate change and the energy transition: Regardless of political swings, he sees the decarbonization of the global economy as the largest capital reallocation in human history, already underway and reshaping everything from infrastructure to finance.
- Rising inequality within countries: Barton argued that income inequality is worsening almost everywhere, including China, and that this feeds social anger and political volatility.
- Polarization and institutional strain: In his view, polarization is both a product of, and a catalyst for, dysfunctional politics, especially in democracies. It makes long term decision making harder at the very moment when long term choices are crucial.
He likened the current period to the 1770s in terms of the scale of disruption: economies, political orders, and technologies are all in flux at once. Leaders, he argued, must learn to hold “a microscope in one eye and a telescope in the other without getting a headache,” shifting constantly between immediate decisions and long term strategy.
Learning Without a Playbook: Oxford, Tri Sector Leaders, and Transferable Skills
Charlie Wang turned the discussion toward leadership and career paths, asking what skills translate across the private sector, diplomacy, and the social sector. Barton drew on Joseph Nye’s idea of “tri sector leaders” who have experience in business, government, and civil society. He wishes he had crossed sectors earlier, not just at the ambassadorial stage.
Across those worlds, he identified three core skills:
- Problem solving in a world without playbooks: There is no manual for AI governance, for rethinking supply chains, or for resurrecting a collapsed bilateral relationship. The capacity to break a messy situation into tractable parts, identify leverage points, and design paths forward is crucial everywhere.
- Deliberate, long term relationship building: Relationships, he insisted, must be treated as lifetime projects, not transactional instruments. Many of the ties he formed in China between 2003 and 2009 later proved vital when he returned as ambassador, even though he had no inkling that such a role would ever be offered to him.
- Ambition for the institution rather than the self: Barton distinguished personal careerism from the kind of ambition that lifts a team or organization beyond what it would otherwise attempt. Leaders, he argued, “raise the bar,” while managers preserve the status quo. That mindset, too, can be learned and cultivated.
He tied much of this back to his time at Oxford, which he described as a place where he “learned how to learn.” Supervisors would assign two essays on a topic without lecturing or handing out reading lists. “That is your problem,” he recalls being told. “You figure it out.” Being forced to operate without a script, in his view, was one of the greatest gifts of that education.
Looking back, his two regrets from those years were traveling too little and not venturing even more outside his discipline. He wished he had done the Silk Road, walked through more of Asia, and taken more advantage of the chance to sit in on lectures in philosophy, astronomy, and other fields unrelated to his degree. For today’s students, his advice was simple: move, explore, broaden. “We do not know what we do not know,” he said, and each geographic or intellectual move acts like an accelerator for growth.
Social Capital, Miscalculation, and the Risk of Sleepwalking into Conflict
The conversation eventually returned to the central anxiety of many in the audience: how close are the United States and China to a serious conflict, and how worried should we be about an accidental slide into war.
Barton did not sugarcoat his concern. He thinks we are in a fragile equilibrium. The rhetoric has cooled somewhat, and there are opportunities for cooperation, but underlying drivers remain: strategic rivalry, domestic pressures, and mutual suspicion.
His biggest fear is miscalculation. A collision at sea, an aerial incident, a drone mishap, some crisis in the Taiwan Strait or South China Sea could spiral if both sides approach the situation with brittle politics and shallow relationships. He invoked World War I as a warning about how a relatively localized shock can trigger an avalanche when systems are tightly wound.
Here he returned to the concept of social capital, borrowing again from Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. Just as civic life within societies can fray when people retreat into private spheres, international life can become dangerously brittle when leaders and publics stop investing in cross border relationships.
Barton argued that:
- Leaders need time and space for serious, personal engagement, not just tightly choreographed summits.
- People to people ties in science, sports, arts, and education are not luxuries, but safeguards.
- Academic exchanges and collaborative projects, which persisted even at the height of the U.S.–Soviet Cold War, should be protected rather than treated as expendable.
Without that fabric, he suggested, it becomes too easy to reduce rivals to caricatures, to think in zeros and ones, and to react emotionally rather than strategically when something goes wrong.
Business as Civic Actor: Beyond Shareholder Myopia
In one of the more philosophical turns of the evening, Barton picked up a question about the role of companies in an era of weakened civil society, rising nationalism, and strained public institutions.
He rejected the idea that governments alone can or should shoulder the burden of maintaining international order. Public officials are already overwhelmed by “fires” and electoral cycles. In his view, business leaders, academics, NGOs, and even athletes all have a responsibility to think and act as stewards of the broader community.
Barton recalled being described once, not entirely flatteringly, as part of the “Jesuits of capitalism.” The phrase prompted him to revisit Adam Smith’s lesser touted work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, where Smith argues that entrepreneurs have a duty to care for the societies in which they operate. That strand of moral responsibility, he suggested, needs revival.
He sees a number of practical roles for business leaders:
- Maintaining and expanding cross border networks by continuing to travel, meet, and speak candidly with counterparts in rival states.
- Bringing grounded assessments from those interactions back to governments, to counterbalance worst case assumptions and help policymakers understand how things look on the other side.
- Accepting reputational risk. In a polarized media environment, executives who engage in controversial geographies may be labeled naive or disloyal. Barton’s view is that this discomfort is unavoidable and must be embraced if business is to help stabilize the system rather than simply benefit from it.
In his closing response, he insisted that “everyone has to act like an owner.” The world is, in his metaphor, perilously close to midnight. If we rely on inertia or “hope as a strategy,” the odds of an accidental crossing of the line go up.
For the Next Generation: Curiosity, Courage, and the Long View
Throughout the dialogue, Barton kept circling back to the responsibilities and opportunities facing young people in their twenties who are watching this turbulence unfold. His advice was not a neat checklist, but a cluster of habits and attitudes:
- Treat disruption as the new normal, not an aberration.
- Learn problem-solving rather than memorizing scripts.
- Invest in relationships across divides and disciplines, not just within your own comfort zone.
- Hold ambition for the institutions and communities you join, not just for your own resume.
- Move, geographically and intellectually, whenever you can.
- And above all, develop the capacity to look through both microscope and telescope at once, making choices quickly while never losing sight of the larger forces and longer arcs that shape those choices.
In a world defined by uncertainty, Barton’s message was neither despairing nor complacent. It was, instead, an invitation: to build fabric, to understand the forces at work, and to step into leadership in whatever sector one inhabits, not as a spectator of history but as a participant in its repair.