this is largely pr for the pmo. but, it's international pr with a functional purpose. i don't want to pretend that there's a monolithic canadian, but our general perspective for decades has been that we'd rather create goodwill than build a military. you often hear americans ask the question: why do they hate us? canadians tend to take it a step further in advocating a foreign policy that ensures they have no reason to hate us. we legitimately want mutual respect. the thinking is that we don't need a conventional force, that way - and that we can utilize our allies for nuclear deterrence.
on first glance, this is even more rational in a world where war is defined by terrorism than it was in the cold war. but, the only reason it was really possible in the first place was due to the alliances within the cold war. america may have been content to allow canada to kind of drag our feet on nato, so long as we were a useful diplomatic ally. that's not the way things are anymore.
so, what trudeau is no doubt thinking is that we can squirm out of these onerous demands to buy american weapons that they expect us to use to bomb syria by sending peacekeeping troops to africa, instead. he thinks that because it worked in the 60s and 70s. it kept us out of vietnam. it's just that it's not the 70s anymore.
i'm honestly not sure how the americans are going to react to this.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-peacekeeping-announcement-1.3736593
canada always has and always will contribute to legitimate defensive war efforts. but, as a people, we're just not committed to the idea of empire.
we want real multipolarity, not unilateralism and hegemony.
there have been times when we've even described ourselves as 'non-aligned'.
this is longstanding liberal party policy, and widely populist, here. i'm just not sure how to make sense of it in 2016. post-history. post 9/11.
i guess we'll have to check the details.
i mean, this was one of the big questions in the last election: what is the party going to do to adjust it's peacekeeping policies to make sense in today's world, where the president doesn't even consult congress anymore, let alone care about international law?
we never really got a good answer. i guess we'll see how it unfolds.
just to be clear...
canada contributed to the mission in afghanistan, but not the invasion of iraq. it wasn't arbitrary. it was just a question of international law.
chretien was widely quoted at the time explaining that canada would have gladly taken part in iraq if it wasn't illegal. more or less verbatim. that's been the liberal party's policy forever.
but, how do you put the wars that exist today in that kind of context? iraq blew the whole system up. the americans don't care about the un anymore. yet, we remain aligned with them. that's a huge problem for the party, which is up against a glaring contradiction.
if this is a way out, great. let's hope it works. but, i....
...i don't know how the americans are going to react because it's a decision that's made with flawed information. all of the models and simulations that the americans use are based on rational people. i would expect that they don't have a plan for this, because no foreign policy expert would consider it coherent. like i say - it's the return to canada's "way to escape the cold war" policy without any rational, meaningful context.
first, it's going to confuse the fuck out of them. then, they're going to have to figure out what to do. it could be anything from shrugging it off to taking him out.
like i say: if you're a canadian, this is highly populist. it's been liberal party policy since wwII. it's a part of our national identity. but, if you're an american foreign policy analyst operating in the context of contemporary conflicts in the middle east? it's just coming from absolutely nowhere, and is no doubt going to be hard to make sense of. so, it's hard to predict that response.
i really expected that the policy would need to be tweaked, rather than taken off the shelf and dusted off. we'll see what happens.