the liberal party of the past would have told the americans that it would only support regime change in venezuela if it were upheld by a security council vote, in which case it would join the alliance produced by the global governing body. and, if global consensus could not be reached, we would withhold our active support - although they could still buy weapons and intelligence from us if they insist, and the price is right.

i want to be clear: i'm not saying that the liberals of the past would have rejected regime change outright, and am in fact rather explicitly pointing out that they wouldn't have. what i'm pointing out is that they would have rejected the idea that the americans have the right to act unilaterally, and outside of international law - and rather pointed to the united nations as the body that has the sole right to make these decisions. our historical liberal party would have then stuck to the decision made by the global body, with little wavering on the point.

and, why would they have done this? because they understood that a world order where the americans can use their military arbitrarily puts us at grave danger. they didn't care about iraqi or vietnamese or venezuelan civilians. no; don't think that, you're missing the point. what they cared about was ensuring that a rules-based international order existed that would prevent the americans from doing things like blockading the juan de fuca strait, or seizing the tar sands or invading and/or bombing quebec. if they can bomb vietnam or iraq or venezuela whenever they want, and without answering to anybody, why can't they bomb us under equally flimsy pretexts?

well?

why can't they?

what the sitting liberal government has done is abandoned this leveraging or balancing approach in favour of full on brown-nosing. the new principle at work in canada-us relations is that we're best off sucking up as best we can, in hopes of generating special treatment. so, we are to go out of our way to demonstrate that we're really the bestest of friends, and always were.

this is a continuation of a change put in place by the harper government.

and, it's failing.

because it's absurd and transparent and disingenuous, and ultimately irrelevant - trump doesn't care if you want to be his friend or not.

people will look back at the wisdom of our foreign policy in the second half of the last century, and wonder what caused canada to lose it's intelligence, starting in the mid 00s. and, the answer is at the root of so many of our problems: we decided against educating our children.