Harper on Conservative Foreign Policy
The comments by the PM on Canadian Foreign Policy in his interview with Maclean's editor Ken Whyte are truly appalling.
http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/07/05/how-he-sees-canada’s-role-in-the-wo...
His overview of the last 70 years, starts with the fire fight against fascism, moves to the cold war against communism, and then on to the war on terrorism. For Harper these have been the successive challenges facing Canada and the world, and they can all be lumped together. Each defines the moment, and we face terrorists the way our predecessors faced fascists and communists.
It is bad enough equating the cold war, which originated in Washington according to serious historians such as William Appleman Williams and Walter LaFeber with the war against Hitler and Mussolini (which the Americans only joined after Pearl Harbour) but to equate the war against an abstract noun with World War II is truly unbelievable.
It is as if Harper got his education from reading Time Magazine essays on the greatness of American Foreign policy. No high school social studies teacher would let a student get away with drawing the conclusions Harper draws about the evolution of world affairs, as moving from fascism to terrorism via communism.
Harper is clear that we face a current threat from Radical Islamic terrorism. This justifies our military expenditures. Whyte did not ask him how the F35 jet, designed to bomb a country, prior to a land invasion, made sense as the weapon of choice in the war on terrorism, since terrorists do not sit around waiting to be bombed.
Harper is also clear we have to do our part, meaning carry some of the U.S. burden, and not worry about making friends, meaning forget diplomatic efforts to gather countries together to fight climate change, global poverty, or protect economies against banksters. Indeed our major foreign policy success, according to Harper was to kill the bank tax proposed by the U.K and France.
The ignorance Harper shows of basic elements of international relations, such as imperialism, hegemony, alliance building, diplomacy, and multilateral institutions is stunning, and troubling.
I found this piece about William Appleman Williams to be interesting. He is one of a number of significant American scholars that Harper and his people seem to have never heard of, but who are a credit to their country.
http://www.thenation.com/article/dead-center-william-appleman-williams?p...
And what does the parliamentary "Opposition" think:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/jul2011/cana-j06.shtml
My point was that Harper will carry on as he sees fit, regardless of whether or not he has support from the Parliamentary Opposition, or from anyone else. He's a bully, and has the majority to back himself up. Indeed, you hear the Cons on CBC crowing about their "substantial majority mandate". It's no wonder they have little desire to drop FPTP.
Harper of course has nothing to say on actual foreign policy imperatives like addressing climate change and dying oceans, to say nothing of rising food prices globally.
You make it sound as if this domination of those institutions was a coincidence or an accident.
If you read Yves Engler, and others, then this would be seen as misleading. Instead, it's probably more exact - and certainly reflects the likely FUTURE of Canadian foreign policy (especially under such right wing regimes as the Harper regime) - to describe Canada as playing a supporting role for the U.S. when the "big stick" doesn't work for the imperial masters in Washington. Furthermore, Canada is now an imperial regime in it's own right ... and that did not start with Harper.
Even the Chretien regime, while making public statements to the effect of not joining the "Coalition of the Willing" in the merciless bombing and invasion and occupation of Iraq, provided enormous military assistance and logistics, etc. in those war crimes which led to the deaths of (what?) a million Iraqis and turned Fallujah into a cluster bomb for cancer and birth defects. Peter Gzowski may have had a kanipshen fit when Noam Chomsky referred to Lester Pearson as a war criminal, but we agree with Noam. He had the evidence to back up that claim.
The NDP is in 2nd place. The Liberals are in 3rd. Does anything else matter in 2015 as long as the NDP remains ahead of the Libs?
The heck with the NDP - aren't Will and Kate super cute?
Ikosomos the domination of the IMF, World Bank, GATT, UN and specialized agencies by great power politics was probably inevitable (not accidental or co-incidental for sure) but for the first 25 years of the postwar period, countries such as Australia, Holland, Norway and others wanted to work with Latin America, and Canada to break U.S. domination, and transcend the cold war deadlock. The highpoint was decolonization, and the admission of African states in the 1960s. Of course the great power veto at the UN worked against meaningful collective security action through the Security Council, and still does.
When Pearson accepted nuclear warheads on Canadian soil, Trudeau called him the defrocked prince of peace. Diefenbaker wanted a more independent foreign policy, and there is evidence the U.S. worked to defeat him at the polls.
Canada abandoned the multilateral system under Mulroney and opted for accelerated continental integration. A common foreign policy was written into the preamble of the Canda-U.S. FTA. Chrétien joined in joyfully, so did Martin, and now we have Harper who has adopted the U.S. framework of thinking about world politics.
Unlike Harper, most Canadians support a UN centred foreign policy, peace-keeping, North-South co-operation, environmental action, and promotion of human rights through international treaties. All Harper wants to do is wage the so-called war on terror. I look to foreign policy differences to be an important electoral issue for the opposition parties. The Liberals have seemingly left a lot of space for the NDP to fill. Even the Bloc wants Canada to adopt the U.S. dollar, making a mockery of sovereignty, the basis for their existence.
Duncan,
Most Canadians only understand sound bites and short media clips. Just because they have an opinion on a subject does not mean they understand a subject in any real detail or depth.
We will look at you point about peacekeeping for example. Most Canadians believe that peacekeeping is cheap and harmless to soldiers, they don't understand the financial costs and equipment and resources costs for these operations.
Canadians just understand the myths that have been feed to them over the years.
They think in the terms of black and white, good and bad.
for dc - OK, well, yea, I suppose demonstrating the change over the post war decades has some value. However, from where I'm coming from, the continuity may be equally, or more, important. And emphasizing the continuity would suggest that Canadians who understood that as the dominant characteristic would put more effort into political action other than electing candidate A, B or C of party x, y, or z.
It's only by putting pressure on the Canadian gov - as the anti-apartheid movement did in helping to push an otherwise consistent conservative ideologue (Mulroney) towards better positions than other like-minded conservatives like Reagan and Thatcher - that these foreign policy alternatives will have some chance of success. I don't have any faith that the NDP will be any better on most foreign policy issues. Just look at their capitulation on issues having to do with Palestinian solidarity. Zilch.
In this light the wars on Afghanistan, (covert war) on Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and Yemen make no sense.
It's all about Canada being an outpost in the American Empire and being a pathetic enabling satrap to the American Empire like the U.K., France, the E.U., NATO, etc.
NATO is all about the moral and economic burden-sharing when it comes to America's wars of Empire.
When the American Empire goes down the drain Canada et al will be dragged along with it.
Herr Harper will go down in history as the proud supporter of this.
In his first major speech since May 2, Harper returns to the themes he announced in his interview with Maclean's.
http://www.calgarysun.com/2011/07/09/pm-sees-canadas-place-in-the-world
Canada is rebuilding its military, there is more to foreign policy than foreign aid, or building a diplomatic consensus, Canada knows where its interests lie and who its friends are, the Liberal era is over.
Mostly this is code for an end to UN centred foreign policy and peace-keeping as a priority for the military. It announces a pact with the U.S. against the forces of evil in the world, about which more to come no doubt.