Canada needs to grow up

Bob Rae was a socialist once upon a time. Since 2020 he’s been Canada’s ambassador to the UN. Today he gets a half-page spread in The Globe and Mail; “World needs to grow up, Canada’s UN envoy says.” According to Bolshevik Bob, there remains a tendency for “governments to see the world as a chessboard on which national ambitions are played out… a global tendency not particular to Canada or the United States or anyone else.” Maybe so, but there’s only one country that claims to own the chessboard, and that’s the USA. I refer to Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. It’s a must read for anyone wanting to make sense of the last 25 years of US foreign policy, right up to the current disaster in Ukraine. While I don’t want to spoil it for you, the “geostrategic imperative” can be summed up thusly; America must strive to maintain full-spectrum dominance of any country or grouping of countries that could potentially threaten its role as global hegemon. America has been striving mightily indeed. After a series of lopsided victories over a string of upstarts (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria) America is now on the cusp of victory over Putin’s Russia. America’s Ukrainian proxies have dealt the Russians “heavy military blows” and garnered “a groundswell of international opinion on their side.” The reality is that Ukraine is on life-support provided primarily by American tax-payers, and the US-designed sanctions are taking a far greater toll on the economies of America’s allies than they are on Russia. And while just a few more months and a few more hundred billions in weapons may or may not cement our victory, Bob bemoans the fact that this challenge has been more difficult, militarily and economically, than many had expected. It’s sad to see a former man of principle reduced to shilling for American Exceptionalism. Hey Bob, maybe we should do a little growing up before we lecture the rest of the planet.