By Conrad Black
Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke purposefully at Davos this past week about adopting a more nationalistic policy for Canada. Less persuasive was his call for a league of so-called middle powers to combine to influence the superpowers to set up what he called, in the current tedious jargon, ”a rules-based international order.”
He is vaguely addressing, without recognizing directly, the fact that the Western Alliance was established in 1949 to contain the Soviet Union which it successfully did until the USSR disintegrated in 1991 without exchanging a shot with any of the NATO countries. Since then there has been a gradual shift from a collective security-based to a national interest-based foreign policy on the part of the NATO countries, as well as the former blocks of so-called neutral states and the regional blocks in Latin America and Africa, none of which easily mobilized their combined influence or enjoyed much relevance to the course of international affairs. The United Nations and many of its agencies are just primal scream therapy for many of the most retrograde and primitive regimes in the world. Israel can be commended for taking the wrecker’s ball to the outlet of one of its agencies in Jerusalem.
Carney was effectively wagging his finger at the United States in the highest (or lowest) tradition of its so-called allies who graciously sheltered under the protective wing of American military power while attempting to collegialize all alliance decisions on the basis that the United States was a great mastiff which would do the work and take the risks while it’s European and Canadian allies held the leash and gave the instructions. The “rules-based international order” was always a fraud. It was a stability based almost entirely on the deterrent and enforcement capacity that the United States possessed because of its great military and economic power. The ideas of a group of “middle powers” grouping together to assert themselves is a complete fantasy. Superpowers don’t care about middle powers as long as other superpowers don’t invade them.