Empire's Ally: Canadian Foreign Policy

But Liberal commentators have lamented the break from the approach of the Chretien regime (quietly ignoring the Martin interregnum). Indeed, the Liberal leadership race has a bit of a mantra: the "balance" of sending troops to Kabul to defend the new U.S. puppet Karzai regime and the navy into the Arabian Gulf, but not directly participating in the "coalition of the willing" in the U.S. invasion of Iraq or openly adopting the ballistic missile defense system. For their part, the social Left and the NDP have cursed the drift away from a "peacekeeping" role for Canada's armed forces (although the NDP backed the Conservative Party Parliamentary resolution on the Kandahar mission), and the bypassing of multilateral institutions to support unilateral U.S. policies to remake the global order. The NDP is now taking a soft position against the Afghan deployment, largely on the basis of an inappropriate mix of development, peacekeeping, and military objectives. While the Chretien government maneuverings to allow some Canadian distance from U.S. policies should not be naysayed, none of these views come to grips with the way geopolitical alliances have shifted during the current phase of neoliberalism. Nor do they address the particular role of imperialist ally of the U.S. that Canada has long occupied, and the way Canadian foreign policy has been transformed with the changed geo-political context since 2001. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- URL: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/albo241106.html --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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