Prime Minister Mark Carney made “a terrible mistake” with his immediate full-throated support of U.S. President Donald Trump’s war of choice in Iran, Canadian historian and security-intelligence expert Wesley Wark said yesterday.
It’s hard to argue with Dr. Wark’s grim assessment that the hasty announcement by the PM while at the Canada-India Growth and Investment Forum in Mumbai was “the Carney government’s first major error in the realm of foreign policy.”
“It would have been better to take a leaf from the Chrétien government’s response to the U.S. intention to go to war against Iraq in 2003,” Dr. Wark wrote in his thoughtful National Security and Intelligence Newsletter, which is published on Substack.
Lest readers have not heard of him, Dr. Wark is not some naive peacenik. A professor, author and former advisor to the public safety minister on national security policy, he has served on the Canadian Advisory Council on National Security and the advisory council to the Canada Border Services Agency.
So even if you disagree with him, his view that what Canada ought to do right now is “stay cool and on the sidelines” deserves serious attention.
But, as he pointed out, old habits die hard – even if the prime minister has based his nascent political career on proposing dramatic responses to the rupture in international trade relations created by U.S. President Donald Trump. “It seems we still struggle to unhook ourselves from thought and policy dependency on the United States, despite a brave speech in Davos,” Dr. Wark observed.
Even the obvious fact that Mr. Trump’s attack on Iran came in the middle of negotiations – the equivalent of firing on your enemy after approaching under a white flag – seems not to have caused much hesitation, so habituated were we to jumping on the American foreign policy bandwagon before the advent of Mr. Trump’s erratic regime, the honourable example set by prime minister Jean Chrétien in 2003 notwithstanding.
Meanwhile, here in Alberta, Premier Danielle Smith hasn’t said anything yet about the so-called “pre-emptive strike” – which is a fair description of the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran Friday night since it was clearly intended to pre-empt the comprehensive peace deal that CBS had reported the day before that Iran was prepared to accept.
This would make sense from President Trump’s perspective, since a short successful war is likely to give his Republican Party a boost in November’s mid-term elections and a long unsuccessful once would give him the excuse he’s been looking for to cancel the mid-terms. (Both Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt contested presidential elections during wartime, but they were obviously made of sterner stuff than Mr. Trump.)
As for Alberta’s governing United Conservative Party, no doubt they are privately celebrating the outbreak of war in the Persian Gulf region because the result is certain to be an immediate spike in international oil prices and quite possibly longer-term increases. How much remains to be seen – predictions in the past few hours have ranged anywhere from a few tens of U.S. dollars to catastrophic increases in the hundreds.
But this does mean Finance Minister Nate Horner’s provincial deficit budget on Thursday afternoon was already obsolete by Friday night.
If Alberta needs oil prices to be in the range of $74 to $77 per barrel to balance the provincial budget, this means Mr. Horner may have just seen his chicken poop budget turn into chicken salad in less that 24 hours!
A little more time will be required to tell how the war is really going, how long it’s likely to last, and, importantly, whether Iran can choke off the Persian Gulf.
UCP leaders would be wise to keep their lips zipped about this, since the impact on the rest of the world, not to mention on ordinary working people in Alberta, could be catastrophic. Wisdom not being a UCP strength, we can probably look forward to a gleeful statement from the government by Monday, if not before.
Meanwhile, it’s extremely hard to predict how Mr. Trump’s war will go, other than whatever happens it’s likely to keep reporting about the Epstein Files and the sad-sack state of the Trump economy off American front pages and home pages for a few days or even weeks.
Right now, the Internet is full of Orwellian misinformation and propaganda, the fog of war is notoriously murky at the best of times, and there are plenty of historical precedents for the troops not making it home in as timely a fashion as promised when the first shots were fired in anger.
