Canada's Day, Canada's era

As the Houses of Parliament adjourn for the summer, Canadians can reflect on the fact that this country is in better condition than all but a few others. And that small group certainly does not include the United States.

The state of American policy is now beginning to transcend even the indulgence of the most tenacious believers in Barack Obama's statesmanlike aptitudes. The "Reset" button with Russia has led to a torrent of insolences from the Kremlin, including increased intimacy with Iran in promoting the survival of the Assad regime in Syria. The corrupt Karzai regime in Afghanistan, for which thousands of Americans and their allies (including 158 Canadian Forces personnel) have died and a trillion dollars have been spent, has now embraced Tehran as a senior ally. And Washington itself has convened peace talks that include Mullah Omar's Taliban, the host to Osama bin-Laden and his lieutenants when al-Qaeda was planning 9/11.

In the words of distinguished Wall Street Journal commentator Bret Stephens, it is "The Age of American Impotence: no peace, no peace process, no ally, no leverage and no moral standing." President Obama still speaks of arms control while approaching what is now a high probability of an Iranian-led nuclear arms build-up in the Middle East. His strategy is bluster and threat without any follow-up, unless shamed into action (as in Libya by the French and the British).

In Berlin last week, Obama ascribed terrorism to "instability and intolerance," as if we had gone back to the New Frontier theory of JFK's Best and Brightest, that Indochinese Communism could be fought by the Peace Corps, and by building schools and roads. American liberals, like the French Bourbons returning in the baggage train of the Duke of Wellington's army in 1815, "have forgotten nothing, and learned nothing." There is now little likelihood that America will have anything to show for the mighty effort and sacrifices in Iraq and Afghanistan, except the evaporation of its influence in the capitals of the world.

© 2024 Conrad Black