Trudeau Ideology, Mali and Peacekeeping
The Trudeau government has finally decided to embark on its long-promised peacekeeping mission to Mali to buttress its hopes of gaining a non-veto wielding UN security Council seat. A seat which holds little prestige, and no real power.
The Trudeau government has already invested billions in this exercise so that it can trumpet “Canada is back” to anyone who cares to listen to its ideologically driven worldview ‘battle cry!’ The very same “Canada that is back” that tried to sabotage the Canada European Trade Agreement and Trans Pacific Partnership. The Canada that antagonized China, Japan, the Philippines with its moralizing and its long-time Pacific allies Australian and New Zealand with its dithering. The very same Canada that took a terrorist to events in India, engaged in “Mr. Dress-Up diplomacy” on the sub-continent, and that then blamed the Modi government for Mr. Trudeau’s self-inflicted ‘foot wounds.’ Immediately after India, the Trudeau Canada government snubbed our Belgian ally in their first Royal visit to Canada in 50 years and by mixing up the German flag for the visiting Belgian one. North American Free Trade is at the very best on life support, and at the worst dead. But Canada is back! Feel good yet?
So now we embark on the Trudeau liberals long-promised return to UN peacekeeping announced in the last Federal election as their wish to move away from combat to the Pearsonian-era construct. Never mind that peacekeeping conceptually goes back to 1956, involved a world order now dead, and a willingness by two super powers and their allied military blocs to avoid mutual destruction. Never mind that the Balkans and Africa in the 1990s became the ‘graveyard’ of the Pearsonian peacekeeping idea and that the world returned to peace enforcement and warfighting approaches to conflict. Never mind that outside of a small number of Cold War-era peacekeeping operations that the concept of lightly armed troops restraining military action between opposing belligerent's military forces rests on the ‘garbage heap of history.’ Never mind the fact that this is not a peacekeeping mission, it is peace enforcement and counter-insurgency operation against an Al Qaeda off-shoot in the deadliest UN mission in the world, and that the deployment involves two transport helicopters, four gunships, and a few support and potentially medical personnel.
Gone are the days when we had a battlegroup in Kandahar, commanded the NATO air campaign against Libya, and joined our allies with a robust fighting force to defeat the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria. Gone are the days when Canada was a dependable trading partner. Gone are the days when we were a good world neighbor. Now we let ISIS fighters and their families return home to Canada with no thought to the consequences of this action at home or abroad.
Oh, did I forget to mention “Canada is back.”
