COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER BY
CHRISTOPHER BLACK
"Courageous
Canada Targets Russia: Washington Says Jump, Ottawa Asks How High"
I'm afraid there is a lot of truth in that harsh summary.
It's ironic, the current prime minister's father, Pierre
Trudeau, was an extremely tough and independent-minded leader.
He did many things that upset Washington interests because
he thought they were the right things for Canada to do, as, for example, travelling
to Cuba and befriending Castro at a time when American pressures against Cuba
were immense. Canadians freely travelled to Cuba during America's harsh ban on
travel.
Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minister in the late 1960s and into
the 1970s, and he was no friend of the Vietnam War. He, at one point, directed
border officials to admit any Americans avoiding the war regardless of their
status.
Justin, the current Prime Minister, is in most things very
liberal-minded, but I sense a pattern of avoiding any conflict with the United
States. In his appointment of the current Foreign Minister, Chrystia Freeland, for
example, he did an unpleasant job of catering to American interests. Her
husband is even a writer for the New York Times, which is to say, he is connected
to the American security establishment.
But the observed differences between father and son, may not
be owing only to personality differences between father and son. They reflect
also differences in the America with which each of them had to deal, and the
differences are considerable.
American was a brutal society in the 1960s for sure, but I
think now it has become something even more ruthless. It is making war in more
than half a dozen places, and its security services are interfering in the internal
affairs of many other countries at the same.
It's almost as though, America is now literally at war with
the world, only excepting those portions of it completely deferring to its
primacy, and these are the nations of NATO and some nations in Asia. NATO today
also has no leaders who in any challenge America, the kind of leaders it did
once have.
My view is that this new level of ruthlessness relates both
to the American establishment’s sense of its imminent relative decline in a
world where a number of other nations – once flattened after WWII – now advance
strongly and compete. It is trying to make its position for the future as
indisputable as possible, building bunkers on the beach, as it were, against an
invasion. It is a very short-sighted approach which flies in the face of
emerging economic realities.
The ruthlessness reflects also a new set of pressures and priorities
for its Mideast colony, priorities driven by what has become over decades likely
the world’s most powerful political lobby, that for Israel in the United
States. America is now trying not only to secure that colony’s future as a
country – something never really in doubt, as I see it - but its future as a power
dominating its own entire region. This attempt does not happen without great
brutality and ruthlessness. It also is a short-sighted approach, ignoring many
realities.
The two major goals are mutually reinforcing because
advocates for Israel’s regional dominance see a United States which is highly
aggressive in all of its world affairs as their best guarantee.
In this massive pursuit, there is little room for smaller,
more independent-minded nations such as Canada was under Pierre Trudeau. There
is also little room for international organizations, the kinds of places where
countries like Canada once had conspicuous influence and support. We’ve seen a
perceptible decline in respect for institutions such as the United Nations. Its
budgets are attacked, its subsidiary organizations, such as UNESCO, are
reviled, America’s UN ambassador speaks almost like a gangster at times and
goes unchallenged, and the leadership of the United Nations is quieter and more
ineffectual than I can ever remember it.
The violent efforts behind America’s desperate, and ultimately
unrealistic, pursuits render the United States likely more dangerous than it
has been in our lifetime.
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