From time to time over the last five years in these pages, I have emphatically proclaimed the desirability of Canada playing a leading role in renovating most of the principal international institutions — in particular, the United Nations, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, International Monetary Fund and the Organization of American States.
The IMF is in less dire need than the others, and has generally had capable leaders, including the outrageously persecuted and detained Dominique Strauss-Kahn (whose accuser is now trying to maintain her crumbling sex-assault case by announcing the imminent production of evidence of countless women victims whom DSK has, she claims, “sexually attacked in hotel rooms around the world”).
The real problem of the IMF has been its waffling back and forth over whether it is a serious, if idealistic, lending bank and financial advisor, or a Third World welfare agency pouring money into whatever projects most appeal to the current IMF head. The organization’s new chief, former French finance minister Christine Lagarde, who is also very capable (and understandably enthused to parachute out of the encircling gloom of the financial Euroshambles to be Lady Bountiful to the Third World), should be given a clear mandate from the constituent countries to be as altruistic as she can while maintaining a reasonable lender’s comfort level about repayment.
The UN is a sop to the sensibilities of underdeveloped countries, who impose the tyranny of the global majority and elevate their most disreputable members, such as Muammar Gadaffi, Syria’s Assads and Robert Mugabe, to perverse positions of influence. It is greatly to the credit of Stephen Harper and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird that they have taken Canada’s distance from the terrible hypocrisy of UN human-rights posturing, which consist chiefly of Jew-baiting screaming sessions and a forum for the bashing of the West (without the influence of which there would be no established concept of human rights, anywhere in the world).
Canada is a co-founder of the UN (as it is of NATO and the IMF), and should try to organize a group of rising countries, such as Australia, South Korea, Singapore, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Thailand, possibly Turkey, and India (which, though poor, is enjoying rapid economic growth and is an authentic democracy), and even, conceivably, Iraq if it doesn’t disintegrate. This reform group should expand the UN’s Security Council and assure at least rotating representation for India, Japan, Brazil, Indonesia, Germany, Italy and Canada. (It was scandalous that Canada recently was dismissed by the General Assembly as a Security Council candidate, in part because of an airline landing-rights dispute with the United Arab Emirates.)
A multiple-voting system linked either to population, economic product, and human-rights criteria should be instituted at the UN General Assembly, to replace the current one country/one vote system. In the alternative, any country with apparently less respect for human rights than China should be temporarily reduced to non-voting observer status until it changes its ways (so should China itself, but that is completely impractical).
Peacekeeping activities have to cease being staffed by desperately poor countries raising foreign exchange by selling their UN peacekeepers as mercenaries to warring factions, as in the Congo; UN troops should actually end wars or not be recruited at all.
And Canada is now mature enough to recognize that though it is a peace-loving nation, its credentials as a peacekeeper are less compelling than the conventional national wisdom holds. (Lester Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 for helping to resolve the previous year’s Suez Canal Crisis only because U.S. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and the State Department devised a peacekeeping force as a face-saver to the British, French and Israelis; Lodge knew that the United States could not get it adopted, but encountered Pearson in the corridors of the UN headquarters and gave him the idea.)
Canadians generally have performed well in peacekeeping roles. But if you have peace, you don’t need peacekeepers. And if you have war, they’re of no use, as we saw in Bosnia. And the theory that Canada has any special national aptitude to keep the peace is bunk.
NATO is now dysfunctional. There is no evident threat and it continues by a combination of momentum and the ambition of former Soviet-dominated states to have a military alliance with the United States. Apart from the United States, Canada is almost the only member country remotely pulling its weight in military terms, and much of what the Europeans do spend on defence, as just departed American Defense secretary Robert Gates pointed out, is wasted on parallel bureaucracies, and comparatively little is translated into advanced hardware wielded by trigger-pullers. NATO should be broadened into an Alliance of Democracies, still a defensive alliance, but also with a carefully worded mandate that permits pre-emptive action against plausibly apprehended threats, terrorists and other aggressive movements, and the prevention of mass crimes against humanity (such as in Rwanda in 1994 and Darfur more recently). A reasonable percentage of GDP should be required of and committed to military capability and not just to desk jobs in nominally military government departments. The United States would have to understand that sometimes its forces could be under foreign command. This happens in alliances.
Canada abstained from the Organization of American States (OAS) for most of its history, originally out of Imperial solidarity, and then because the group was so dominated by the United States. Now that the Obama administration has largely thrown in its hand with the left-wing authoritarian governments of Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has virtually gained control of the OAS. The secretary general, Jose Miguel Insalza, is a recycled Chilean socialist hack. The United States has abdicated and there is little leadership for the democratic countries, with Brazil and Argentina more often siding with Chavez and the Castros, and Nicaragua’s Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega.
Canada should co-ordinate with Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, perhaps Peru, (depending on the conduct of the new government), and many of the smaller Caribbean and Central American countries, and start to organize, for the first time in the OAS, a democratic bloc not dominated by the United States.
Such a grouping, invulnerable to the ancient charge of being a Gringo fig-leaf, could possibly attract Brazil and would easily out-perform and soon outshine the floundering socialist Chavista states. America’s torpor and dalliance with the Latin American left, explicable only by the ideological leanings of Barack Obama, should be turned to advantage. Canada could play an important, constructive, and not very expensive part in this. As was widely predicted, including in this column, aid to Haiti subsided and was mismanaged after the terrible earthquake of last year, and Canada’s natural affinity with that afflicted semi-French speaking country has not been pursued with appropriate energy.
Opportunity beckons and the need for renovation is immense. Canada’s time is now.
National Post
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