******************************
Get ready for the full grovel
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...d=970599119419
RICHARD GWYN
It's hard to think of anything more irrelevant and time-wasting ? far worse, more toe-curlingly embarrassing ? than the motion on Canada-U.S. relations that the government will bring down next week.
After the usual paeans about multilateralism, the motion will express the hope that the U.S. "accomplishes its mission (in Iraq) as quickly as possible" and declare that "unbreakable bonds of values, family, friendship and mutual respect" characterize Canada-U.S. relations.
In diplomatic circles, that's known as the full grovel.
It's the ineffectiveness of the grovel that concerns me here rather than its abjectness. The Chrétien government appears to have realized belatedly that it's poor business practice for a merchant to pick a quarrel with his most important customer.
There's the obvious ineffectiveness of coming out with this kind of statement when the U.S. appears to be on the verge of military victory rather than at the war's start, when any sympathetic words would have evoked responsive smiles in Washington.
If our timing is terrible, our public relations are pathetic. It was not our failure to provide any (non-existent) military support that offended Americans, but the self-indulgent criticisms of the U.S. by such as Resources Minister Herb Dhaliwal and backbench Liberal MPs. Far more offensive, still, was Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's failure to crack down on these verbal idiocies.
The motion's true ineffectiveness is that it puts off till another day our dealing with the core issue in Canada-U.S. relations. This is, that the U.S. is now Rome, a global empire, not just dominant but almost omnipotent.
(National Post columnist Andrew Coyne argued recently that the U.S. isn't an empire because, unlike empires from Britain's back to Rome's, it does not have legions and proconsuls patrolling its colonies. Coyne should spend more time looking at television and at his laptop. Thanks to technology, and also to its cultural, financial and economic weaponry ? never mind its long-distance military capability ? Washington can control its global empire from Washington, New York, Los Angeles and Silicon Valley).
Wishing that the U.S. were not now a global empire won't change the fact that it is so. We're going to have to come to terms with this, figure out how to accommodate it and also how to exploit it and capitalize on it.
To this task, Chrétien is irrelevant. So is the entire governmental apparatus in Ottawa. Thus, Paul Martin, the almost certain successor, has so far uttered only platitudes.
We're in a box and we need to think outside the box. Maybe we need the equivalent of the B and B Commission of the mid-1960s, out of which came bilingualism, or of the (Donald) Macdonald Commission of the mid-1980s, out of which came Canada-U.S. free trade.
I can at least suggest two aids to fresh thinking. One is a forthcoming book, While Canada Slept; How We Lost Our Place In The World by Andrew Cohen, a former journalist who is now a professor at Carleton University.
I've read only the advance blurb. But it hits the right note: "We can remain mediocre in the world. We can accept the equivocal existence of small steps and narrow minds that the culture of decline is forcing on us. It isn't hard. We have only to do what we're doing now."
Just one example of our decline: We think of ourselves making our contribution to multilateralism as peacekeepers (rather than as warriors). In fact, as contributors to U.N. peacekeeping we now rank 39th, behind tiny Nepal and bankrupt Bangladesh.
The other useful catalyst for new thought is the article in last February's edition of the magazine Policy Options by Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian-born scholar now at Harvard.
Canada's great foreign policy challenge, writes Ignatieff, "is staying independent in an age of empire." This won't be easy because "We have too deep an inferiority complex to operate effectively in an empire. We have to be tougher."
Toughness will require us to significantly increase our military spending and, as critical, develop the will to use it for peacemaking in "failed states," as in Kosovo, and not just for "easy" peacekeeping.
We must continue to be multilateralists, Ignatieff argues. But we must become effective multilateralists, and earn the U.S.' respect by what we do rather than by what we preach. This will require, "moral authority, military capability and international assistance capability" ? the first of which we have a fair bit of but the last of which, like our military, we've cut to the bone.
No certain solutions exist. The single certainty is that we have to start thinking hard, starting by stopping the wishful thinking that prattling about "unbreakable bonds" will accomplish anything.