Prime Minister Mark Carney’s much criticized ambiguity about the role of international law regarding U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran is more than an excusable stumble by an inexperienced politician operating in a challenging environment.
Carney is building a foreign policy “doctrine” that increasingly warrants a closer look.
Last October, Carney lavished praise on U.S. President Donald Trump for supposedly “disabling Iran as a force of terror” with U.S. strikes months earlier. While the prime minister has softened — but not withdrawn — his support for the current military campaign that began in spite of progress on peace talks, he has not explained why he has long disagreed with intelligence assessments that Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapon.
Nor has Carney or his ministers refused to rule out some form of participation in the conflict that is rapidly extending to other Persian Gulf states.
An opportunity to provide clarity on such issues was rebuffed when Carney skipped an emergency debate in Parliament on the growing crisis. Meanwhile, the war continues to unleash enormous human suffering and chaos.
The parts he is sticking to are the pivot to realism, but most of the rest has already been binned.
Values-based realism has been revealed as just realism wearing a “values” hat to make it palatable to liberals who need some hand holding into a Hobbesian state of chaos and a return to the Standard of Civilization.
The principles in “principled pragmatism” are just more branding. The principles he spoke to, including naming reality, being consistent, building what we claim to believe in have all been more absent by the week. What we’ve seen recently is actually a refusal to name reality, a refusal to be consistent, and a throwing of institutions we claimed to believe in under the bus.
No, again, you are mistaking the path to the top of the mountain as one that always slopes upwards.
Ah, the condescending tone of self-assured belief in 4D chess and promises of payoff someday in the future when evidence in 3D world is mounting in the opposite direction.
It’s not belief that Carney is taking the right path, it’s the knowledge that you haven’t had enough time to assess his path finding ability, given that his stated goals weren’t going to materialize in a 6 month time frame.
His Davos speech did not simply lay out a destination. It laid out a vision for how to walk the path to reach that destination. There absolutely is evidence to demonstrate that he has contradicted his own statements about how to walk the path. He set the pathfinding standard that he’s not following. I’m just assessing him on his following the standard he set. The result of contradictions is that it’s an incoherent foreign policy, and that’s why its being called out and debated by many people in IR and policy spaces.
Yes, middle powers pooling together and using their collective economic power to force fairer systems.
Please go ahead and tell me which middle powers banded together with him to create a fairer system?
Oh you can’t? So we’re still operating in the existing unfair system then? So then we’re back at taking the world as it is.
It is not incoherent foreign policy, it just foreign policy whose goals don’t happen instantly.
Reflect on what you’re writing. You’re just leaning into circular logic that absolves the Carney government by dismissing contradicting evidence out of hand.
Carney says there’s a way to do things. Carney doesn’t do things that way. Must be that Carney couldn’t do things that way. Him not meeting the standard is justified because that’s “the world as it is.”
But wait, wasn’t he the guy who knew how the world is when he set the standard in the first place?
Hmm, also, if “the world as it is” justifies every departure from the way he said to walk the path, does he even have agency as a leader navigating circumstances, or should we put his agency aside any time a decision looks off?
You reflect on what you’re writing. It is not conflicting evidence it is simply a situation more nuanced than black and white.
Honestly, stop responding if you need to boil everything down to simplistic terms to understand them.
This is literally just the most basic game theory problem of coordination. A single actor cannot move on their own if the move requires the coordinated efforts of many.
Lol. I can totally understand how you would like someone to stop responding when your points keep getting cooked as you work to establish an unfalsifiable position that rejects the evidence in front of your nose.
As for understanding things in simplistic terms, you provided a great example in your other comment.
why not address the concept , as opposed to insults and hand waving? because you can’t
Your bullshit might work with the braying imbeciles you consort with, but sad news, the inmates time running the asylum is winding down
You’re really making the case for avoiding insults and addressing the concepts there.
cry more
you started it
I really appreciate your ability to elevate a conversation. Impressive.
The only mountain Carney is interested in is the enormous pile of money he is fire-hosing at the corporate world