U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent actions in Venezuela and his overall strategy for the Western Hemisphere should serve as a warning to all Canadians and require a more fulsome response from its political leaders, Canada’s former ambassador to the United Nations says.
Bob Rae, who finished his five-year ambassadorship last November, told Global News in an interview that the U.S. under Trump is rejecting multilateralism in favour of asserting its dominance over the hemisphere, without “any notion of legality.”
“We’re basically being told (by) the Americans, ‘We will do whatever we can get away with, and who’s going to stop us?’” he said. “Which is a license to take over any country that they feel is getting in their way.
“We’re not in Kansas anymore. This is a new ballgame and we need to understand the consequences of this.” Trump had already raised fears in Canada and elsewhere with his new national security strategy that seeks to restore and update the Monroe Doctrine, a 200-year-old foreign policy statement that envisioned American dominance over the Western Hemisphere and was used to justify U.S. interventions in Latin America for over a century.
The seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife by U.S. forces over the weekend — as well as Trump’s subsequent threats against Greenland, Colombia and Cuba — have underscored the reality of that strategy. Although Trump has not similarly revived his threats of making Canada the 51st U.S. state, Rae said that doesn’t mean Canadians should rest easy. “We’re on the menu,” he said. “If you don’t think we’re on the menu just because he hasn’t mentioned the words ’51st state,’ I think that’s really missing the boat in terms of what this administration is about.”
He pointed to comments made to CNN on Monday by Trump’s deputy chief of staff and top advisor Stephen Miller — who at one point said the “future of the free world depends on America being able to assert ourselves and our interests without apology” — as well as a U.S. State Department social media post that declared “this is OUR hemisphere,” as further proof of the Trump administration’s mindset. At the very least, Rae and other experts say, Trump’s strategy calls into question the sovereignty of Canada and other U.S. neighbours over their own national interest, security, and critical resources. “It kind of looks like we’re on the road to being downgraded from a sovereign neighbour to a U.S. junior resource appendage,” Fen Osler Hampson, a professor of international affairs at Carleton University, said in an interview.
As the U.S. looks to take control of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves after Maduro’s capture, Hampson says Canada’s own energy infrastructure is on the table along with critical mineral reserves, Arctic resources and “anything that the United States deems as important to its national security.”
“The U.S. is going to put us under enormous pressure, quite frankly, to follow its lead when it comes to China, and they’re going to look very carefully at the kinds of investments that other countries make in our own natural resources,” he said. “We’re going to be under Washington’s thumb, whether we like it or not.”.. By Sean Boynton
Source: globalnews.ca/news
Source: ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-
