Better Red than Dead

Harper, eager to fulfill his new role as the yapping miniature attack dog of NATO, is pushing through a new round of sanctions on Russia, in an effort to shore up support among Ukranian nationals and national security voters in the upcoming 2015 election.  These new sanctions include travel bans on a few selection individuals, as well as financial prohibitions (which make it difficult for Russian oligarchs to move money around) and restrictions on exporting technology used in Russia's energy sector.  These measures copy those instituted by the E.U. and our American allies.

Instead of falling in line with the Western bloc Canada should eschew imposing sanctions on any nation and instead trade freely with everyone in the world.  The path which Western elites are dragging us down is insanely dangerous.  Provoking war with a nuclear power is not a great idea. Nor can we, who intervene so freely throughout the world, condemn the Russian incursion into the Crimea without being the worst type of hypocrite.  While there is little to laud about Putin or the Russian state in general our foreign policy should be one of strict non intervention and unilateral free trade instead of belligerence, protectionism and bellicosity. Instead of sanctimoniously lecturing the world about how to behave we should seek to end our own military engagements overseas; we should withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan permanently and refrain from sending troops to the middle east or, as the NDP are advocating, to the Central African Republic or anywhere else.  Our military, if we are even to have a standing army, should be a peaceful defensive fighting force stationed within our own borders.

This whole nasty affair with Russia demonstrates the dangers of entangling alliances.  It is time for Canada to pull out NATO and to have a foreign policy determined not by the imperial ambitions of Washington but of a careful assessment of our own national interest along the lines which I have outlined above.  Peace and commerce with all nations, war and entangling alliances with none.