{"id":36950,"date":"2026-05-08T10:26:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T10:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/36950\/"},"modified":"2026-05-08T10:26:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T10:26:09","slug":"the-iran-war-has-shown-why-canada-shouldnt-just-take-the-world-as-it-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/36950\/","title":{"rendered":"The Iran war has shown why Canada shouldn\u2019t just take the world as it is"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Prime Minister Mark Carney takes part in a family photo during the Canada-UAE Investment Summit in Abu Dhabi in November, 2025.Sean Kilpatrick\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n

\u201cWe take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.\u201d That phrase, and the coldly self-interested realism that appeared to be behind it, became associated with Prime Minister Mark Carney\u2019s approach to the Middle East for a brief moment earlier this year.<\/p>\n

Grabbed from the PM\u2019s Davos speech in January, the line was celebrated by those who believed Canada\u2019s foreign policy had descended into the virtue-signalling promotion of Canadian values, and needed to return to the rock-ribbed projection of national interests.<\/p>\n

For them, the pinnacle of Mr. Carney\u2019s \u201cworld as it is\u201d paradigm shift came in his recent negotiation of investment deals with the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. These deals were part of a necessary effort to diversify Canada away from a suddenly threatening United States, but realist-minded observers focused enthusiastically on the fact that the Prime Minister gave only perfunctory mention to the darker side of these Arab monarchies, including the UAE\u2019s role in supporting this century\u2019s largest-scale genocidal slaughter, in Sudan.<\/p>\n

Ottawa\u2019s focus on diversifying trade overshadows human-rights issues, experts say<\/a><\/p>\n

To them, this was a welcome pivot away from Canada\u2019s limp tradition of projected idealism. Keep your values at home, the story went, and don\u2019t mix your virtues with your deals.<\/p>\n

About six weeks after that phrase entered the discourse, however, a military attack launched by the U.S. and Israel showed us how hollow it is. <\/p>\n

First, the Iran war revealed what actual world-as-it-is realism looks like. Mr. Carney initially welcomed the attack \u2013 but for purely ideals-based, democracy-promotion reasons. It was Donald Trump\u2019s initial call for the Iranian people to rise up against their murderous theocratic regime that the Prime Minister welcomed. It expressed our values.<\/p>\n

Within days, the President made it clear that his real goal was a cruelly, profoundly realist one: The Islamic regime would be kept in place, but headed by figures, he hoped, who would play ball with Washington. This was the ultimate expression of taking the world as it is, putting interests (in this case Mr. Trump\u2019s, not his country\u2019s) above values. Mr. Carney backed away.<\/p>\n

Second, the war revealed that those supposedly hard-realist Gulf investment deals relied on the squishy idealism built through decades of values promotion. As a consequence, the war\u2019s effect of shifting the region from post-petroleum soft-power projection into hard-nosed realpolitik has probably killed Canada\u2019s deals: Recent weeks have seen struggling Gulf-state wealth funds abandon investments in the West and shift their focus strictly to domestic economies.<\/p>\n

Editorial: Mark Carney\u2019s push toward realpolitik<\/a><\/p>\n

In the realist imagination, the nadir of Canada\u2019s descent into geopolitical virtue-signalling was then-foreign minister Chrystia Freeland\u2019s 2018 statement condemning Saudi Arabia\u2019s brutal persecution of women\u2019s-rights activists. The kingdom took it personally and broke off diplomatic relations with Canada for years, though it did not cancel the multibillion-dollar arms deals that form the core of the Canada-Saudi economic relationship. That was the sort of \u201cmegaphone diplomacy\u201d that realists would say you don\u2019t want to do in the Middle East (even though we wouldn\u2019t hesitate to publicly condemn the same actions from, say, Vladimir Putin).<\/p>\n

In the end, however, Ms. Freeland\u2019s statement was part of a tide of condemnation that forced Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to reform his country\u2019s hard-line fundamentalist policies. Without this shift to a more tolerable kingdom, Mr. Carney\u2019s investment deal would likely not have been politically or practically thinkable. The megaphone made possible the muscle.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the United Arab Emirates, receives Mark Carney before a meeting at Al Shati Palace in Abu Dhabi.Ryan Carter \/ UAE Presidential C\/Reuters<\/p>\n

Values-based actions and statements have always been integral components of Canada\u2019s interests-based dealmaking. We struck lucrative oil-exploration deals with Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi and his family in the 2000s, then correctly saw the need to use our NATO role to help the Libyan people overthrow him in 2011. We supported Israelis in their darkest moment following Hamas\u2019s atrocities in October, 2023, and then, when Mr. Netanyahu\u2019s response became a humanitarian outrage, we joined other democracies in agreeing to recognize the Palestinian state in 2025. These were all expressions of our ideals. There is no such thing as a purely or mainly realist foreign policy, unless you are a monster or a demagogue.<\/p>\n

\u201cTake the world as it is, not as we wish it to be\u201d has long been an American saying. It has Cold War origins, and it was used by<\/a> president Barack Obama during his 2008 campaign, and throughout his presidency<\/a>, to mark a policy break from the neo-conservative idealism of George W. Bush that led to the Iraq war. Its most infamous result was the decision to leave Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in power during the Arab Spring, after which he would commit atrocities with chemical weapons.<\/p>\n

Mr. Carney, in fact, only uttered it as part of a longer statement<\/a>, at the core of which was the more sensible phrase \u201cvalue-based realism\u201d \u2013 a three-word acknowledgment of the less simplistic reality the Iran war has exposed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Prime Minister Mark Carney takes part in a family photo during the Canada-UAE…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36951,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[164,224,238,214,212,239,17,211,230,231,227,213,210,235,171,234,143,222,249,215,216,229,225,226,219,240,220,244,245,247,242,246,94,243,217,142,233,113,232,241,223,236,237,228,221,218,248],"class_list":{"0":"post-36950","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-canada","8":"tag-alberta","9":"tag-arts-news","10":"tag-bc","11":"tag-breaking-news","12":"tag-breaking-news-video","13":"tag-british-columbia","14":"tag-canada","15":"tag-canada-news","16":"tag-canada-sports","17":"tag-canada-sports-news","18":"tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","19":"tag-canadian-breaking-news","20":"tag-canadian-news","21":"tag-economy","22":"tag-education","23":"tag-environment","24":"tag-federal-government","25":"tag-foreign-news","26":"tag-globe-and-mail","27":"tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","28":"tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","29":"tag-government","30":"tag-life-news","31":"tag-lifestyle","32":"tag-local-news","33":"tag-manitoba","34":"tag-national-news","35":"tag-new-brunswick","36":"tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","37":"tag-northwest-territories","38":"tag-nova-scotia","39":"tag-nunavut","40":"tag-ontario","41":"tag-pei","42":"tag-photos","43":"tag-political-news","44":"tag-political-opinion","45":"tag-politics","46":"tag-politics-news","47":"tag-quebec","48":"tag-sports-news","49":"tag-technology","50":"tag-travel","51":"tag-trudeau","52":"tag-us-news","53":"tag-world-news","54":"tag-yukon"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36950\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}