(Caandian prime minister Mark Carney speaking at Davos in January 2026)

Canadian Diplomatic Successes 2000-25

All through this quarter century starting in 2000, Canada was cashing in on a self-declared ‘peace dividend’. With the brief exception of Afghanistan between 2003 and 2014, Canada reduced its strategic footprint.

By 2025, the regular force of Canada’s military — which had numbered 69,000 service members in 2000 — had fallen to 66,000. Canada had fewer full embassies and consulates general around the world. After recent cuts, Canada is likely to spend only about 0.25 percent of nominal GDP on aid in 2026 — roughly the same level as in 2000, and far below Pearson’ goal of 0.7 percent.

Yet despite this loss of military and diplomatic altitude — despite not having served on the UN Security Council since December 2000 — Canada did have moments of diplomatic success over the past twenty-five years.

Here are seven of them:

(i) Jean Chrétien decided to turn down the US when it requested our participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, anchoring a reputation for principled independence;

(ii) Canada committed strongly to the mission in Afghanistan, invoking article 5 in 2001, championing NATO structures in 2003 and leading the transition to combat in Kandahar in 2005, which led to military success that motivated other allies;

(iii) In 2011, Canada championed the responsibility to protect (R2P) in Libya and commanded a successful NATO air campaign, authorized by the UN Security Council, with China and Russia abstaining alongside Brazil, Germany and India;

(iv) Starting in 2009-10, Canada reduced funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency, already heavily infiltrated by Hamas, reducing it to zero by 2013-14;

(v) From 2009 to 2014, we negotiated the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) that was signed in 2016 and in force by 2017. In 2012, Canada joined Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations that concluded in 2015. We signed TPP in 2016. Following the US exit from TPP during Trump’s first term, we re-signed the Comprehensive and Progression Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) in 2018 with ten other countries.

(vi) In 2014, Canada was the principal ally pushing for Russia’s expulsion from the G7 following its invasion of Ukrainian Crimea and Donbas. We led the push for sanctions and for Russia “to get out of Ukraine.” In 2015 we deployed the first training mission for the Ukrainian army on the ground in Ukraine.

(vii) Carney sharply increased military spending in 2025, agreeing to meet new NATO goals of 3.5% of GDP on military spending and an additional 1.5% on related infrastructure. At Davos, he sketched a strategy for middle powers.

These contributions were substantial. Outcomes in Afghanistan, Libya and Ukraine, would have been different, and probably worse, without Canada’s contributions.

Today’s Challenges

Yet none of these achievements has prevented the emergence of a set of interlocking threats now fueling today’s instability: Pakistan’s predatory policy towards Afghanistan; Iran’s proxy wars across the Middle East and Africa; China’s threats to the South China Sea and Taiwan; above all, Russia’s continuing invasion of Ukraine.

In my view, Russian aggression remains the principal threat to international peace and security today. Moscow is Tehran’s main military ally. Russia was the first country to give the Taliban regime official recognition. China’s policy on Taiwan depends on Russia’s fortunes in Ukraine.

Russian aggression is a recurring theme over the longer arc of Canadian history. Let’s compare snapshots, each a half century apart from the next. In the run up to Confederation, with Germany also uniting, Bismarck reportedly said: “The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia.” By this he meant that giving Moscow a free hand to suppress Poland, Ukraine, Finland and other countries would give Prussia a free hand to deal with Austria, Denmark and France.

And so it was for several decades. Only when Bismarck was gone in 1890 did the Franco-Russian Dual Entente of 1894 begin to pave the way to world war. When Canada took Vimy Ridge in 1917, Russia was in the throes of a revolution that took it out of the war. Moscow became Germany’s de facto ally until 1941. After the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Germany was able to move over 40 divisions from the eastern to the western front, which may have cost allies a more decisive victory.

Fifty years later, in 1967, Moscow pivoted from Cold War-style conflict in Cuba, Germany, Korea and Vietnam to proxy wars in developing countries from Angola and Madagascar to Ethiopia, Nicaragua and Afghanistan. With a brief respite in the 1990s, when Moscow was fighting in Chechnya, these conflicts resumed under Putin.

Since Canadian Confederation in 1867, Russia has changed the game every fifty years. From the ‘League of the Three Emperors’ in 1873 they pivoted to worldwide communist revolution in 1917, to proxy war in the developing world in 1967, and war in Europe in 2007. Their aim remained the same: territorial expansion.

These successive reorientations of Russian aggression have literally shaped Canada. Britain’s need to respond to faltering stability in Europe was one factor driving Canadian Confederation. Our sacrifices in two world wars were larger because of Moscow’s 1917-41 de facto and later explicit alliance with Berlin. Our founding role in the League of Nations, UN and NATO was motivated by a wish to end “the scourge of war” and other acts of aggression, including Russian aggression; after all, the last act of the League of Nations in 1939 had been to expel the USSR for invading Finland. Canada’s later contributions to the war in Korea, CIDA and Afghanistan were also responses to Soviet aggression in the Cold War and the developing world, including the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Today’s Canadian military commitments in Latvia, Poland and Ukraine were made in response to a renewed Russian threat.

My favourite actual quote on diplomacy is from Talleyrand: « Il n’y a pas de principes, il n’y a que des événements. »

In the end, there is no principle governing Canadian diplomacy or international policy that says we must counter Russian aggression. Events now oblige us to do so.

Russia backed Islamist terrorism starting in the 1960s. Moscow became Iran’s partner after the revolution. Russia used the conflict in Syria to radicalize European politics and seed the political ground in the UK for Brexit. Russia worked to humiliate NATO in Afghanistan. The Kremlin used the Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel of October 7^th, 2023 to divert attention from Ukraine.

My favourite quotation attributed to Talleyrand is sadly apocryphal: « L’art de la diplomatie est de prévoir l’inévitable et d’en hâter l’avènement. »

A decisive reckoning with both Iran and Russia is now inevitable. The Iranian revolution of 1979 and Russia’s loss of empire in 1989-91 unleashed waves of aggression which, if we value our institutions and way of life, must be countered.

In responding to such threats, Canada is not a minor player. If over the coming years we unlock Canada’s full economic potential, close the current GDP gap with Italy (and eventually France and the UK) and create new capabilities to act with real relevance in today’s world, then Canada will have a new opportunity.

Seven strategic initiatives could generate renewed diplomatic and political influence:

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The theme of the conference was ‘If I Only Had a DIME: Canadian National Power in the New Global (Dis)Order’. Four speakers addressed each dimension of the diplomatic, information, military and economic (DIME) rubric.

These remarks focused on the outlook for Canadian diplomatic and political influence:

(Lester Pearson, Canada’s secretary of state for external affairs until June 20th, 1957, arriving in Oslo to receive the Nobel peace prize on December 10th, 1957)

Ask almost any AI platform today for a joke about Lester Pearson and diplomacy, and you will get this one: “The chief distinction of a diplomat is that he can say no in such a way that it sounds like yes.”

Self-effacing and anodyne like Pearson himself, the online world can nevertheless not enlighten us as to when Canada’s most famous diplomat actually made this remark. It seems to be a free-floating quotation, unmoored to any particular context — perhaps from early in his career, perhaps not.

My time as a diplomat began in an era whose flavour was very different from the cordite-tinged interwar, wartime and Cold War periods Pearson had known. By 1991, the chief distinction of a diplomat was to struggle for relevance. In those days, like our military colleagues, we mostly said yes — but in a manner that did not incur future spending obligations. By the 1990s most policy-makers worshipped at the altar of free trade. Trade negotiators were larger-than-life figures. Business, investment and market economics would resolve most of the world’s problems, or so many believed — perhaps with a little help from HIPC debt forgiveness, NEPAD & the Ottawa process.

‘So how did that work out?’ is a question with which we are still coming to grips. To make a very long story short, the diplomacy of the 1990s mostly failed. Global imbalances and incompatibilities reasserted themselves. Genocide happened in Rwanda and Srebrenica. Acts of aggression multiplied.

When two decades later I became an elected politician — that profession was still relevant, if somewhat infamously so. One of Churchill’s early quotes is apt: “Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.”

Having worked as a diplomat under fire in both Russia and Afghanistan — on the other side of the Northwest Frontier on which Churchill served — I can agree politics is considerably less exciting than war. This may be simply because the results of politics are almost always deferred.

Is political death worse than death on the battlefield? The very question is absurd. But one thing is certain: the political casualty, who is only metaphorically dead, has the very real misfortune to witness the aftermath of his or her fall from grace.

We are not here to re-litigate the legacies of Pearson or Churchill, the Cold War or the mission in Afghanistan. Canadian diplomacy seems a far safer, more prosaic topic.

Except that it is not. These remarks are being made by one who is still firmly convinced that political leadership and diplomacy remain key drivers of world affairs — and that Canada has an outsized role to play even and perhaps especially in today’s landscape of hard risks and shape-shifting friends and foes.

Pearson dedicated his Nobel acceptance speech to a goal he — a true son of the manse — described as “the Empire of Peace.” His Nobel lecture focused on what he called the four faces of peace — prosperity, power, policy and people.

Pearson had seen his country make huge wartime sacrifices for peace. A generation earlier, Borden had spoken of “establishing upon permanent ideals a League for the enforcement of international right and for the prevention of future war.”

(Opening session of the Versailles peace conference, Trianon palace, January 1919)

That league had failed after only two decades. When Pearson spoke, the UN was only twelve years old, and had yet to prove itself. In his 1957 Nobel acceptance speech, Pearson acknowledged that the “determined and effective will to peace displaying itself in action and policy remains to be achieved.”

The longing for peace, as expressed by Borden, Pearson and so many others, was an old ideal — in modern form, as old as Immanuel Kant’s philosophical sketch of ‘Perpetual Peace’ published in Königsberg in 1795. The Congress of Vienna aspired to implement it. By the 1860s and certainly after the 1878 Congress of Berlin, the balance of power created by this Concert of Europe had started to fall apart.

Twice in the twentieth century new and elaborate machineries of peace were attempted — with the League of Nations, then later the United Nations. Canada was present at the creation for both.

Borden saw the League Covenant, backed by 32 states, as a solemn pledge “that not force but right and justice shall be the arbiter of international disputes.”

Yet both the League and more recently the UN failed to keep the peace.

The League’s failure heralded the Second World War, which was only ended by allied victories in Europe and Asia. How will the UN’s jarring state of disrepair be handled? How can a middle power like Canada generate and exert decisive diplomatic and political influence in this century?

To answer this question, I want to cover three issues — first, how the global order has changed since 2000; second, the high-water marks of Canadian diplomatic and political influence over the past quarter century; and third, how we might refashion our diplomacy and political influence to address today’s larger issues.

The International Order Since 2000

After the democratization and globalization of the 1990s, the turn of the millennium saw two major changes. First, a nationalist former KGB officer took over in the Kremlin. Second, Israel unilaterally withdraw from the south of Lebanon, triggering a Hezbollah ‘victory’ in May, the failure of the Camp David Summit in July and the start of the second intifada in September.

Two more events upended the global status quo the very next year.

On September 11^th, 2001, a terrorist group based in Pakistan used civilian aircraft to attack the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, sending the US and NATO allies on military manoeuvres in Afghanistan for the next twenty years.

Then on November 11^th, 2001, China acceded to the World Trade Organization. Over the next quarter century, its exports would surge from US $246 billion in 2000 to $1.9 trillion in 2011 and $3.8 trillion in 2025.

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(Field Marshal Asim Munir, who is Pakistan’s chief of the army staff, calling on Pakistani prime minister Shehbaz Sharif in November 2025.)

As the US vice president heads to Islamabad for talk with Iran, the strategic contradictions that beset this military operation from its start on February 28^th are coming home to roost.

The failure of the White House to bring allies onside in advance has now led to an open breach, which will not be easily mended.

Even as American bombs rained down on Tehran over 40 days, Trump and his team remained utterly besotted with their Kremlin friends, batting away hard evidence Russia provided intelligence to help target US service members and Gulf energy infrastructure. Far from being embarrassed, the Administration is doubling down on its backing for Russia’s genocidal occupation of Ukraine.

The Iranian people, who have suffered in countless ways since 1979, seem no closer to ridding themselves of the repressive regime that massacred thousands of them in streets and hospitals in cold blood in January.

With little to lose, the remains of the Khomeinist machinery of repression seem determined to hold international commerce hostage in the strait of Hormuz and threaten Gulf neighbours.

Given the current ceasefire does not apply to Lebanon, where Hezbollah has been in breach of UN resolutions for two decades, Israel has been engaged in air strikes on targets there for two days — in addition to a ground operation that began on March 16^th, which took the IDF as much as ten kilometres into Lebanon. They have almost reached the Litani river, north of which Hezbollah was required to withdraw by the terms of UN security council resolution 1701, adopted unanimously on August 11^th, 2006 in a bid to end the Israel-Lebanon war of that year.

While Iranian military capabilities have been damaged, the regime’s obdurate obsession with continuing its proxy wars remains undiminished.

Lebanon is a virtual Iranian protectorate. Hamas still exists. The Houthis are still hurling anti-Israeli hatred and violence at the world from Yemen.

As we have argued before, there will be no Middle East settlement — no peace around the Persian Gulf — until Iran’s aggression against Israel and other states is ended.

What are the prospects for success in Islamabad? In short, nil.

Iran has made unacceptable demands. The US has put forward a wish list of laudable goals with no prospect of being achieved — even in part.

JD Vance opposed the military operation against Iran from the start. With Trump, he is the flashing red light signalling this White House’s de facto alliance with Iran’s ally Russia, having just visited Budapest to help Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban, the Kremlin’s top stooge in Europe, remain in power.

The host country for these talks embraces a virtual carbon copy of Iran’s playbook. In fact, they invented it years before the Iranian revolution took place in 1978-79. In Pakistan’s case, the main prize for decades of state sponsorship of terrorism, proxy wars and genocidal occupation has been Afghanistan, which Trump and Biden combined to gift to Islamabad in 2020-21. Islamabad is also China’s most important and most obsequious strategic ally.

To top things off, Pakistan’s defence minister recently posted this:

This tweet is all we need to know about prospects for peace this weekend,.

By agreeing to meet in Islamabad — the country that backed Iran’s terrorism project most staunchly since 1979 — the US is showing more strategic weakness. In the end, Pakistan was only chosen as a mediator and venue because of its army chief’s headlong, calculated effort to ingratiate himself with Trump over the past year, which we highlighted at the start of the US/Israeli air campaign against Iran.

Does the choice of Islamabad show that, as ever, Trump always chickens out (TACO)?

Yes, quite possibly.

But if Iran is an exception to the TACO principle — as Trump’s statements about Iran since the 1980s lead some to believe — then a resumption of military strikes and even operations to open the strait of Hormuz is also entirely possible.

Either way, the economic pain of Iranian blackmail in the strait of Hormuz and Iran’s hostile designs on the Middle East will remain.

Some including a former Israeli foreign minister writing in today’s Globe and Mail have gone so far as to conclude that, by repealing the principle of a Clausewitzian ‘centre of gravity’, rogue states like Iran are bound to have endless success with their asymmetric war-fighting.

The truth is more prosaic and more concrete. The Iranian regime is now enfeebled. They will only stay in power by continuing massive internal coercion. Their economy is vulnerable, with no windfall or saviour in sight.

States like Iran, Pakistan and Russia need trade. They need weapons. They depend on partners. They crave financial flows. They require technology to continue their wars of conquest and occupation in Lebanon, Afghanistan and Ukraine.

Sanctions, embargo and enforcement actions can tip the balance against them.

All that is required is political will and unity among allies.

Both are now in short supply. But we should not give up on the only formula for responding effectively to situations of great gravity that is known to work.

Ever true to form, Ukrainian president Zelenskyy has seen this clearly. In Ukraine’s efforts to share their world-beating drone defence systems with Gulf states, in its call for more decisive to pull economic levers that would end Iran and Russia’s ability to project aggression, there is the outline of real strategy.

For now, most allies are not even naming the problem correctly.

Macron’s knee-jerk condemnation of Israel for defending itself against attacks from Lebanon — and the French president’s refusal to be remotely coherent on Iran over the past five weeks — are just the tip of the iceberg.

The vitriolic hate speech by a Pakistani defence minister, inciting the same violence Iran has been meting out for nearly half a century, will not be denounced by any allied political leader or UN official. Most media are ignoring it.

Only Pakistan army chief Asim Munir apparently had the presence of mind and clout to oblige his minister — technically Munir’s superior — to delete the offending tweet. But the damage done by waves of Anti-Semitic rancour remains.

While allies are blinded by prejudice, the US is grounded by incoherence.

While attacking Russia’s ally, this Administration sides with Moscow. When seeking an off-ramp for military operations, they turn to Pakistan — with Iran, the most intractable state sponsor of terrorism in the world today whose occupation of Afghanistan Trump eagerly facilitated in his first term.

For now, the doom loop of incoherence and under-reaction continues.

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(US vice president JD Vance visiting prime minister Viktor Orban on April 7th, 2026 — five days before Hungary’s elections. [Janos Kummer/Getty])

When Viktor Orban was first elected prime minister in 1998, he campaigned on a liberal-conservative platform for a ‘civic Hungary’. He portrayed himself as a generational alternative to bourgeois socialists who had failed the country.

When he returned as prime minister in 2010 after an eight-year break, he campaigned against the same left-of-centre establishment — this time as a national conservative. He sought a revolutionary break with weak EU leadership. He wanted “national cooperation” for work, family, order and national sovereignty.

When the 2014-15 European migration crisis broke out, fuelled by Assad’s appalling waves of violence against his own people, Orban pivoted quickly.

But every stage of his career — liberal-conservative, national conservative and anti-immigration hardliner — has had one common denominator: Russia.

In a sworn 2016 statement, Dietmar Clodo described handing one million Deutsche Marks from Semyon Mogilevich, a leading Russian mobster then living in Budapest, to Orban ahead of 1994 parliamentary elections.

In an interview this month Laszlo Kovacs, a former Budapest gang member, alleged bomb-maker and bodybuilder, described acting as a courier for Mogilevich in 1997 — just before Orban’s first win — to deliver payments of $300,000, $500,000 and even one million dollars in a single sports bag.

In recent days, we have also learned that Orban’s foreign minister routinely briefed his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on confidential EU Council discussions. They even strategized about ways to lift sanctions and block support for Ukraine.

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(Ukrainian president Zelenskyy arriving in Syria on April 5th, 2026.)

The current US and Israeli military operation aims to ensure Iran no longer poses a strategic threat. Europe, the UK and Canada are supporting Ukraine’s continuing self-defence against Russian aggression.

Yet Trump and Netanyahu see Russia as a friend. Europe, the UK and Canada failed to prevent Iran from becoming a main enabler of Russia’s aggression.

As a result, strikes against both Iran and Ukraine are happening against a backdrop of grand incoherence, as both sets of allies mostly ignore their enemy’s main enabler.

This is a recipe for continuing failure. Neither Iran nor Russia will abandon its aggressive posture unless both face uniformly strong pressure.

For now, only Ukraine has fully grasped this linkage. The same drones hitting Kharkiv and Odesa are being launched against Dubai and Doha. By offering to help Gulf states counter such threats, Ukraine is again showing leadership.

Peace in Europe and the Persian Gulf requires that both Iran and Russia lose their capacity to build, deploy and launch drones, missiles and rockets.

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(Ali Larijani, head of the supreme national security council of Iran, who was killed in airstrikes last month. [Arash Khamooshi/New York Times])

For decades, Iran has been engaged in wide-ranging campaigns of terrorism, proxy conflicts, subversion and a genocidal war against Israel. But the rules of international relations seem not to apply to them.

For example, just weeks after murdering thousands, Iran was elected vice-chair of the UN commission on social development “whose priority theme will be promoting democracy, gender equality, and ensuring tolerance and non-violence.”

Why is this?

First, the comprehensive support that Iran enjoys from China, Russia, Pakistan and other corrupt and/or authoritarian states counts for a great deal.

Yet Iran’s long-term impunity cannot be explained by support from dictators alone.

In Iran’s case, leading democracies seem to have suspended judgement. We treat Khomeinist regime violence as insensate — a series of inevitable or uncaused effects. To see why, we need to cite four interlocking factors:

Ideological capture: Parts of the academy, media, and NGO world have long framed the Islamic Republic as an authentic ‘anti-imperialist’ force resisting U.S. hegemony and Israeli power. This view goes back to the 1979 revolution itself, which some intellectuals initially romanticized. It hardened during the era of the Iraq war and post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ fatigue. Iran’s self-presentation as champion of the ‘oppressed’ (Palestinians, Shia communities, Global South) aligned neatly with a post-colonial willingness to prioritize Western sins over theocratic repression. Terms like ‘axis of resistance’ were often adopted uncritically, making it difficult to counter Hamas infiltration of the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, the UN Relief and Works Agency or the government of Lebanon at all levels. This uncritical attitude was not universal — some conservative outlets, Israeli media, Gulf Arab states, and Iranian dissidents highlighted the threat — but it prevailed in media and universities.

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Iran’s sophisticated influence and disinformation apparatus: Tehran runs documented ‘soft war’ programs targeting democratic elites. The leaked post-2014 Iran Experts Initiative showed the Foreign Ministry cultivating academics, think-tank analysts, and journalists in Europe, the US, UK, Canada and other countries to place sympathetic op-eds, shape policy debates, and downplay threats — sometimes via ghostwriting. Iran operates state media (Press TV), proxies, and cyber networks that amplify ‘both-sides’ or victimhood narratives on social platforms, exploiting open democratic debate without reciprocal access. Iran also has well-known, large-scale initiatives targeting cultural, academic, student and diaspora groups.

Policy and economic incentives for ‘engagement’: European governments and the Obama administration during the post-2015 era of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) prioritized nuclear diplomacy and trade over confrontation. Highlighting Iran’s full aggression would have complicated deal-making, sanctions relief, and Airbus/Boeing sales. Post-Iraq/Afghanistan war weariness reinforced reluctance to “beat the drums” for another conflict. Realpolitik also played a role: some saw Iran as a counterweight to Sunni extremism or a market worth courting. This created a feedback loop where media echoed official talking points about ‘moderate’ factions and ‘pragmatic’ Rouhani or Zarif.

Asymmetric aggression is harder to dramatize: Unlike Russia’s tanks rolling into Ukraine or China’s South China Sea bases, Iran’s method — deniable proxies, missiles via Houthis, assassinations via cutouts — is diffuse and incremental. The Israel-Palestine framework often subsumes Iran’s role into a broader ‘cycle of violence’; Tehran’s eliminationist rhetoric and arming of proxies are downplayed. Narratives focus on protests, crackdowns and sanctions — but rarely on long-term effects on Iran’s people or the Middle East as a whole. The regime kills thousands — in January it killed tens of thousands — but rarely produces a single ‘shock’ image that sustains outrage. There is still no visual from the January 2026 state-sponsored mass slaughter of Iranian protesters analogous to ‘tank man’ on Tiananmen square in 1989. This allows narratives of ‘mutual escalation’ to persist.

In the preface to a book published in 1783, philosopher Immanuel Kant credited his encounter with the skepticism of David Hume, whom he had first read in the 1760s, with awakening him from a “dogmatic slumber”.

For too long, our political debate has given Iran’s aggression a virtual pass. The regime weaponizes Western divisions and deploys its own hybrid toolkit. It prioritizes revolutionary violence over the welfare of Iranians — and is putting the stability of the whole Middle East into jeopardy. It’s time to wake up to the reality of an aggressive, revolutionary Iran. We need to put aside dogmatism, knee-jerk anti-Americanism and resurgent Anti-Semitism to see this threat as it is.

(As US and Israeli airstrikes continue, Iran faces an internet blackout and continuing repression at all levels. [Vahid Salemi/AP Images])

Since the 1979 Islamic revolution, Iran’s aggression against its people, neighbouring states, Israel, the US and other democracies has never stopped. Yet Europe, the UK, Japan, Canada, Australia, the Gulf states and other allies — the famous middle powers of Carney’s Davos speech — appear reluctant to confront the threat to regional security and global commerce that Iran represents. Why is this?

Let’s first recall the Khomeinist regime’s track record:

Revolution and genocide: Iran’s ideological goal is to export its theocratic revolution, eliminate Israel (”the Little Satan”) and damage the U.S. (”the Great Satan”).

Iraq and Syria: After 2003, Shia militias in Iraq killed U.S. and coalition forces. Iranian proxies in Syria triggered massive displacement, destabilizing Europe.

Armed groups: The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its Quds Force built the ‘axis of resistance’: Hezbollah in Lebanon; Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza; the Houthis in Yemen to attack shipping, Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Terrorism sponsorship: The 1983 Beirut barracks bombing killed 241 U.S. Marines: Iran has been on the U.S. state sponsors of terrorism list since 1984. Iran has orchestrated plots against dissidents and Jewish targets worldwide.

Proxy wars and regional subversion: The axis of resistance has not been a dormant force: it has fuelled multiple wars. Iran propped up Syria’s Assad with troops, Hezbollah fighters, and militias; organized, trained and supplied Shia militias to fight U.S. forces in Iraq; and militarized Yemen via the Houthis.

Dissident killings and abductions and direct attacks abroad: For decades, the regime assassinated or kidnapped opponents in Europe and elsewhere. These operations have escalated since 2022 and are now outsourced to criminal networks to maintain deniability. Iran also conducts direct attacks against Jewish sites

Downing of civilian aircraft: In 2020, IRGC forces shot down Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752, killing all 176 on board; most were Canadian citizens, permanent residents or students; Tehran initially denied responsibility.

Support for Russia’s war on Ukraine and Chinese ambitions in southwest Asia: Since 2022, Iran has supplied Russia with thousands of shahed drones and ballistic missiles, with ongoing production assistance and sanctions evasion. Iran imports Russian and Chinese weaponry and supplies energy to China.

Repression and violations of basic rights: Over the past year, Iran has detained over 75,000 political prisoners. It maintains high rates of execution, including of anti-regime activists. The regime comprehensively violates the rights of women and has virtually extinguished basic political freedoms, including freedom of speech.

Cyber attacks and large-scale influence operations: Iran made large-scale cyber-enabled attempts to interfere in the 2024 US elections, which were backed by Russia and China. In fact, the only other states with comparable records of violence, hostage-taking, and hybrid warfare are China, Pakistan and Russia.

Despite this egregious litany of destabilizing actions, large swathes of media, academia, and political debate in our democratic societies treat these facts as secondary or contested. They insist on “contextualizing” them.

Far more often than in the case of Russian aggression against Ukraine, Iran’s wars — including its support for Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis — are portrayed as ‘legitimate responses’ to U.S./Israeli ‘provocation’.

Media coverage and policy debates often emphasize the humanitarian impact of sanctions against Iran. Concerns about repression, terrorism or war are subordinated to hopes for nuclear diplomacy. Israel’s responses to attacks by Iranian proxies are given prominence while Tehran’s role in initiating attacks and the scale of its campaign against Israel are soft-pedaled.

In this regard, the October 7^th, 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel were not a watershed. While most Europeans and North Americans condemned Hamas, a high percentage subsequently viewed Israel as having used disproportionate force in Gaza. Younger people tend to see Hamas as a ‘resistance movement’ — not a brutal Iranian weapon aimed at a democratic state. Few European, British or Canadian voters are open to military action against Iran.

It is as if the shocking reality of Iran’s revolutionary goals and violence come wrapped in a blanket of acceptability, rationalization and special pleading.

Our friends at Get Fact see this as a contest of narratives, tradecraft and wills — “the war Iran is winning”. For more background on what Iran is doing to us all, please do give their excellent work a read.

How did Iran pull this off? We will delve into this question in our next essay.

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One month into the current round of US and Israeli strikes on Iran, allies seem increasingly determined to do too little to defeat Russia and nothing to defeat Iran. To counteract this unfortunate trend, let’s acknowledge two issues the Trump White House, in spite of itself, has almost got right over the past year.

Trump has done this ‘in spite of itself’ because this administration, when it pushed for higher levels of military spending from NATO allies, did not intend for this to translate into larger commitments to finance Ukraine’s defence needs. After all, key members of Trump’s team — from Vance and Rubio to Witkoff, Kushner and Gabbard — cut off virtually all US military support for Ukraine in a brazen attempt to tilt the military balance in Russia’s favour and help the Kremlin end the war on its terms. This group, which retains considerable if not always decisive influence, continues to see Russia as a ‘geopolitical partner’ or even strategic ally.

The Trump administration have only ‘almost’ got Iran right because the need to counter Iranian aggression in the Middle East and further afield has been clear for decades. Washington’s misguided Iraq war only made the threat posed by Iran more acute. The JCPOA gave Iran virtually a free hand to bolster its axis of resistance.

But now that a sustained military campaign is underway, the current White House seems determined to go about it in the most ham-fisted way imaginable — without a serious plan to keep shipping lanes open or commercial traffic flowing; without enacting maximum economic and political pressure, which was even more richly justified by the January 2026 bloodbath inflicted by the Khomeinist regime on its own people; without engaging allies (apart from Israel) in advance military planning; and without exerting military or economic pressure on Russia, which remains Iran’s primary military and strategic enabler and partner.

In other words, the Trump White House has rightly pushed for more allied defence spending and tougher action against Iran. But they have done so while: (i) wrongly cutting off virtually all US military aid for Ukraine; (ii) engaging politically with aggressor Russia, the main military and strategic partner of aggressor Iran; and (iii) alienating allies — over potential invasions of Greenland and Canada and other issues — that might otherwise have been prepared to help.

It is almost as if the Trump Administration is using its current military campaign against Iran to drive maximum division and dysfunction within NATO.

This would obviously be an outcome Moscow would relish.

But they will probably not see it. Trump, his strategists and Kremlin pals are unlikely to have satisfaction on this divisive score for three reasons. First, the degradation of Iran’s military capabilities is a setback for both Moscow and Beijing. Second, Ukraine’s agility in partnering with Gulf states on counter-drone capabilities only adds to the Kremlin’s strategic discomfort. Third, Ukraine’s destruction of Russia oil export infrastructure on the Baltic and elsewhere means Moscow is unlikely to enjoy any oil price windfall, however long today’s elevated prices last.

Yet the truth remains: spending more on defence and taking strategic action against Iran are the right things to do. Israel has long been engaged in intelligence and military operations to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Since the October 7^th, 2023 terrorist attacks, which Iran orchestrated together with Hamas and Russia, Israel has kicked such operations into high gear, over multiple theatres, by targeting the entire axis of resistance and its enablers in Iran.

Allies need to get over themselves to find ways to contribute to the defeat of both Iran and Russia. Those who continue to focus only on one or the other are making major strategic mistakes. It was always unlikely one dictatorship would end its aggression while the other continued to invade, bomb, occupy and wage proxy wars.

Iran and Russia are locked into this cycle of violence together. For well over a decade, Russian and Iranian aggression have not run on separate tracks, or in isolation, but rather in coordinated, integrated and mutually reinforcing phases.

Without higher levels of defence spending, Europe, Canada and Japan would be unable to provide adequate support to Ukraine to compensate for US cuts — or ultimately to defeat Russian aggression, as they must in the end do. Without effective military action against Iran, Israel, the Gulf and other states will face growing threats — including from growing Iranian long-range ballistic missile, drone and nuclear weapons capabilities.

As we have been saying from the start of this campaign, large-scale aggression must no longer go unanswered and military action to curtail Iran’s most threatening offensive military capabilities is both legal and legitimate.

For allies including Canada, this should be a moment to move beyond the reprehensible withdrawal of support from Israel — a nation facing brutal, unrelenting attacks by Iran and its proxies for decades. They should recommit to the principle of collective self-defence to counter large-scale patterns of aggression.

We will have more to say later this week about the insidious narratives still preventing most allied governments and citizens from seeing Iranian aggression for what it is.

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(Representative Luna [in white] with [to her right] Russia State Duma deputy Vyacheslav Nikonov, Molotov’s grandson, plus four other sanctioned Russian parliamentarians. The Duma voted for Russia’s genocidal ‘annexation of several Ukrainian oblasts and Crimea, which no UN member state has recognized.)

In a sign of the times, the grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov, architect of Stalin’s infamous pact with Hitler, is leading a Russian parliamentary delegation visiting Washington, DC this week.

Their host is representative Anna Paulina Luna, an arch-MAGA US air force veteran who was elected for Florida’s 13^th congressional district in 2023.

Luna’s grandfather was Heinrich Mayerhofer, born in 1926 in Fürstenfeldbruck, Bavaria. An electrician by profession, he emigrated by ship from Bremerhaven to Montreal in 1954, entered the US in 1959 and filed naturalization documents in California the next year. As a young man, Mayerhofer served in the Nazi army, or Wehrmacht: you can see him in uniform here.

So the granddaughter of a Nazi, who appears to have falsely claimed Jewish heritage, is hosting the grandson of history’s most notorious Nazi ally in the Capitol.

The Trump administration is also meeting today with an undisclosed list of Russian officials at the US Institute for Peace, a non-profit founded under Reagan in 1984 which Trump is currently seeking to rename after himself.

Needless to say, this is not a good look for the United States. It is also a symptom of a far deeper problem: this US administration is showing signs of state capture.

What does this mean? It means Moscow doesn’t just have allies in this White House, as they did in the first Trump administration. Senior figures are actually pursuing Russia’s agenda from official positions in the US government.

Let me give you three recent examples. Just this week the US Department of Justice reached a $1.2 million settlement with Michael Flynn, the former national security advisor to Trump who, as part of the Mueller report on Kremlin interference in the 2016 US election that Trump won, pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.

In other words, one of the key orchestrators of Russia’s mischief has not only been pardoned but received a US government settlement for wrongful prosecution. This move serves to whitewash Russia’s malign activity, which has already changed the course of US history and done enormous damage to American democracy.

The Trump administration has also eased some sanctions on Russia, including via a one-month waiver for oil sales to India. They have included many pro-Kremlin ‘new media’ outlets in White House briefing pools, including one funded by Russia Today employees who were charged by the Department of Justice in 2024.

Threats from Russia, whose war of conquest against Ukraine has now lasted twelve years, were downplayed in the latest US National Security Strategy, released in December 2025. As part of fraudulent ‘peace talks’ with Moscow, Trump’s envoys are reportedly pursuing business opportunities in Russia.

Beyond these headlines, many senior figures in the Trump administration are known to have close ties to Russia or extremely Russia-friendly views. In the wake of Russia’s full-scale 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Vice President J.D. Vance was the US senator with the most consistently and unapologetically pro-Moscow stance, which has carried over into his current role. He is set to visit Hungary a few days before forthcoming elections next month which Viktor Orban — a longstanding Kremlin ‘Trojan horse’ in the EU and NATO that Vance has strongly supported — seems on course to lose to reformer Peter Magyar.

Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles has wide-ranging ties to Russian oligarchs and Russia-connected businesses and lobbyists. FBI director Kash Patel was Trump’s point person in reframing Russian interference as a ‘hoax’. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who started her political career as a Democrat, has been a notorious apologist for Russia and its proxies, including Syria’s Assad.

This group does not control the whole administration: explicitly pro-Russian orientations or connections are found among perhaps one-third of those in senior positions, especially among acolytes of chief ideologue Steve Bannon, who served a four-month prison term in 2024 for contempt of Congress. But this group exercises enormous influence: we have no idea how they may be serving Moscow’s interests when the klieg lights are off — on issues that have so far escaped scrutiny.

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(Canadian Army instructors discuss mechanized infantry defence tactics with their Ukrainian Armed Forces colleagues during Exercise Raid Trident in Starychi, Ukraine on June 30, 2016. Photo: Joint Task Force Ukraine)

When allies very incorrectly expected Russia to steamroll Ukraine in early 2022, Canada, the US, UK and others pulled back training contingents that had been operating in Ukraine since 2015. Now it’s time to send them back.

The first reason is obvious. NATO was created to deter and, if necessary, defeat a Soviet land invasion of Europe. It remains patently absurd and indeed shameful that when that major aggressive land invasion actually happened in 2014 — six years after NATO had withdrawn an invitation to Georgia and Ukraine to begin the NATO accession process — NATO stood aside.

It is absolutely indefensible that today — fully twelve years’ later — the ‘most successful alliance in history’ does not even have an operation of any kind in Ukraine. To remind, NATO currently has at least seven major operations and missions underway in and around Europe, the Arctic and the Middle East — two longstanding ones in Kosovo (KFOR) and Iraq; maritime security missions in the Mediterranean and Aegean seas; air policing over the Baltics and Eastern Europe, as well as Arctic Sentry for the Arctic and High North; and of course the Enhanced Forward Presence on the Eastern Flank, where multinational battle groups are stationed in eight countries, including one led by Canada under Operation Reassurance, which features well over 2,000 military members deployed to Latvia.

Yet in Ukraine, a country now facing a spring offensive from 710,000 Russian soldiers? There is not a NATO uniform in sight.

Fortunately, Ukraine has prevailed to date despite this allied absenteeism.

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The NATO workaround, ostensibly to shield our forces from Russian strikes, has been to host Ukrainian trainees at 140 training sites across 34 countries, with major hubs in Poland, Germany and the UK. Canada’s training mission, still known as Operation Unifier, was relocated mainly to Poland and the UK, as well as Latvia.

A few days ago Ukraine’s General Staff announced it will no longer send recruits abroad for basic training. The reason? As veteran company commander Yevhen Dykyi delicately put it, there is now “less that they can teach us.”

In other words, Canada and its allies, which have not seen ground combat for over a decade and have never been in a high-intensity drone war, have little to teach battle-hardened Ukrainian veterans of twelve years of war, whose forces have been adapting, innovating and adding new layers to joint combat arms tactics every step of the way.

As a result, Ukraine is now inviting NATO instructors and forces back to Ukraine —to see how this new war is being waged, and how it can ultimately be won.

We and other NATO allies should take them up on this invitation.

With Russian assets still running the White House — at least for now — we should assume the US will prevent this from being a NATO mission.

Instead we should approach it as a NATO-minus-one mission and ensure every other ally takes part — from across the coalition of the willing and beyond.

We should be open-minded about the mission’s shape and tasks. It should respond to Ukraine’s most acute needs. It should definitely help them to increase the mass and reach of their drone-led operations. It should also augment the density and mobility of their indirect fire and long-range strikes. Most of all, it should include a full air combat mission that protects more Ukrainian civilians, gives Ukraine enduring air superiority, and tilts the balance further in favour of full suppression of Russian missile and drone threats.

It should include logistics and innovative approaches to bolstering ammunition flows. Training should be part of every one of these components — with NATO allies set to learn as much or more than any Ukrainian counterpart.

Russia is still trying to use Trump to force Ukraine to give up four oblasts. Moscow wants to lock in its ill-gotten gains — to whitewash the same monumental crimes for which history continues to indict Hitler and Stalin.

When allies including Canada send their forces back to Ukraine, they should carry a clear political message: the mission is victory. This coalition is committed to victory. Ukraine and its allies will fight until every last Russian soldier is eliminated or withdrawn across the entire territory of Ukraine, including Crimea.

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(Reform UK leader Nigel Farage delivering his New Year’s message for 2026)

For ten days I have pondered an FT Magazine interview with Britain’s Brexiteer-in-chief. A brilliant sketch, it was also unusually revealing. It illustrated how today’s populism harnesses real issues to quack fixes promoted by mischief-makers.

Let me explain. Financial Times columnist Henry Mance published his first interview with Nigel Farage – a ‘Lunch with the FT’ – nearly a decade ago, on April 8^th, 2016. It ran just two months before the Brexit referendum.

In it, Farage was portrayed as the chain-smoking “son of an alcoholic Kent stock broker” who went to swishy Dulwich college, traded on the London Metals Exchange in the 1980s and became the country’s leading “Brussels-basher” in the 1990s.

Mance conveyed Farage’s bluff charm — a “blokish bloke” with a passion for “proper pubs, proper markets” and penchant for First World War battlefields.

In this year’s interview, which ran on March 13^th, Farage claimed he was “not a populist” but a Cassandra warning of dangers. Such disingenuousness has a long provenance: Farage did not express public support for Trump or Marine Le Pen until after his team had won the Brexit vote. As for the Reform MP’s recent policy flip-flops, Mance said “fiscal detail has never been Farage’s strong point.”

Astonishingly, there was no probing of Brexit, its aftermath or growing real-world costs. The closest we come is Farage’s attribution of “Britain’s lack of dynamism” to the “marzipan layer” which Mance defines as “the upper-middle classes who are happy with the status quo and reluctant to push innovation.”

Cogent analysis this was not. As it has turned out, immunity to serious scrutiny has been a hallmark and feature, not bug, of Farage’s entire career.

When several dozen schoolmates reported to the Guardian that he had uttered “racist or anti-semitic abuse” at Dulwich, this episode was reduced to a throwaway line in the Mance interview. Farage’s claim that “The Taliban said they will accept Afghan refugees back from me” did not cause a ripple of controversy for the FT — presumably because Britain’s Labour Home Secretary had just banned study visas for Afghans and citizens of three other nationalities.

Farage was allowed to claim, unchallenged, that his first party (Ukip) was “radical old-school liberal” and Reform UK, his new party now with eight MPs including Farage at Westminster, is “a lot more communitaire: family, community, country.” By such laws of inversion, Benjamin Disraeli was a fire-breathing Marxist.

But this is how populism works.

Its political leaders use (in Farage’s case) calculated bonhomie or (in Trump’s case) soul-destroying celebrity to become, as they see it, firebrands championing causes that are otherwise lost — the disenfranchised, the overlooked, the Rust Belt factory worker in Ohio or the under-employed electrician in the Midlands.

Then they offer simplistic, naïve or dangerous policy solutions — Brexit, ICE, DOGE, Liberation Day tariffs, ‘stop the boats’, ‘send Afghans to the Taliban’.

The result is massive domestic harm, fraying of the rule of law and vaulting cynicism towards politicians. The latter curiously benefits Farage, whose party led mid-March UK surveys of voting intentions, because (as Mance delicately puts it) “not having been in government allowed him to wash his hands of the post-Brexit mess.”

Pardon me? By my reckoning, Farage, Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings were the principal architects of this mess. Farage only ‘washed his hands’ because he was allowed to do so by journalists, politicians, businesspeople and citizens.

But once again, that’s the thing with populism. Pithy falsehoods go unchallenged. Disasters go unreckoned with. Viktor Orban is only facing potential defeat next month after 16 uninterrupted years (plus a four-year term 1998-2002) as prime minister of Hungary, where living standards have plummeted. Trump won a second term after paying for radical organizers to come to Washington DC to foment a violent insurrection in the Capitol. Even after the Brexit catastrophe, Farage is still seen by many as a leading candidate for prime minister.

This seems irrational. By almost every economic measure, Brexit and Trump’s sweeping tariffs were terrible policy, harmful to Britons and Americans. Trump’s trampling of constitutional norms damages the United States. Retrograde US and UK migration policy undermines both countries.

But sound policy proposals are effectively ignored because at least one third of the public has tuned out good ideas and tuned into populist quackery. Responsible policy-makers are often not up to the job of offering better alternatives or propose pale imitations of the populist fare. They are also not loud or confident enough: the din generated by populist foghorns drowns them out.

As a result, good policy goes ignored. Populism is dissected, repeated and amplified — but not by voters exercising their democratic or political rights. As Lauren Southern, the Canadian right-wing influencer named in US Department of Justice indictments tied to a Russian influence operation, put it in a recent interview: “I would argue that the vast majority of right-wing influencers now are paid for by foreign governments, interest groups, corporations.”

We could not agree more. Today’s problems are real — affordability, growth, trade, Russia, Iran, China. But the policy solutions predominating online are not the product of homegrown democratic deliberation. They are slogans pushed by foreign-funded bot armies, or externally-funded influencers like Southern.

This ecosystem also produces Nigel Farage. To Mance’s immense discredit, he seems not to have asked once about Russia — despite a vast and growing trove of damning evidence, surfacing even more visibly again this year, that Ukip, Brexit and Reform have been up to their eyeballs in Russian influence for twenty years.

The most brutal paradox of today’s populism is this: its ravages are less visible to the primary victims than to outsiders. For many Britons, Farage remains someone with whom they would gladly have a pint, as Mance implied in 2016. For foreigners stunned by the UK’s Brexit-induced self-harm, he is an obvious candidate for shunning. In this month’s interview, Farage expressed delight at having recently met Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s placeman atop the National Rally, and frustration that visiting Canadian conservative leader Pierre Poilievre had pushed back the time of their meeting. (It was later cancelled.) Bardella is a fascist; Farage is very close to deserving that label. Both bask in Moscow’s continuous adulation. If Poilievre wishes to be taken seriously, he should know better than to meet with any of them.

Britain’s reckoning over Brexit, if it ever comes, still seems a long way off. Boisdale is named for its owner Ranald Macdonald, eldest son of the 24^th captain and chief of — as the restaurant’s website puts it — “the Macdonalds of Clanranald, the largest and most anciently Royal of all the Highland clans.” A previous Ranald Macdonald, younger of Clanranald (son of the 17^th chief), was one of the first major Highland leaders to back Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s rebellion in 1745. After the defeat at Culloden the prince spent seven to eight weeks — from late April to late June 1746 —on or near South Uist, though he did not stay at Boisdale itself

From the start of his Eurosceptic political career in 1993, Farage has understood branding. He has portrayed himself as a British Everyman, an irrepressible bulldog, defender of British identities, liberties, traditions and valour from the romantic Jacobite cause right through to the Somme and the Falklands.

Brexit was an exercise in nostalgia. It was also an economic disaster, fueled by a massive, continuing Russian influence operation. Erecting massive trade barriers with the UK’s main market was not a flash of brilliance or triumph of innovation. It is a still-swelling blot on Britain’s proud island story.

Contemporary populism has taught us three painful lessons. First, the dislocation and disorientation caused by globalization have been brutal for many. Second, solutions proposed by populists like Trump, Johnson and Farage have only done more harm. Third, a Greek chorus of malign influence and deliberate falsehood continues to make it very hard to debate effective solutions, or bring them into democratic focus.

Ultimately, Farage has absolutely no right to channel the defiance shown at Boisdale, the Battle of the Somme or the Blitz. He has zero achievements to his name — only damages owing. Slowly but surely, scrutiny is coming for populists everywhere: we all have an interest in seeing them held fully to account.

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(Posters of new Iranian supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, who today promised to retaliate for every death, and his deceased father in Tehran on March 9th, 2026.)

In one of our two March 10th essays (‘The Rules-Based Order: How to Save It?’), we recalled how, when the United Nations Charter was being drafted, Stalin insisted on the ‘Yalta formula’. According to this principle, permanent members of the Council would have a veto over any and all military action by the UN. This effectively meant that, if one veto-wielding power was committing acts of aggression, that state would nevertheless continue to sit in judgement over itself — at the very table where decisions were being made over how the UN should respond.

This arrangement was less of a problem so long as the Permanent Five were not engaged in wars of aggression or territorial expansion. With the launch of Russia’s fascist wars of conquest, starting with Georgia in 2008, it has been almost fatal to the organization. Russia’s veto has meant the UN has been unable to respond to these wars and proxy wars of aggression. A Chinese military operation to subjugate Taiwan by force would make this terrible situation far worse.

The solution to this difficulty in the League of Nations covenant had been to give members of the League Council the power to vote unanimously to expel any member, permanent or non-permanent. The member targeted for expulsion was not allowed to vote. This is exactly what happened to the USSR in 1939 by a vote of seven to zero. Stalin’s insistence on the ‘Yalta formula’ was born of this experience. In 1945, he was seeking complete impunity. By getting this League provision dropped, he both gave Moscow a veto and ensured it would never be expelled again.

That did not prevent allies from circumventing Moscow’s veto, as when a key motion regarding the Korean War was passed in June 1950, while the Soviet delegate was boycotting the Council. Membership in the UN Security Council is also far from absolute. In the same March 10th essay cited above, we noted that there are workable plans for removing Russia from it. (They have not yet been attempted.)

In the meantime, with Russia and its allies (including Iran) committing so many egregious acts of aggression in recent years, generally enabled by China, how does one get around the ‘Yalta formula’ to ensure such aggression does not go endlessly unaddressed? The solution is the “inherent right of individual or collective self-defence” which we discussed at some length in an essay published last October 25^th and mentioned briefly at the end of yesterday’s piece.

This provision of international law was not created by the UN Charter. Self-defence was explicitly identified as a just cause for war as early as 1625 in De Jure Belli ac Pacis (The Law of War and Peace), the landmark treatise by Dutch humanist, diplomat and jurist Hugo Grotius. It was part of customary law for centuries before that. But article 51 of the UN Charter explicitly recognized and reaffirmed the right of self-defence — a provision that had gone unmentioned in the League of Nations covenant.

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The inclusion of self-defence was a very deliberate effort to counter-balance the ‘Yalta format’ veto power enshrined in the Security Council. The reference to collective self-defence was pushed by Latin American delegations who, prior to the San Francisco conference, had adopted the act of Chapultepec in March 1945 at the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace.

This act established a regional collective self-defence principle that NATO would later follow: an armed attack against one American state was considered an attack against all, authorizing joint defensive measures. The Latin American delegations feared the Security Council might override these arrangements.

In debates on the UN Charter, the Colombian delegate in particular emphasized that the term ‘collective self-defence’ was meant to preserve systems like the Inter-American one. On May 12th, 1945 the US delegation, led by secretary of state Stettinius and then-advisor John Foster Dulles, circulated a draft to the future permanent Security Council members that included reference to the ‘inherent right’ to self-defence in case of aggression.

That language became the basis for article 51 of chapter VII of the UN Charter. In today’s cases of aggression, where Russia is either itself the belligerent or a main ally or enabler of aggressor states such as Iran, article 51 is the primary legal basis for action to counter acts of aggression and breaches of the peace.

Since 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has committed itself to Israel’s destruction repeatedly. Over several decades, it established the axis of resistance as a multi-state platform from which to attack Israel. It systematically sponsored terrorist groups and sought to develop nuclear weapons with the express goal of attacking Israel, as Hamas set out to do on October 7^th, 2023.

No country today has a more clearly inherent right to defend itself against external aggression — except perhaps Ukraine.

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(An oil depot burns near Tehran after airstrikes on March 7th, 2026)

It has been twelve full days since Israel and the US launched large-scale air strikes against Iran. As we predicted, regime change remains a distant shore. While Iran’s military capabilities have been partly destroyed, they remain a credible threat to tankers in the straits of Hormuz,

The most urgent questions now seem to be: Will the US and its allies be able to defeat and deter Iranian attacks on vital oil, gas and other trade flows in and out of the Persian Gulf? If so, how quickly? If not, how will Iran use this leverage?

Yet instead of focusing on questions of military strategy or even tactical success, most recent commentary in Europe and North America seems to have focused on whether US and Israeli military action is even legal.

Sir Keir Starmer outlined the UK’s case for restraint on legal and strategic grounds, leading many observers to conclude that he viewed the strikes as unlawful. But the British prime minister did not make any such assertion directly.

While initially supportive of the strikes, Carney later declared them “prima facie (…) inconsistent with international law.” Macron said they were “outside international law.” Germany and Japan have not commented on their legality. But they have not endorsed the strikes either.

Writing in the New York Times (‘How Good Intentions Helped Pave Trump’s Road to Iran’, March 7^th, 2026), Amanda Taub said the responsibility to protect (R2P) had provided a ‘humanitarian loophole’ which Israel and the Trump Administration were now using to justify strikes against Iran, which Taub believed to be illegal.

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(Russian foreign minister Lavrov chairing the UN security council on April 24, 2023 — exactly fourteen months after his country launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.)

We know who has been attacking the rules-based order for the past three decades. Last week we examined how their aggression has gone virtually unanswered. Now we need to look more closely at what could be done to salvage what remains of the rulebook established at such great cost in 1945.

The United Nations remains central. After all, its first purpose, as listed in the UN Charter, is “to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace.” For over a decade, little or nothing has been done to prevent, remove or suppress threats or acts of aggression by Russia, Iran and Pakistan.

This failure to come to grips with aggression has left the UN paralyzed and powerless — in the kind of disarray that swept over the League of Nations in the 1930s. Chapter VII of the UN Charter is entitled “Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression.” It is the longest part of the UN’s founding document, detailing enforcement measures to be authorized when diplomacy and other peaceful approaches to dispute resolution fail.

Yet when Pakistan supports the Taliban to recapture Kabul, when Russia launches an invasion of conquest in Ukraine, or when Iran arms the axis of resistance and seeks nuclear weapons to destroy Israel, the UN has mostly stood aside. Why? The UN has been immobilized in large measure by a fatal flaw baked into the Charter from the start. When breaches of the peace or acts of aggression occur, there is no provision for removing the aggressors themselves from Security Council deliberations concerning actions to be taken to enforce international peace and security.

As a result, Russia, China and Pakistan are members of the Security Council today — able to take full part in debates concerning Ukraine, Afghanistan and Gaza, where they have committed or enabled acts of aggression. As permanent members, Russia and China have veto power which they wield to shield aggressors from accountability and reinforce their impunity.

Iran chaired the UN Human Rights Council in 2023 and just last month was elected vice chair of the special committee on the UN Charter. For one month almost every year, Russia chairs meetings of the Security Council where its genocidal and illegal occupation of Ukraine is an agenda item. This Orwellian anti-utopia would be farcical if the consequences for millions of victims and hundreds of millions of displaced people were not so grave and often deadly.

With aggressors blocking action, the UN has failed to respond effectively in Syria, Ukraine, Africa, Afghanistan or Iran. Conflicts have spiralled out of control as escalating aggression by Russia, Iran and Pakistan, supported and enabled by China, North Korea and others, goes unchecked.

The League of Nations Covenant was more rigorous on this score. Its article 16 provided for the following: “Any Member of the League which has violated any covenant of the League may be declared to be no longer a Member of the League by a vote of the Council concurred in by the Representatives of all the other Members of the League represented thereon.”

In other words, aggressors were removed from League deliberations. The League’s members agreed to submit major disputes, including acts of aggression, to judicial settlement, arbitration or decision of the League’s assembly in which parties to the dispute would not vote. As a result of these provisions, Japan and Nazi Germany withdrew from the League in 1933; fascist Italy withdrew in 1937; Spain in 1939. The Soviet Union was expelled by a 7-0 vote of the League’s executive council in December 1939 for invading Finland in the Winter War. Only four months’ later, the League assembly voted itself out of existence amid the chaos of the Second World War.

The League also provided for measures beyond arbitration and expulsion, often more honoured in the breach. These included sanctions and virtual embargo: “Should any Member of the League resort to war in disregard of its covenants under Articles 12, 13 or 15, it shall ipso facto be deemed to have committed an act of war against all other Members of the League, which hereby undertake immediately to subject it to the severance of all trade or financial relations, the prohibition of all intercourse between their nationals and the nationals of the covenant-breaking State, and the prevention of all financial, commercial or personal intercourse between the nationals of the covenant-breaking State and the nationals of any other State, whether a Member of the League or not.” In 1935, Canada was involved in an unavailing effort to impose penalties on Abyssinia, which Mackenzie Kind notoriously reversed.

In the deliberations over the UN Charter, which country do you think was most adamant that no provision similar to article 16 be included in the new founding document? Which country instead that aggressors be able to take part in deliberations over their own acts of aggression? This was of course the Soviet Union, which has been expelled from the League in 1939. In negotiations over the UN Charter, Stalin insisted on preserving the ‘Yalta formula’ for the resolution of disputes, meaning the great powers — Moscow, Washington and London — should decide strategic matters, as they had done at their famous 1945 summit in Crimea that had left Europe devastated and divided for nearly two generations.

For well over a decade, this outdated model, which protects the impunity of aggressors, has left the UN on the sidelines. The Security Council has been unable to take decisive action, while Russia, Iran and Pakistan have escalated their aggression in Ukraine, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Africa and elsewhere. Sanctions and other measures have mostly been agreed outside UN structures.

Ukraine and Israel have acted in self-defence, with the support of partners, but allies have so far failed to invoke the inherent right of collective self-defence that is confirmed in article 51 of chapter VII of the UN Charter.

This is unfortunate. The original united nations were formed, not in 1945, but rather in 1939 and again in 1941 as a coalition of democracies fighting Nazi and Japanese aggression to free Europe and Asia from conquest and occupation.

Today’s aggression also needs to be fought. This can be done outside UN structures, by fully invoking the principle of collective self-defence.

But it can also be done within UN structures once Russia is removed from the Security Council, as richly deserves to be. Some have argued this is impossible, as Russia would veto its own removal. This misses the obvious point that the Soviet Union, which no longer exists, was given a permanent seat, not Russia. There are workable plans for Russia’s removal, including this one. All that has been lacking so far is the political leadership and political will to implement them.

The history of the twentieth century showed that if collective action is not taken, the current storm of aggression is likely to worsen, as it did in the 1930s. If China blockades or invades Taiwan, a truly global conflict is likely to ensue.

One way or another, aggressors must be defeated, Further aggression must be prevented, and international peace and security restored.

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(Taliban leaders Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (centre), accompanied by then head of political office Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanakzai (second from the right) meet Russian diplomat Zamir Kabul (right) on May 28th, 2019 in Moscow. Baradar is now deputy prime minister and Stanakzai deputy foreign minister in the illegal and illegitimate Taliban terrorist regime that took Kabul by force in 2021.)

As the US and Israel continue their air campaign against Iran, whose outcome we cannot fully or reliably predict, let’s remind ourselves which states have been attacking the rules-based order most aggressively in recent decades.

What do we mean by ‘rules-based order’? To be relatively straightforward, let’s define it narrowly as institutions, laws and practices established to uphold the “dignity and worth of the human person” — in the phrase of the preamble to the UN Charter — and to prevent wars of aggression and invasions.

This rules-based order is generally held to have survived the Cold War, including the Korean and Vietnam wars. But it was seriously and continuously undermined after 1945 by Soviet and Chinese communist repression at home and abroad. In fact, the crackdowns, genocide, interventions, occupations and proxy wars undertaken by these states were the principal factor curtailing postwar human dignity.

A full accounting of aggression over all 81 years since 1945 would be a monumental task, far beyond the scope of this essay. To summarize, the international community avoided world wars but not regional, proxy or civil wars — often with devastating consequences for national populations. The number of forcibly displaced persons, including refugees, has risen steadily from 2.1 million in 1951 to a projected 136 million this year. Persistent civil conflicts in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America drove much of this displacement.

Instead of reviewing the entire track record since 1945, let’s pinpoint the primary sources of aggression in the world since roughly 1990 — the year just after the massacre on Tiananmen square (June 3-4^th, 1989) and destruction of the Berlin wall (November 9^th, 1989) but before the disbandment of the Warsaw Pact (July 1^st, 1991) and dissolution of the Soviet Union (December 26^th, 1991).

To understand this contemporary era of conflict, we need to recall that, starting in the 1960s, the Soviet Union shifted its focus, as we discussed in our series on the end of the Cold War, from sponsoring worldwide communist revolution to partnering with Islamist, left-wing and nationalist groups, including terrorists, as well as long-term active measures to disorient, polarize and disempower the politics and societies of democratic allies. Russia scaled up these practices after 1991.

The 36 years of aggression after 1990 break down into five main threads:

The first was violence related to the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, as revanchists tried to hang on to territories by force. This led to armed conflicts in which both Gorbachev and Yeltsin sought to retain control of enclaves in roughly half a dozen states that were previously part of the Soviet Union. Moscow also waged two brutal wars in Chechnya. Belgrade launched wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Russian and Serbian nationalists were the main aggressors in each case.

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(Urban with ‘Putin’ in the Kremlin, November 28th, 2025)

Viktor Orban has long been the Kremlin’s snake in grass.

Since becoming Hungary’s prime minister of Hungary from 1998 to 2002, then from 2010 until now, he has systematically disrupted EU and NATO efforts to counter Russian aggression and support Ukraine. With Slovak prime minister Robert Fico, he has been the only EU leader to visit Moscow since 2022.

He was recently instrumental in blocking the EU’s 20^th sanctions package and $90 billion in financing for Ukraine secured by confiscated Russian assets.

In advance of April 12^th elections, Orban is trailing Peter Magyar, the pro-European conservative liberal leader of the Respect and Freedom Party (TISZA)

(Peter Magyar in 2024 [Reuters/Bernadett Szabo])

As in Moldova, Romania and other democracies last year, Moscow is scrambling to steal the vote for Orban. According to recent reports citing European intelligence sources, the Kremlin has tasked former prime minister Sergei Kiriyenko, first deputy head of the presidential administration, with ensuring Orban wins.

Moscow is reportedly sending military intelligence specialists in online electoral manipulation to Budapest. They and others active on the Hungarian front report to Vadim Titov, head of a major Kremlin unit dedicated to such campaigns.

As you will recall, such tactics nearly brought down democracy in Moldova last year. President Maia Sandu and her allies narrowly prevailed, ensuring Moldova continues on a path of European integration. In Romania, Nicusor Dan only won because results of a Russia-tainted election in 2024 were overturned by the constitutional court.

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(‘Putin’ meeting today in the Kremlin with Central African Republic president Faustin-Archange Touadéra, who was elected in 2016 and protected from an attempted coup by mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner Group.)

One notable change since the launch of large-scale US/Israeli air strikes against Iran on February 28^th: Russia’s usually loquacious leader has been unusually tongue-tied. In fact, he has barely mentioned the only issue that mattered this week.

As you will recall, Putin was a vociferous critic of the US-led invasion of Iraq, culminating in his 2007 speech at the Munich, where he threw down the gauntlet over a US-led ‘unipolar world’ and dared allies to stop him.

Since then, the Russian president has rarely missed any of his many opportunities to skewer the US with regard to any number of military moves and operations — from Afghanistan and Libya to Syria and Ukraine.

Yet since the US/Israeli air campaign kicked into high gear on Saturday, ‘Putin’ has largely skirted the issue. He managed only desultory written condolences on the death of Khamenei whose killing he termed “a cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law.”

This is, to put it mildly, rich coming from a regime that has poisoned and murdered opposition leaders, pesky journalists, dissident oligarchs, superfluous diplomats, its own wayward officials and of course ordinary Ukrainians on a massive scale.

As we have chronicled, the consolidation of power by Kremlin Chekists under Patrushev may have subjected the Russian president himself to a similar fate.

In his March 1^st statement, ‘Putin’ called Khamenei a ‘great statesman’ who had made “a huge personal contribution to the development of friendly Russian-Iranian relations, raising them to the level of a comprehensive strategic partnership.”

Apart from cursory telephone calls to Gulf leaders — whose countries are under attack by Russia’s ally, in some cases with Russian-made drones — the marquee event for the public ‘Putin’ since February 28th was today’s meeting with the president of the République centrafricaine — a longtime host to and client of Wagner and its successors, making his country perhaps Russia’s most reliable remaining ally.

‘Putin’ had a sombre meeting yesterday with Hungary’s foreign minister, whose boss faces electoral Armageddon as the country prepares for April 12th polls. ‘Putin’ also gave a boilerplate address to the Ministry of Interior, again without breathing a word about Iran — something the real Putin would never have done

(‘Putin’ with Russian journalist Pavel Zurabin yesterday in the Kremlin)

The Kremlin used the only televised presidential remarks since February 28^th — given a full four days after attacks began — to (i) complain about new EU restrictions on Russian gas including LNG; (ii) call a fire aboard an LNG carrier in the Mediterranean a ‘terrorist act’; and (iii) claim Ukraine would attack pipelines.

There was nothing about US or Israeli military action against Iran.

Needless to say, this is not Moscow’s usual modus operandi. It smacked of desperation and heavy improvisation. The Kremlin is clearly non-plussed by this latest war but preoccupied by growing internal financial pressures. They know Russia will not benefit from this week’s spike in energy prices, which markets expect to be temporary. Russia’s budget deficit is skyrocketing, as oil and gas revenues continue to slide.

Most worryingly of all for Moscow, Belgian special forces, backed by France, boarded and seized the Ethera, an oil tanker sailing under the flag of Guinea, in the North Sea on Saturday night. This more proactive EU posture has spooked Politburo 2.0.

But what is really driving ‘Putin’s’ reticence on Iran?

First, the Kremlin is terrified any criticism of US actions might irritate their own irascible poodle, Trump – on whom they count to legitimize their conquests.

Second, Russia is downplaying its role in creating the Shahed/Geran drone menace now shattering the Gulf states’ carefully-cultivated air of invulnerability.

Third, despite a warm relationship with Netanyahu, Moscow has a more complicated one with Israel since 10/7, given Russia’s role in enabling those attacks.

For ‘Putin’ to boast about Russia’s ‘comprehensive strategic partnership’ with Iran while Israeli pilots pummel IRGC headquarters and military installations across the country only discredits Russia further in Israeli eyes.

The usual suspects confidently predict this war will fill Russia’s coffers and drain Ukraine’s defensive stockpiles, as interceptors are redirected to the Gulf.

The truth is the opposite.

Ukraine is now the recognized leader in defending against Iranian drones and missiles. The US, Europe and Gulf allies will scale up these capabilities, making Moscow’s last formidable weapon against Ukraine less relevant.

As Iran’s role in waging proxy war and sustaining autocrats becomes clearer, shadow fleets and sanctions-busting will become less fashionable; seizures and boardings on the high seas will become more feasible and more common.

In short, the dashboard of official Russia is a sea of flashing lights, all signalling weakness, as budgetary, economic, military and political reverses mount.

Worst of all, the Kremlin is stuck with a double literally no one takes seriously.

Fascist Moscow’s oily officials cannot even get to Abu Dhabi, the venue for trilateral talks on which their unrealistic hopes hang, which is under attack by Russia’s ally.

This would be farcical — worthy of a film like ‘The Death of Stalin’ — if Russian and Iranian aggression had not already cost the world so much.

Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, as he was born, did in fact die on this day, March 5^th, in 1953, aged 74. Putin, apparently born a few months earlier on October 7^th, 1952, would have turned 74 later this year. He has not been seen since 2023.

Russia today is headless, friendless and almost penniless. It is also eerily silent. The nightmare Putin loved to recount from his days in Dresden, about a capital that no longer answered as the Soviet Union began to capsize, has come full circle.

But this time the predicament is far worse: Moscow is not just incommunicado. It literally has nothing to say.

As Russia’s crisis deepens, the countries it has directly and indirectly attacked— Ukraine and Israel — are riding high. The Kremlin’s most prized asset is damaged goods, losing steam, unable to deliver on most fronts that matter to Moscow.

No wonder ‘Putin’ and the Kremlin clique have been stumm this week.

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(Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Mason (DDG 87) alongside Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush in the Atlantic, Feb. 21, 2026. [U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Jayden Brown])

(Continued from a previous essay, published earlier today)

Moscow is hoping this new phase of war against Iran redirects allied attention away from Ukraine even further. While attacking Iran, the US continues to be unbelievably soft on Russia, which remains Iran’s principal defence partner. Washington is still trying to impose territorial concessions on Kyiv, as our essay (‘Withstanding Pressure’) noted on the eve of the first joint US/Israeli strikes.

By cutting off military support for Ukraine and blocking Ukraine’s use of confiscated Russian assets, Washington is in effect helping Russia wage its war against Ukraine — ignoring the reality that this theatre of war turned Iranian drones into a global threat that is now hitting US allies across the Gulf.

By neglecting Russia’s intimate ties with Iran — which run from defence and intelligence-sharing to nuclear energy and support for terrorism — the Trump Administration is undermining prospects for democratic regime change in Tehran. The Trump Administration says its military operations against Iran will be disruptive for China, but makes no mention of the 20-year Comprehensive Security Partnership Treaty that Moscow signed with Tehran only last year.

By remaining indifferent to Moscow’s wide-ranging ties with Iran and enabling Russian aggression against Ukraine, Washington is also downplaying international law — a framework the US and its allies fought two world wars to establish. As Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni put it: “A crisis in international law is inevitably the result of the war in Ukraine. When a member of the UN Security Council deliberately attacked its neighbor, it was inevitable that it would lead to a season of chaos.”

(Trump at the White House in September with Pakistani prime minister Shehbaz Shari [on the left] and field marshal Asim Munir [on the right], who is also Pakistan’s chief of the army staff. [Handout/Government of Pakistan])

The Trump Administration also seems indifferent to the longstanding solidarity among jihadist regimes in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. In fact, Trump’s 2020 deal with the Taliban was instrumental in returning terrorists to power in Kabul. Pakistan’s current chief of the army staff, field marshal Asim Munir, has reportedly visited the White House four times since June 2025, becoming perhaps the most unexpected and improbable of Trump’s new chums.

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(A female Israeli air force pilot [IDF])

The joint Israeli-US military operations against Iran that began on February 28^th has been unprecedented in several respects.

For the first time since the Vietnam war, which ended in 1975, the US has launched large-scale air strikes without meaningfully consulting either the UN or NATO allies. At the same time, in a moment that is unmatched since the 1978-79 Iranian revolution, there is widespread hope for regime change in Iran — as shown by nationwide demonstrations across the country in January, which resulted in brutal repression and mass executions of over 7,000 Iranians, as confirmed by the Human Rights Activists News Agency. The regime is suspected to have killed at least ten or fifteen thousand more Iranians, but their deaths have not yet been verified.

By taking military action now, the US is seeking to capitalize on this widespread disaffection, to degrade the regime’s capacity to take further repressive action and, in so doing, to give Iranians space to take their fates into their own hands.

Among the many goals Trump has so far mentioned, he is also very clearly motivated by the recent success — as he sees it — of his January 2026 regime decapitation operation in Venezuela, which saw the dictator Maduro removed from power but left the rest of the regime intact.

Political realists must also acknowledge that Trump — whose polling numbers are unfavourable as midterms approach — is seeking a boost from the ‘halo effect’ that successful use of military force in election years provided to Johnson, Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush. Trump will also know that ‘wag the dog’ failed to deliver positive results for Carter and George H.W. Bush. He no doubt considers himself wilier and more ruthless than either of them, and is once again emboldened by the recent success (as he sees it) of his military action in Venezuela.

The historical reality is that regime change on the scale now hoped for in Iran has never been achieved by air power alone. The closest precedents are NATO’s missions in Libya in 2011 and Kosovo/Serbia in 1999. In the former case, rebel forces were needed on the ground to overthrow the Gaddafi regime. In the latter, Serbia withdrew from Kosovo but Milosevic held power until 2000, when he was ousted after a disputed election and mass protests.

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(Zelenskyy and Trump in the Oval, February 28th, 2025 [Andrew Harnik/Getty Images])

Our first essay appeared the day Ukrainian president Zelenskyy upset Trump and Vance by speaking the truth in the Oval Office. Since February 28th, 2025, we have have published 122 essays, managing a pace of nearly one every three days — or between two and three per week, which had been our goal.

This note is to thank you all, our readers and subscribers: we are grateful.

The Diehard Optimist has covered a wide range of topics, with several recurring themes. Thirty essays have tackled Canadian subjects, including a ten-part series on foreign interference in our 2025 federal elections. Twenty focussed on Ukraine, twenty-two on Russia and thirteen on Trump’s United States. We have declared the Putin era over; found new meaning in George Grant’s Lament for a Nation 60 years’ later; pushed for the coalition of the willing to become a coalition for victory in Ukraine; and profiled the Kremlin’s Chekist masters.

A seven-part series on how the Cold War ended touched on Ukraine, the US, Canadian indigenous history and of course the demise of the Soviet Union. Unlike most histories, we concluded the Cold War was winding down over 1965-75 and had ended by the time Soviet military advisors were deploying en masse to Angola. Moscow has been engaged in large-scale, hot irregular warfare, massive influence operations and other active measures against NATO allies ever since. It is vital not to conflate the dissolution of the USSR and Warsaw Pact with the end of Russia’s active forever war, which they continue to wage at full tilt.

We have also tackled issues from Libya, Greenland and Moldova to Afghanistan and China’s balance of trade. Our objective is not to compete with headlines you read every day, but rather to take a step back from the news cycle — to provide deeper insights that put today’s conflicts, the fortunes of our democratic institutions and the policy choices that will make or break our futures into broader context.

Many platforms today are brimming with quality material. Our goal is to provide analysis and commentary you will not find anywhere else. Democracy, free speech and the peace we once took for granted are under concerted attack. This new wave of aggression started at least two decades ago, as yesterday’s essay pointed out. To restore hope for the future, to retake the initiative and re-open the door for more countries to become stable, free societies, we need to understand the sources of this aggression and the moves required to defeat it.

One year later, Ukraine has survived its most difficult winter since Russia’s full-scale onslaught began in 2022 — in fact, the worst of the twelve since Russia first invaded in 2014 on the very day Canada’s women won gold in hockey at Sochi.

It has been a brutal year for Ukraine and its allies. With a Russian asset in the White House, everything has gotten harder. Zelenskyy bounced back quickly from that awkward February 28^th meeting, showing that bowing to bullies never pays and speaking the truth remains a powerful weapon. When we appease or coddle autocrats, as many have done in recent decades, or when we simply pretend they are something else, we only dehumanize, dishonour and weaken ourselves.

These lessons are eternal, but they must seemingly be re-learned in every generation. Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people inspire us because they are the principal force and main voices reminding the world today that freedom and peace were won by the sacrifices of those who defied and defeated tyranny.

We are close to another one of those watersheds. The peace broken by Russia, Iran, Pakistan and others will not be restored without much greater effort and, yes, sacrifice by allies. We will advocate for these exceptional commitments, explain why they are needed, and aim to remain among the voices shaping and charting this difficult path forward. Thanks again for being part of this conversation.

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