Retired U.S. diplomat Charles Shapiro, who served as ambassador to Venezuela under then-President George W. Bush, told The Hill Times that the strategy “captures the ethos of the Trump administration,” particularly its more isolationist wing.
Former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela Charles Shapiro says the strategy is ‘full of Trump administration bugaboos’ on immigration and accusations of ‘civilizational decline’ in Europe. Photograph courtesy of LinkedIn
“This strategy is full of the Trump administration’s bugaboos on mass migration and ‘civilizational decline’ in Europe, and it essentially looks at the world as three competing power centres,” Shapiro explained.
However, while the strategy seeks to divide the world between the U.S., Russia, and China, Shapiro notes that the document is “vaguely critical” of China, but offers no criticism of Russia and “completely sells out NATO.”
“It just sort of ignores the rest of the world, except as the objects of action by those three powers and just dumps on the Europeans,” Shapiro said.
Lloyd Axworthy, who served as foreign affairs minister to then-Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien, previously told The Hill Times he believes the strategy threatens to make Canada “a vassal state” and “needs to be put on the reading list” of every MP.
Axworthy said that the security strategy illustrates that “the United States no longer has a commitment to collaborative, co-operative multilateralism,” and has basically adopted an “our-way-or-the-highway approach in the Western Hemisphere.”
NDP MP Jenny Kwan (Vancouver East, B.C.), her party’s national security critic, described the strategy as “a break from the liberal internationalist script” and “the clearest articulation yet of an old imperial impulse dressed up as ‘flexible realism.’”
“By openly reviving a Trump-branded Monroe Doctrine, Washington is no longer pretending that the Western Hemisphere is a community of sovereign nations,” Kwan wrote in a statement to The Hill Times. “It is declaring a hierarchy, and Canada is firmly placed in the category of subordinate territory whose primary function is to enable U.S. power projection. We cannot and will not stand for it … Canadians expect us to respond aggressively, in kind, in support of the national interest.”
