Fantasy Foreign Policy

Michael Byers’s Intent for a Nation: What Is Canada For? is not a serious attempt to outline a Canadian foreign policy. It is a form of therapy, a personal diary of Byers’s feelings, mainly his antipathy for the United States, with plenty of self-congratulating anecdotes thrown in for good measure.

Come to think of it, that actually does sum up Canadian foreign policy pretty neatly for most of the last 40 years.

The book’s subtitle is “What Is Canada for?” but the book is more about what Byers is against. More pages are devoted to attacking the U.S., or at least Byers’s cartoonish caricature of the U.S., than articulating a positive Canadian position. The book is a fantasy where terrorism is a fake problem exaggerated by the Republican Party, where Iran can be trusted not to weaponize its nuclear program, where the UK and the U.S. are greater threats to human rights than China is, and where the United Nations is the arbiter of morality and...