The Western alliance now faces an “axis of resistance” – centered around Russia and China – that might be tempted to threaten its hegemony with a simultaneous, coordinated challenge. Like sharks, they undoubtedly smell blood in the water.
We must be unafraid to confront the dark side of progress now, but without losing faith in the human campaign to make life better. This is the conviction that we need to save our planet and ourselves.
My subject is “Canada in the World: The Challenges Ahead”. We’re in a struggle to reinvent our country, to maintain our unity at home and project our influence abroad. Before we can reinvent ourselves tomorrow, we need to understand how this country was made. One of my themes is the way in which the national identity and the nation-building of Canada was structured by forces outside us, chiefly by the forces and ideologies of empire.
The age of empire ought to have been succeeded by an age of independent, equal and self-governing nation-states. But that has not come to pass. America has inherited a world scarred not just by the failures of empires past but also by the failure of nationalist movements to create and secure free states—and now, suddenly, by the desire of Islamists to build theocratic tyrannies on the ruins of failed nationalist dreams.
