Terry Glavin: Our theoretical responsibility to protect

It was the perfectly Canadian and elegantly multilateralist antidote to what was pretty well universally regarded by all properly sophisticated people at the time as the vile toxin of unilateralist American adventurism. It couldn’t have more effectively appealed to the Canadian weakness for parochial self-flattery had it been specifically designed with that low purpose in mind.

That is one way of looking at the “responsibility to protect” doctrine. It was the marvellous 21st-century prosthetic to finally replace the phantom limb of Canada’s obsolete 20th century “peacekeeper” fantasy...