Canada’s Liberal government announced a wholesale makeover of foreign and defence policy this week that repudiated much of what they ran on in 2015. Instead of cheap soft power diplomacy, they’re now promising expensive hard power militarism. It’s exactly what U.S. President Donald Trump wants Canada to do, but the Liberals say they’re doing it because they can’t depend on Trump to reliably defend the free world anyone. Whatever the case, writes Ettore Fiorani, this hawkish new Liberal doctrine is likely to go down badly with their voters and is therefore unlikely to last any longer than the Trump presidency.

Anybody seen Sean Penn or Oliver Stone or Noam Chomsky in Caracas lately, pleading with angry, hungry Venezuelans to stop rioting against the Maduro government and support the revolutionary vision of the late socialist saint Hugo Chavez? How about Canadian Chavistas Linda McQuaig and Naomi Klein? Surely they all believe the country’s current economic and democratic meltdown is the result of a conspiracy by western capitalists and imperialists. They better get that story out quick, writes Ettore Fiorani, before they catch blame as enablers of the world’s next failed state.