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So, apparently, we’re reverting to the days when war and threats of war were “the sport of kings” — all our elaborate diplomatic and constitutional arrangements set up to keep the peace after the horrific lessons of previous wars now up in the air.

His would-be majesty, Donald Trump, New York real estate crook, TV blowhard, crotch-grabber, abuser of immigrant children, shredder of treaties and, shamefully, president of the United States, sends warplanes to attack Iran, and with 10 minutes to target, calls them back on the grounds that despite having the most elaborate information system on Earth at his disposal, he only found out at the last minute that people would be killed.

For this aversion of a new conflagration in the Middle East — with many deaths, a spike in oil prices and maybe a worldwide economic crash, and who knows what else — we are asked to be truly thankful for Trump’s tender conscience. This guy does have a way with what we used to call logic.

The question weakly arises as to whether anything can be done about this by the world community. Apparently not much — the failure of the American constitutional order that was designed to prevent this sort of thing is the core of the matter, and largely impervious to outside influence.

Does that mean that the nations of the world can do no more than passively suffer the insults, threats and manipulations of this presidential egomaniac? What I’m getting to in that regard is the Canadian connection.

At the behest of the Trump administration, Canada arrested Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer and daughter of the founder of the Chinese electronics giant Huawei, because her company allegedly got around Trump’s sanctions against Iran. The legalities turn on whether a Hong Kong company doing the actual business was a Huawei subsidiary or not, plus — try not to laugh — whether Huawei lacked transparency and committed “obstruction of justice.”

Keep in mind that these sanctions and the tensions with Iran now are the result of Trump imperiously ripping up the nuclear treaty that, by all accounts except Trump’s, Iran was observing properly.

So, now, we are upholding arbitrary Trump rules that we don’t believe in and that are an affront to international law, while the Chinese beat up on us for it with commercial penalties and counter-arrests. How undignified can we get?

The question is this: do we have the guts to drop this blatantly political prosecution on behalf of a rogue American president? Former prime minister Jean Chrétien — who would likely have stood up to Trump — recently suggested just that. The Trudeau government said that’s not on because the “rule of law” must run its course.

It would indeed be preferable that the court deal with it and throw it out — Meng’s defence is that it’s all blatantly political, which seems obvious enough. But that could take another year, if not more. And although the prosecution is under an extradition treaty with the U.S., the government can choose to prosecute or not.

Strange that the Trudeau government was so eager, indeed willing to risk everything, to avoid prosecuting SNC-Lavalin for bribery, and was accused of playing fast and loose with that selfsame rule of law, but now is sticky about it where it poorly applies. Meng’s lawyers are arguing, logically enough, that Meng shouldn’t be extradited for what is not an offence in Canada.

Trudeau, like most other Western leaders, has been on pins and needles sucking up to Trump but getting only insults and vilification in return. The man, after all, has huge power to do damage — the U.S. is the world’s head office for everything, including finance, communications, electronics, economics, entertainment and much else. The world largely accepts this as long as the rules, although they might favour the U.S. in the big picture, are at least predictable. Trump, whining that it’s all rigged against the U.S. and abusing America’s position mercilessly, simply makes trouble.

Let’s keep in mind that neither Iran nor China are sweethearts, and that Huawei itself is problematic for the West as a shadowy instrument of China’s Communist government. So it’s time, as a U.S. election approaches in which a crooked process could deliver the same flawed result as last time, for the Western world to start snarling back, regardless of the neo-monarch’s wrath, before we are indeed in a new conflagration. Dropping the Meng extradition while Trudeau still enjoys a large international profile could well be the right message at the right time.

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Ralph Surette is a freelance journalist in Yarmouth County.