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By 2014, Obama had abandoned his European allies in Libya, where he’d only reluctantly participated in a UN-sanctioned no-fly zone that prevented Gaddafi from committing genocide

By 2014, Obama had already abandoned his European allies in Libya, where he’d only reluctantly participated in a UN-sanctioned no-fly zone that prevented Muammar Gaddafi from committing genocide against the Libyan people. The Libyans wanted a back-up force of 6,000 NATO troops to protect their embryonic, democratic government. Even that was too much to ask, and Obama had the gall to blame Libya’s unravelling on what he called NATO’s “free riders” in Europe.

“Obama leaves Iraq in a mess, disengages from the Mid East, does nothing in Syria, Libya or Palestine and then blames us. Not much of a legacy,” is the way Sir Alan Duncan, the United Kingdom’s Minister for Europe and the Americas, put it. This wasn’t just a Tory critique. Here’s veteran Labour MP Barry Sheerman: “Obama has been a huge disappointment as a President and leader of the free world.” And now, the United States is finished as a force of stability within NATO, within the World Trade Organization, the G7, the United Nations, the Organization of American States, and even NAFTA.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel gets it. The European Union must “take its fate into its own hands,” Merkel said last week, pointing to the loss of both post-Brexit Britain and post-Obama America as reliable allies. “The times in which we could completely depend on others are, to a certain extent, over,” Merkel said at an election rally in Munich, and she wasn’t putting too grim a gloss on things. Trump had just met with European leaders and pointedly refused to affirm America’s continuing commitment to NATO’s mutual defence clause. It was doubly disgraceful that Trump’s refusal occurred during an unveiling of a memorial to the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks – the only time that NATO’s mutual defence clause had been triggered. It was triggered in defence of the United States.

So Freeland is quite right. Canada can no longer count on American self-interest to provide a “protective umbrella.” We have to strike out on our own somehow, with democratic partners that share Canadian values. “To rely solely on the U.S. security umbrella would make us a client state,” Freeland said, and those days are gone.

What Canada does now, though, is a question Freeland did not adequately answer. And that answer will continue to elude us all so long as we persist in the comforting delusion that it all started with Donald Trump.