Almost immediately after being elected in 2015, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau smugly proclaimed that on foreign relations, “Canada is back.” His Liberals (unlike those nasty Harper Conservatives who just wanted to make war) would “restore Canadian leadership” and “make a real and valuable contribution to a more peaceful and prosperous world.”

We would once again be proud to be peacekeepers, to be the “middle power” that “punched above its weight,” the “honest broker” who could move between superpowers and developing countries making deals that all sides trusted.

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We would exercise the “responsibility to protect” because “we’re Canada … and we’re here to help.”

However, during his three years in office, Trudeau has strained nearly every international relationship Canada has, notably with the United States, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Russia and now, of course, China.

Indeed, with all the strains Trudeau’s international bumbling and moralizing have caused, Canada has been left to battle China largely by itself. Not many other nations have been prepared to stand up for us with Beijing, apparently not even in private.

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When two Canadians were seized by the Chinese government in December, and a third had his 15-year sentence for drug dealing raised to death, countries such as the U.K., Australia and France would normally have been expected to put a word in for their release without much prompting.

But thanks to the failings of Trudeau’s foreign policy, Canadian diplomats apparently have had to go to traditional allies and seek their interventions, which reportedly have been half-hearted in many cases.

Trudeau was sure his emoting and caring would produce superior results to the harder-nosed manners of the Harper years. But there is little real-world proof to back that up.

In his 2018 book on the Trudeau government’s foreign policy, “A Selfie with Justin Trudeau,” former Liberal government insider Jocelyn Coulon revealed that Trudeau is “incurious” about foreign affairs. That’s a polite way of saying Trudeau is dense about international issues and relations.

For instance, Canada has had less support from the U.S. than might have been expected following our arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou. After all, we arrested Meng at the request of the Americans. They should have instantly stepped in and told the Chinese the fight was with them, not us.

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But, of course, Trudeau slagged U.S. President Donald Trump behind Trump’s back at last summer’s G7 summit in Quebec. And Trudeau, with great self-righteousness, withdrew Canada’s fighter jets from the American-led operations against ISIS in early 2016.

These are the actions of a leader who doesn’t understand how diplomacy is done or how friendships among nations are nurtured. Now his amateurism is coming back to bite us.

After being elected, Trudeau made a lot of airy pronouncements that made the world’s press and “progressive” tweeters go all googly-eyed, such as “Indigenous peoples have known for thousands of years how to care for our planet. The rest of us have a lot to learn.”

But his shallowness eventually caught up with him.

It’s easy to sign the Global Compact on Migration and mouth greeting-card platitudes to the U.N. General Assembly. Much harder to stop illegal refugees from streaming across our borders or deal effectively with returning ISIS fighters, to say nothing of performing the delicate balancing act between gently persuading the Saudi regime to protect human rights versus setting off a diplomatic counterattack that saw them expel our ambassador, recall their own and threaten Canadian universities with the loss of 7,000 fees-paying Saudi foreign students.

And let’s not even get started on the damage done to Canadian-Indian relations by Trudeau and family’s Mr. Dressup tour of the subcontinent.

Rather than Canada being back, under Trudeau Canada is now at the back.