At the height of US military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan that infamously cost $4 trillion and 225,000 lives, my foreign reporting professor at a New York journalism school gave us what seemed then like invaluable advice about traveling abroad.

"Just tell everyone you're Canadian. Everyone loves Canadians," she said.

That was 2010. And like a lot of what I learned there about journalism and the international community, that lesson seems evermore dated and naive.

Canadian presses swell with praise for the Harper administration's decision last week to cut diplomatic ties with Tehran, as a rash of violent attacks sweep Western embassies across predominantly Muslim countries, upset by a mysteriously bad-quality Islamophobic video mocking their prophet.

"Canada’s move suddenly seems prescient and cautious," an article in The Montreal Gazette said, triumphant.

Iran's embassy in Ottawa is closed, as is Canada's in Tehran -- there is now no formal channel for Ottawa to mediate international conflict -- as it successfully has in the past -- with the leader of of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a union of 120 largely anti-Western countries in the global South.

It was a decisive move that skirted any formal attempt at diplomacy -- and preceded any formal explanation. The Gazette was all for Harper's decision to send "Iran's diplomats packing, without so much as a by-your-leave."

Experts in Canada's international relations with the Muslim World are vastly opposed to a gesture they see as a wholesale breakdown in Canada's tradition of foreign diplomacy and peacemaking.

"No other Western power has done this... This is taking us one step closer toward war with Iran," warned director of research for the Canada Research Chair in Islam, Pluralism and Globalization at the University of Montreal, Roksana Bahramitash.

Washington acts, Ottawa follows suit. Sort of.

Premier Stephen Harper's Conservative government has infamously echoed the sentiments of its Republican counterparts to the south.

The US has engaged its partners, from Britain to Japan, in sanctions and countless other efforts to get Tehran to abandon its nuclear program, which it fears aims to produce weapons for use against ostensible enemies of the Islamic Republic, like Israel.

The US has no diplomatic representation in Tehran, and vice versa. There are no channels for the US to mediate a conflict with its adversary in the Middle East, after a nearly decade-long war in Iraq that, if anything, was evidence of the perils of Washington's diplomatic failures: the costs in human capital and federal funds, at the height of a crippling recession that still has young Americans unemployed and angry.

But Bahramitash says there isn't even any US precedent for Ottawa's bellicose, chest-thumping break with Tehran.

"The US embassy in Iran closed during the hostage crisis. What happened in Canada?" Barhamitash said, referring to the 1979 captivity of US foreign diplomats at the beginning of the Islamic Revolution.

"Ironically, it was the Canadian embassy that finally got the hostages out of Iran" after 444 days of captivity, Bahramistash added.

Who now will mediate between the West, Iran and the NAM nations -- to include North Korea, Venezuela and Somalia?

A paradigm shift

A full break with Iran's Eastern bloc is not the only sign that 2012 marks an end of days for Canadian international diplomacy. Ottawa is putting Canadian tax dollars where its paradigm shift is.