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By the time Beijing decided to throw us up against a wall and slap us around for having merely acted on a U.S Justice Department extradition request in the case of Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou, one of Xi Jinping’s corporate untouchables, the easy explanation — the fashionable, facile one — was that this, too, was just another fine foreign-policy mess the ditzy Trudeau government had gotten us into. As if China has behaved with the utmost decorum with every other democracy in the world.

Photo by Ariana Cubillos/AP

But perhaps the main reason the significance of Canada’s intervention in the Venezuelan crisis has been overlooked is that the 20th-century left-right paradigm of analysis is morbidly useless in the case of Venezuela, causing a degree of cognitive dissonance that has been particularly acute among certain New Democrats. In the real world, there is nothing remotely “progressive” or “anti-imperialist” about Maduro’s Bolivarian hellhole. And Canada is not following the United States into some re-enactment of a Cold War bloodbath. The United States isn’t even a member of the Lima Group. If anything, the U.S., however unhelpfully, has been lately following Canada’s lead.

Far from being a U.S. puppet and coup plotter, Juan Guaidó is a socialist. He’s the Venezuelan version of firebrand American presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, and he’s up against a vicious regime in Caracas that is riddled with drug dealers, bankrolled by circuitous Chinese and Russian oil-for-credit arrangements and otherwise run by Cuban military intelligence. Maduro’s backers at the UN consist of more than 40 of the world’s torture states and “illiberal” democracies of both rightist and leftish pretensions — among them Syria, Iran, Belarus, Turkey and North Korea.

Whatever Donald Trump’s rambling utterances might suggest, the U.S. has no plans in the works to invade Venezuela. But if the Lima Group’s strategy fails to succeed, a foreign military intervention will be the only play left on the board. And that would be a real disaster.

It’s the very thing Freeland and the Lima Group are trying to prevent.