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In all the eye-rolling and the uproar attending to the glamour treatment lavished upon Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the cover of this month’s Rolling Stone magazine, there’s one thing that has been conspicuously overlooked in each of the obsessively forensic deconstructions of the gushing 7,000-word profile that accompanies the magazine’s stylish portraiture. There is nothing in it that even comes close to answering the question posed in its headline: “Is he the free world’s best hope?”

As a public service, then, here’s the short answer. If Justin Trudeau is the free world’s best hope, then the free world is doomed.

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On a scale that exceeds anything since the darkest moments of the Cold War era, a belligerent authoritarian internationalism is corrupting the world’s democracies and undermining the institutions of freedom and the rule of law from Hong Kong to Hungary and from Washington to Warsaw. It is a state of affairs that may not yet require any defiant Churchillian oratory of the “let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground” variety. Still if the free world’s foremost champion is to be a glamorous, tousle-haired scion of Canada’s soft-palmed class, this is exactly what you will get, in Trudeau’s own words: “I mean, the image of Canada, the way people look at you as ‘Oh, you’re Canadian, but you’re here to help, you’re not here for oil, you’re not here to tell us how to run our country.’ ”