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Now, everything is turned on its head. U.S. President Barack Obama’s “legacy” project has turned out to consist of substituting NATO influence in the Middle East with Khomeinist hegemony, in exchange for a dubiously crafted commitment from Iran’s ayatollahs that they will abandon their nuclear aspirations, which they insist they never harboured in the first place.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s “legacy” project has turned out to consist of substituting NATO influence in the Middle East with Khomeinist hegemony,

Thus, Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion can look straight into a television camera and deride the former Conservative government’s hard-line policy on the Iranian theocracy as “irrational and ideological.” The thing to do now is to cash in and pull out all the stops to help Bombardier Inc. beat whatever Boeing bids for the leavings from Iran’s recent $25 billion deal with Airbus. How times have changed.

As recently as December 2012, only three months after the Harper government severed diplomatic relations with Tehran, the Liberal line was that Canada’s Iran sanctions policy “wasn’t going far enough.” At the time, Dominic LeBlanc, the Liberal foreign affairs critic, had this to say: “Conservative sanctions against Iran are inadequate. Canada must strengthen its efforts to encourage regime change, including sanctioning the major human rights violators.”

Imagine that. Sanctioning Iran’s major human rights violators. “Regime change,” even. Who even talks like that anymore?

Debates about Canada’s foreign policy tend to fall along lines that are partisan, almost tribal, but there are honourable exceptions. Toronto lawyer Kaveh Shahrooz, a longtime Liberal and human rights activist, isn’t too shy to describe Canada’s new supine posture in unfavourable terms. “It’s the China model,” Shahrooz told me the other day. “We’re open to diplomatic relations, with no connection to internal issues.”