A version of this column originally ran in Le Devoir on April 7, 2026. Translated from the French by Elettra Pauletto.

After the February 28 attack on Iran, I found solace in the thought of universal condemnation of America’s and Israel’s criminal act by a still sane international community, especially by Canada. Like many Americans, I had become an admirer of the worldview taken by Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, which is antithetical to that of our rogue president.

Normally, I do not look to Anglo-Canadians for inspiration—and certainly not to a former central banker with center-right economic leanings. However, I was captivated by his well-regarded speech at Davos this past January, and by his promotion of a new role for “middle powers” in response to Trump’s neo-imperialism. His defense of “territorial integrity” and of the “prohibition on the use of force except in cases provided for by the UN Charter” struck me as heroic in the face of the Mar-a-Lago monster.

I was thus taken by surprise when the Canadian government quickly declared its support for an act of aggression that was entirely illegal under international law, using language that was not only anodyne, but also hollow and devoid of logic. To begin with, it is debatable whether “the Islamic Republic of Iran is the principal source of instability and terror throughout the Middle East.” Ask survivors in Gaza, or the more than one million displaced persons in Lebanon, whether “the Jewish and democratic State of Israel” rates a mention in the race to cause the most instability and terror. One can ask the same question of the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority, which is constantly harassed by Tel Aviv and its settlers.

And let’s not forget Israel’s covert support for Hamas—a tactic designed to weaken Hamas’s political rival, Fatah. “For years,” notes Tal Schneider of The Times of Israel, “the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank—bringing Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group. The idea was to prevent Abbas—or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government—from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.” Schneider’s op-ed on Netanyahu’s strengthening of Hamas was published on October 8, 2023—the day after Hamas’s brutal assault on Israel (often attributed to Iran)—with the following line at the end of the headline: “Now, it’s blown up in our faces.” 

Mark Carney and his advisers followed their shortsighted analysis with a blatant lie worthy of George Orwell: “Canada supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security.” Where is Israel, a nuclear power (believed to have had atomic weapons since 1967, without ever acknowledging it), in this twisted exercise of rhetorical acrobatics? Was this attack not, after all, a joint operation between Washington and Tel Aviv? Israel is believed to possess dozens of nuclear warheads, while there is no concrete evidence that Iran possesses a single one, or that it is on the verge of building one. In Ottawa, as Orwell wrote in 1984, “War is Peace … Ignorance is Strength.” I find it remarkable that Carney could so deliberately disregard the strategic timeline behind Trump’s mission to save the world from the perceived Iranian nuclear threat. On February 24, NPR revealed that a file had been removed from the Jeffrey Epstein archives. It contained allegations by a woman claiming that Trump had sexually abused her in 1983, when she was just 13 years old. The details of this alleged encounter are, quite frankly, graphic. Two days later, NPR’s report made the front page of the New York Times. Two days later the bombing of Iran began. A coincidence?

Does Carney—who has since called for de-escalation—truly care about the accused’s presumed innocence? I, for one, believe in Trump’s survival instinct—an animalistic drive that may be savage but is far from dumb. The Epstein affair has all but vanished from public discourse since the attack on Iran, buried under the mounting death toll there, as well as in Lebanon and Israel, and by soaring gas prices throughout the world. If the Canadian prime minister finds 1984 too long or too depressing to read, I recommend Orwell’s Animal Farm—a metaphorical fable that explores themes similar to those in 1984 but is more accessible to political-satire neophytes.

Truth be told, however great my disgust for the folly of Carney and his Liberal Party, it pales in comparison to my contempt for the so-called opposition party in the United States, which is doing its best to avoid any confrontation whatsoever with Trump. The Democrats are so afraid of offending the Israel lobby, or of abandoning the pious and arrogant worldview handed down by the Puritan settlers of Massachusetts and President Woodrow Wilson, that they ignore the lessons of history and the obligations of their own Constitution.

While officially critical of the murderous charade in Iran, Democratic party bigwigs are playing a deeply cynical game regarding Trump and Netanyahu’s attack on a proud nation that believed it was engaged in peace talks. The obsession with the 1979 American hostage crisis causes people to forget the 1953 Anglo-American overthrow of Iranian president Mohammed Mossadegh’s democratically elected regime, as well as the fact that the nuclear dispute dates back to the atomic ambitions—rejected by President Nixon—of the Shah of Iran, a dictator installed by the Americans and the British. The Iranians—as much proud nationalists as violent theocrats—detest Washington. That much is certain.

It may be too late to learn and back down. Unfortunately for Trump, Netanyahu, and Carney, their “malevolent target” is an ancient civilization, not a former colony drawn up in a European capital.