As goes Canada, so goes Australia (and Israel and the Anglosphere?)

One of the most fascinating aspects of world politics today is Canada’s relationship with Australia and the potential it has for these two countries, plus Great Britain, New Zealand and India. It brings into focus the difference in relationships between what we might consider cousins, friends, passing acquaintances and “others” (zombies, hellcats, vengeance demons). Canada is first among our first cousins.

But Canada’s (and Israel’s) relationship with America is changing dramatically today from Submissive Partner to Equal and Independent Partner. If this new, better, more equal and more mature relationship is not respected, Canada (and Israel!) will look elsewhere for friends.

{mosads}An op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on Monday by Mary Anastasia O’Grady says the appointment of Bruce Heyman, an ex-Goldman Sachs bundler for Obama, as Canada’s ambassador “effectively belittled Canada’s concerns as trivial next to its good fortune in being a U.S. neighbor.”

“Many Canadians have already been saying that they’ve given up on Mr. Obama and now count the days until he leaves office. That may be a good survival strategy for Canada. But it can’t be good for the U.S., which doesn’t have so many allies that it can afford to offend one of the most important,” she writes.

It is not surprising that the Obama administration views Canadians as polite rurals yearning only to play hockey outside again on black ice as they did in their youth. Heyman in particular might brief himself by Googling the YouTube clips of Canadian political commentator Rick Mercer’s hilarious “Talking to Americans.”

Canada and Australia draw closer today and away from America. They have Commonwealth kinship, are rising to first prosperity in the greater world, and I may be the only one to say so, but it is important that they are both non-revolutionary Anglo cultures. There is no technical reason why they should follow America’s lead any longer. It was the psychological dynamic of America’s victory in World War II — the “end of civilization” in author Nicholson Baker’s view of the war — that brought us together. The war is over and so is Pax America. This might be seen as an organic separation rising in the greater Anglosphere like the division between Britain and America in 1776.

Through the creation of the UN, NATO and the other post-World War II globalist matrices which institutionalized the postwar world victory of Greater America or in the Sixties phrase, “Everywhere America,” we have come to see and take for granted the world as a benign or static singular cell. But in reality, nothing is static and all natural states are in constant phases of receding or advancing, one or the other, either as new or rising economies and cultures or old and receding. Canada, Australia and New Zealand can be seen as rising or advancing (Israel, India too), with the U.S. and Britain receding. And to complicate the matter, the American West is new and rising, while the American East is old and receding. America, at least the Eastern parts, is about to reach the cliff, and calling on the rising Western and middle regions to save it.

America should recognize these transitions and their symptoms, as the new and rising tend to chop down father’s tree, jump ship and begin anew as they did here in 1776.

Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children. Contact him at quigley1985@gmail.com.