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William Watson: Trump is no FDR but Carney may be a Mackenzie King

PM's ambiguity about Iran war's legality and our support for it echoes King's dodging and weaving, which did succeed in keeping Canada whole

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Donald Trump says British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is “no Churchill.” This after the U.K. declined to let the U.S. use its air bases in striking Iran — at least not until Iran struck back, so that further actions could be categorized as defensive and therefore not in violation of international law, whatever that is. “This is not Winston Churchill we’re dealing with,” Trump said from the couch in the Oval Office.

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Maybe not, Starmer could have shot back, but you’re no Franklin Roosevelt.

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Whether out of good breeding or good sense he did not. But he would have been right. Unlike Trump, FDR won large majorities of the popular vote, controlled both houses of Congress by large margins, brought in his social revolution via legislation, not executive order, so that it had a better chance of lasting, and was famous for his fireside chats: radio talks in which he explained complicated matters in simple terms ordinary Americans could understand.

On the other hand, like Trump, FDR faced stiff resistance to U.S. involvement in foreign wars. But he managed to get aid to Churchill’s Britain via finesse and ambiguity until Japan greatly simplified his job with a surprise attack on Hawaii early one sleepy Sunday morning in December 1941 — the kind of surprise attack that, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Robert F. Kennedy, Sr., told his brother, President John F. Kennedy, was immoral and un-American. (RFK, Jr. so far has not objected to the Iran strike.)

The irony is that Starmer himself favoured letting the Americans use the bases in their surprise first strike but couldn’t carry his national security group with him. His failure was not of strategic vision but of the tactical ability to persuade his colleagues.

These comparisons with World War II leaders raise the question whether our own Prime Minister Mark Carney is a modern-day Mackenzie King — not the grumpy old bachelor who held seances and took policy advice from his dead mother (whose advice, incidentally, was usually pretty good) but the shrewd, careful and often creatively ambiguous politician who succeeded in steering an ethnically divided country through the stresses of total war.

If you ask AI what statement King is most famous for, it’s his 1942 declaration “Conscription if necessary but not necessarily conscription,” which is hardly Churchillian in its clarity. But we forget how divided Canada was. When King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mum) visited Quebec City on their summer 1939 North American tour, the first visit ever by a reigning monarch, Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis skipped the official lunch, claiming, King biographer Allan Levine writes, that he had to “attend to a personal matter.”

And during the parliamentary debate on a Canadian declaration of war in September of that year, several Quebec Liberals spoke against, along with the leader of what became the NDP, though no recorded vote was taken. Before the debate King had promised his Cabinet there would be no conscription for foreign service. He wanted to keep his party together but also worried that conscription would spark literal riots, as it had in 1917.

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King’s political problem was that many of his English-speaking ministers were as adamantly for conscription as his Quebec ministers were against it. A 1942 plebiscite on whether the government should be released from its no-conscription promise won 63-37 in the country as a whole but lost 27-73 in Quebec — which caused King to delay introducing it until late 1944. The delay lost him a defence minister but the party and the country survived. (And some Quebecers came to realize their mistake. In a 1945 letter to a friend, a young Pierre Trudeau regretted having sat out “the greatest cataclysm of all time … occurring 10 hours from my desk.”)

The war on Iran is not such a challenge to Canadian unity but the country, like the world, is divided about it. The strategic need to get along with Trump and the nature of the Iranian regime justify Carney’s initial support for the strike. His subsequent rumination that the group decapitation was likely a prima facie violation of international law was lawyerly — prima facie is a lawyerly term — but also probably true: as a rule, countries don’t go around murdering other countries’ top 40 officials.

On the other hand, a reasonable case can be made that international law warrants punishment of a regime that is itself murderous — though it would be hard to get that through the International Criminal Court, much less the UN, which is home to too many equally noxious regimes. But little in this episode is clear cut. If Carney’s reaction-management statements qualify as creative ambiguity, so be it.

One way I hope Carney is not King-like is in his sensitivity to slights and flattery. Levine makes King sound downright Trump-ish. Successive British High Commissioners to Canada advised Churchill on how to cultivate our prime minister. At the slightest indication King was feeling ignored or insulted, Churchill would send messages extolling his great contributions to the common cause. One such telegram, Levine reports, King “tucked … in his coat pocket and on cue displayed … proudly to political associates and reporters for some time.”

In the interests of transatlantic harmony, in 1941 Churchill hosted King at Chequers, where, after dinner and drinks presumably, and “to the great amusement of everyone present, the two stocky 66-year-old prime ministers danced together.”

Carney will hope continued cultivation of Trump requires only metaphorical, not literal, two-stepping.

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