Soft power is dead. If we want other countries to listen to our moral messages, we have to ante up with hard power

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In his latest column, titled “The Canadian delusion of soft power is dead, and good riddance,” the Daily Telegraph’s chief foreign affairs commentator, David Blair, says that during a recent stint in the U.K. government he began wondering “whether Canada might be the most annoying country in the world.”

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The reason? Our chronic, evidently incurable preachiness. At the time, he writes, we were running “a ‘feminist foreign policy’ … as if there could be a specifically feminist response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.” We called our foreign ministry (we still do) Global Affairs Canada because we “seemed to dislike the word ‘foreign.’” And, worst of all, “in a hotly contested field,” our ministers could “outdo any European counterparts in sanctimony and self-righteousness.”

Did we think maybe the world wouldn’t notice?

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