Mark Carney ties his own foreign policy in knots

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Let’s peek in on Mark Carney’s Iran war foreign-policy update, beamed to us all the way from Australia.

Mr. Carney supported U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran in a statement issued Saturday, and he still does, now in a different way, because the U.S and Israel probably did not act in keeping with international law, which is unfortunately part of the world we live in, but we also have to take that world as it is, not as we wish it would be, and the best course is diplomacy, so the strikes Canada supported Saturday should be de-escalated now.

Is that clear?

Apparently Mr. Carney’s travels to the antipodes made a lot of things muddier. Just a few days ago, he ruled out a military role, but on Wednesday he waded deep into hypotheticals to say he can’t “categorically rule out participation” to defend allies.

It seems pretty clear he wasn’t talking about joining attacks on Iran − he drew a distinction between the U.S. and Israel’s “offensive operations” and possibly defending allies in the future − but that’s a whole lot of imprecise speculation amid a shooting war.

Carney says Ottawa’s position supporting U.S., Israeli strikes on Iran was taken ‘with regret’

That’s just poor communication. But the substance of his stand on the Iran war is now absurdly contradictory.

The clear-cut realpolitik of just a few days ago – siding with the air strikes launched by the tetchy President of Canada’s largest trading partner against a dangerous and repressive Iranian regime – is gone. Well, it is not gone so much as it is now contradicted by the other parts of Mr. Carney’s position.

At a news conference and in a new statement released Tuesday – Wednesday morning in Australia – he forced together support for Donald Trump’s strikes with retroactive critiques of them based on Canada’s belief in adherence to international law and preference for diplomacy over war.

The result was incoherent.

This has been a week when the Prime Minister has found it hard to reconcile the hard-nosed foreign policy he is trying to implement with the principles many Canadians want to see him espouse.

That was true earlier in his three-country tour, when he was in India, where he focused on reviving relations in the pursuit of trade but dodged questions on whether the Indian government is still involved in foreign interference in Canada.

It is also true in his shifting position on a shooting war in the Middle East.

Mr. Carney’s new statement on Iran read like a leader having an argument with himself.

In that statement he said Iran’s nuclear program has not been halted and that Canada supports “neutralizing this grave global threat.” The fact that that long-standing threat hasn’t been dealt with till now, he said, is a failure of the international order.

Okay. That’s still an argument for supporting the strikes. He appeared to say that Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism is another reason.

Opinion: After shackling Canada to Trump’s war in Iran, Carney’s course correction is wise

But then the new statement urged the U.S. and Israel to respect international law and rapidly de-escalate the conflict.

At a news conference in Sydney, Mr. Carney repeated a phrase he uses to declare his foreign-policy realism: “We take the world as it is, not as we would like it to be.”

“We would like international law to always and everywhere be respected,” he said, but he added that it’s up to the U.S. and Israel to make the case that their actions are consistent with international law. And that it appears they are not.

How bizarre. Since he already supported the strikes, and is taking the world as it is, why pipe up now to wish those strikes had been launched in accordance with international law?

The same principles of international law existed last week so why didn’t he mention them when the bombs started falling?

It’s hard to know precisely what made Mr. Carney revamp his position.

The blowback over his initial unmitigated support, including from Liberals, probably played a part.

The concerns that his support broke with traditional Canadian opposition to pre-emptive attacks might have started to feel a little more serious amid all the Trump administration’s shifting justifications, which suggest the war was launched with pre-emptive strikes in the absence of an imminent threat.

Perhaps Mr. Carney got spooked by the prospect of being tied to Mr. Trump’s conduct of the war.

The upshot is that now Mr. Carney has a self-contradicting position on a raging war.

That probably won’t have an impact on international events.

But this week, the clarity and realism for which he won praise when he delivered a major speech on foreign policy in Davos in January was clouded by events in the real world.

In Davos, he laid out an intention to uphold core principles in a pragmatic way, University of Ottawa professor of international relations Roland Paris said. “But there wasn’t anything in the speech about balancing principles and pragmatism.”

Admittedly, that’s not an easy balance to strike. On Iran, Mr. Carney made two attempts and ended up in a muddle.