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By Randall Palmer
OTTAWA, Jan 6 (Reuters) - Veteran Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy has worked
tirelessly to raise Canada's profile in world affairs using what he calls "soft
power," but his critics say he is hopelessly idealistic.
Axworthy, who will travel to Cuba on Thursday on an official visit, is
basking in his success in pushing through a treaty to ban anti-personnel
landmines among signatories and in winning a seat on the United Nations Security
Council, which Canada will chair next month.
Educated at Princeton University during the 1960s civil-rights movement,
Axworthy has always preferred dialogue to force, multilateral moves to striking
out on one's own.
"Using the new tools of 'soft power,' we can demonstrate that security
is best built through cooperative ventures boldly applied," he told a
parliamentary committee last year.
Canada's top diplomat recently has raised the ire of U.S. and British
policymakers by calling on NATO to reexamine its nuclear policy, a call widely
interpreted to question the doctrine of first-use adopted by NATO member
nations.
Axworthy publicly maintains the goal of getting rid of all nuclear weapons,
even if rogue states which manage to put together a nuclear bomb might then have
the ultimate blackmail weapon.
Yet, confronted with the realities of massacres or open flouting of U.N.
decisions, Axworthy has supported military action. Most recently he swiftly
backed Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien's approval of U.S.-British air
strikes on Iraq.
"There must be many moments when Axworthy pretty much has to chew his
lip," said historian John Thompson, director of Canadian studies at Duke
University in North Carolina.
Axworthy has pressed for a tough Commonwealth stance against Nigeria and
expanded economic sanctions on Burma for human rights violations.
Even so, Canada's overarching method of diplomacy has been engagement, and
it quickly joined France in 1997 in shattering the Western coalition that had
sponsored an annual U.N. human rights resolution critical of China.
It follows that the same method has been employed in pursuing warm relations
with Communist Cuba -- symbolized by Axworthy's visit to Havana this week.
"Canadians like their foreign ministers to stand up to the United
States, to tweak the eagle's beak," Thompson remarked.
Axworthy, 59, is also pressing to limit the veto of the United States and
other permanent members of the Security Council and to give poorer countries
more weight on the body.
"The suspicion must be that he has a romantic progressivist vision of
Canada leading a multicultural coalition against the rich and greedy West and
that he has forgotten that Canada is a part of the West -- and that it is his
job to protect Canada's interests," the National Post editorialized on
Wednesday.
Axworthy believes that by working for a more civil, more peaceful world,
with fewer refugees and civilian casualties and less economic destruction,
Canada's interests are also advanced.
For that reason he pushed hard for an international war crimes court last
year. And he has tried to get the anti-landmine coalition to turn its attention
also to curbing trade in small arms and to stop the use of child soldiers.
"Is this a bit of a Don Quixotic foreign policy?" University of
Toronto political scientist John Kirton asked.
Axworthy's soft power, Kirton suggested, was really foreign policy "on
the cheap," preferably without using firepower.
Reform Member of Parliament Bob Mills, who has occasionally traveled with
Axworthy on foreign missions, said many world dictators understand only hard
power.
"This guy really believes the United Nations can be an international
government that can smooth everything out and it will be a wonderful world with
a white picket fence and little puppy dogs," he said.
"To me it just seems like he doesn't understand how some of these thugs
think."
17:41 01-06-99
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