A Critique of the Ostrich Approach

“What do the foreign wars even have to do with us?”

On its head, this is a fair ask. It feels intuitive, given our location in the world. These conflicts are far away… so should we then stop talking about all of them and move on about our day?

This perspective represents the “ostrich” approach to geopolitics, in contrast to “war hawks” and “peace doves,” this is a less discussed bird analogy around foreign policy that is widely held amongst populist spaces in Canada.

Essentially, the ostrich is prone to sticking its head in the sand. The parable here is that we can do the same for our country by ignoring events abroad.

However, the actual reason the bird buries its head is to commit suicide.

We will follow suit as a political movement if we take the same approach for our country. We simply cannot afford to stick our heads in the sand and wish away the surrounding world. The fact of the matter is that our daily lives are intrinsically affected, directly and indirectly, by the foreign policy and international relations of our government.

At first glance, the isolationist position of the ostrich may seem alright, especially in comparison to the interventionist position of the war hawk, but this is insufficient to understand why these foreign conflicts are happening and how they have already embroiled the government of our country.

This is why we need to have a comprehensive understanding of the historic and current foreign policy of the British Dominion of Canada. This is a major weakness with much of the analysis coming out of the nationalist milieu that demonstrates a lack of depth which we can classify as “narrow nationalism.”

The approach of solely looking inwards at our domestic issues without the full picture of the world that shapes these very circumstances actually makes us more susceptible to external threats, especially when it comes to our citizens being propagated to about the foreign wars by the legacy media and corrupt politicians, if we do not make the connections to the foreign policy, we cannot effectively communicate the “why” of current events to our fellow Canadians.

“Canada First” should not mean being ignorant to everything happening outside of our country, in fact, the patriotic position demands the opposite. We need a deep understanding of our own history that is connected to that of the world to position ourselves as a sovereign republic during this period of global realignment in the 21st Century.