Values alone cannot build serious foreign policy

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Open this photo in gallery: Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images David McKinnon is a former diplomat who is currently a senior fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. The days when foreign policy was an afterthought, subordinate to domestic politics, are over. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Canada had its own “end of history”: comforting illusions of a stable international order (with Canada near the centre) and ever widening free trade. The fall of the Soviet Union and seemingly permanent unfettered access to the United States made us assume that prosperity was inevitable and our security guaranteed....