Canada has a different foreign policy, based on the principle of human security. It's not based on the cold-war geopolitical model that seems to have been resurrected in Washington. And it's not about nation-building.

Economist William Easterly has blasted the current model of foreign aid in his book The white Man's Burden. Now I'm not going to weigh in on his particular arguments, but it's interesting to note that the current aid model is very top-down, and its ultimate goal is to produce viable, independent nation-states.

Human Security, on the other hand, places the rights of individuals ahead of the rights of nations. It's a radical break with the whole nation-building model. Instead, we focus on a distributed process, driven from the bottom, that attempts to address all problems of human security. It's irrelevent whether people are dying because of political repression or because their environment is crashing; they're still dying. Human Security provides the policy framework that lets us address either case.

There's a lot of information out there if you're interested--starting with the Human Security website. Kofi Annan's book Human Security and the New Diplomacy is another place to start; and the essential thinker behind the philosophy, Lloyd Axworthy, has published a fine book entitled Navigating a New World.

Human Security has a simple motto: "Freedom from Fear." It led Canada into Afghanistan--where our troops are being shot at and bombed right now. It didn't lead us into Iraq. It's a real alternative to the so-called "war on terror."

If all you get is Fox News and CNN, it might seem like there's only one paradigm for viewing the international theatre--and you're either for it or against it. But that's simply not true. Nor is there just one "coalition of the willing" operating in the world. Their actions may not make it onto Fox, but the dozen+ Human Security nations are out there right now, working to create a truly viable new world.

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