Well, I would respectfully disagree because at some point during the Syrian crisis, as our witness would be able to recollect, we tried in a way what we called “malign neglect”. We thought that the fact that we had Hezbollah backed by Iran fighting al-Qaeda groups in Iraq would then lead to a sort of sorting out. The thinking in Washington was “well, after all, it's not so bad because we have al-Qaeda fighting Hezbollah” and so on and so forth. But as in the case of, for example, North Korea and the Korean Peninsula, this strategy of malign neglect did not work and ISIL then spread quite quickly to Iraq. So, unfortunately, and I say this poignantly, we have no choice but to remain engaged. I'm also aware, from a grand strategy point of view, that this is probably not where Canada's national interest or American national interest is going to lie in 20 or 25 years. Everybody is trying to focus on Asia-Pacific but at the same time malign neglect did not work and I very much doubt that it will work in the future. Unfortunately, we do have to remain engaged, not only for humanitarian reasons but for strategic reasons as well.
