Mr. Chair, it has been a war of our medieval rivals over the civilization we have built, a war borne of post-war and Cold War anti-colonial uprisings and of Communism's fall in the Soviet Union reanimated from Beijing today, and a war of nearly a half century cast in modern technologies, the globalized economy we have built and the moral equivalencies we have fallen to.
I rise having just returned from Abu Dhabi, where the closing chapter of this regime began to unfold before my very eyes. As I watched Emirati interceptors engage Iranian ballistic missiles overhead, missiles and drones enabled by Beijing's technology, I was taken back 20 years ago to when I was in Iraq watching Iranian Katyusha rockets falling over Baghdad.
Today, in response to more than 1,000 missiles and drones, the Emiratis defend their country with extraordinary precision. Their systems worked. Their people were protected.
Why does this regime attack Abu Dhabi and Dubai with such aggression? It is because these shining cities represent everything the Iranian regime fears. While the Middle East has moved forward toward prosperity and opportunity, Tehran remains trapped in its same dark obsessions.
For 20 years, I have warned about this regime. In Iraq, I have worked with Iranian dissidents. For that, Tehran branded me a terrorist. Later, as an adviser to former prime minister Harper and former minister John Baird, I helped close the Iranian embassy in Ottawa, strengthen nuclear inspections and provide political space to millions of Iranians to speak freely.
After 47 years of the Islamic Republic and 37 years under Ali Khamenei, the record is damning. This is the regime that stormed the American embassy and took diplomats hostage, while brave Canadians helped some escape. It is obsessed with destroying Israel, has pioneered roadside bombs, built an empire of proxy militias, sustained Bashar al-Assad's butchery over his own people and brutalized its own citizens over the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement.
In recent weeks, the regime has massacred tens of thousands of Iranians, all while racing toward nuclear weapons. Who helped fuel this final sprint? The Kremlin and the Middle Kingdom saw their partner in the clerical military dictatorship. Russia and China want a new age of empires. They have been afforded the west's best intentions. The G7 expanded to include Russia, creating the G8, and NATO established confidence measures and the NATO-Russia Council. China was granted most favoured trading status, a seat at the World Trade Organization and prominence in multilateral organizations.
None of this was earned. Neither Russia nor China divested their military ambitions, dispensed with their revanchism or displaced arbitrary authoritarian rule with democracy and open markets. As their decisions to decouple from the international system compounded, as they pursued dreams of dual circulation to export boldly while curtailing access to domestic markets and as the state capitalist belt and road initiative challenged democratic capitalism, democracies grew more complacent and prone to elite capture and corruption.
The west's nihilistic obsession with postmodernism swelled, imbued with performative stances on issues ranging from human dignity to energy security and an incapacity to define and confront the threat of a rising illiberal age. Russia turned to the Iranian regime for drone technologies and to China for discounted energy as an instigator for the chaos in the west militarily and through exploiting moral equivalencies.
Two lifetime rulers, undeterred by well-intentioned protestations and unbowed by democratic resolve, stood in their shared vision of their own dominance over their neighbours and the world. From their vantage, at every turn over the last decade, the democratic world adhered to a pattern of half measures to conciliate, failing to make the hard decisions that would defend us against their authoritarian ambitions.
In Venezuela, we see an unchallenged authoritarian consolidation. In Crimea and Donbass, we see a policy of strategic management. Between Syrian former president Bashar al-Assad and ISIS, we see containment. In Hong Kong and Xinjiang, we see performative theatre. In Kabul, we see retreat. In Tehran, we see entreaties.
The democratic world's aversion to confronting authoritarians for what they are, instead of longing for a return to an elusive normal they wish they had, can be summed up in one word: appeasement. In two years, China has become the principal external supplier of Iran's ballistic missiles and now buys nearly 90% of its oil.
However, this moment is bigger than one regime's collapse. It is about the Iranian people, the millions who have suffered and the thousands who have died for freedom. It is about fulfilling the ancient promise of Cyrus the Great. To the Iranian community in Canada and around the world, this is their moment. The ancient light of their civilization now pierces through the darkness of the last 47 years.
The Prime Minister began with strong measures but now wavers between strength and de-escalation. De-escalation with the regime that launches missiles at its neighbours and massacres its own people is not policy; it is appeasement. The Iranian people deserve their freedom. The region deserves peace. Canada must have the moral clarity and act on our interests to stand on the right side of history.
