It’s hard to imagine this scenario, but let’s try: Canada’s ambassador to Washington publicly urges the Bush administration to cut its military spending, indicating there are concerns about excessive U.S. spending at the very highest level of the Canadian government.

This scenario is hard to imagine, not because it wouldn’t be a great idea for Washington to reduce its military spending. (I can think of few better ideas, both in terms of making the world a safer place and freeing up resources for the world’s many urgent problems.)

The scenario is preposterous, however, because Canada would never dare intervene in a matter that the Americans considered as central to their sovereignty as their right to arm themselves to the teeth. And if we did, they’d ignore us, and media pundits on both sides of the border would sharply call Canada into line.

Yet, interestingly, little fuss was made here last week when U.S. ambassador to Canada, Paul Cellucci, attempted to intervene pretty boldly in Canadian affairs. In an interview with the National Post, Cellucci stressed that the Bush administration was concerned that Canada wasn’t spending enough on its military.

I guess we’re supposed to be awed by this — imagine that we may be the topic of conversation right in the Oval Office itself!

Another reaction might be to question why we should care. Call me old-fashioned, but I like the idea that we’re a sovereign country and we — not the Oval Office — decide how we’ll spend our money. If we prefer health care and education to a big military … well, that’s just the wacky way we like to do things up here. The U.S., on the other hand, likes a very big military. It spends more on its “defence” than the eight countries with the next highest military spending combined.

Much is being made these days of the values we share with Americans. “There are no people on the planet that are closer to us in terms of the value structure and everything else than is the United States,” Deputy Prime Minister John Manley said last week.

Really? It may be true that we eat the same hamburgers and watch the same sitcoms, but our values have traditionally been quite different, the approach to military spending being one example. Those different values may, if anything, have become more pronounced.

Under George W. Bush, the U.S. has rejected international treaties aimed at controlling biological and nuclear weapons, declined to co-operate with the Kyoto accord on global warming, refused to abide by the Geneva conventions on rights for prisoners of war and now is poised to invade Iraq, despite near-universal world opposition. All this suggests that Washington is increasingly adopting an obstreperous, go-it-alone, in-your-face attitude towards the rest of the world — something that would appear to have little resonance with Canadians.

There also seems to be no limit to how far the Bush administration will go in using the tragedy of September 11 to promote U.S. interests. The White House is even invoking the war on terrorism to quash a human rights lawsuit launched by Indonesian villagers against Exxon Mobil.

The villagers, who managed with the help of the International Labour Rights Fund to bring their case before a U.S. court, allege that security forces hired by Exxon murdered, tortured and raped villagers while patrolling a vast Indonesian gas field. Now, at first glance it might seem like the connection to terror here is the terror the Indonesians allegedly experienced at the hands of the Exxon-paid guards.

But that kind of terror apparently doesn’t concern Washington. It’s considered merely bothersome by the Bush administration, which has asked the court to dismiss the villagers’ lawsuit, arguing the suit could discourage foreign investment in the country, thereby weakening the Indonesian government, a key U.S. ally in the fight against terrorism.

With the needs of the war on “terror” defined this broadly, it’s hard to imagine anything the U.S. and its corporations might want to do in the world that couldn’t be classified as essential for U.S. security. The post 9/11 era seems to be shaping up as one where a highly arbitrary, self-serving military giant feels justified to do whatever it pleases.

It makes you wonder if we should be so quick to conclude that there are “no other people on the planet closer to us in terms of value structure.” I suspect the values of many Canadians are actually closer to those Indonesian villagers, who apparently cling to primitive notions like the rule of law.

Linda McQuaig

Journalist and best-selling author Linda McQuaig has developed a reputation for challenging the establishment. As a reporter for The Globe and Mail, she won a National Newspaper Award in 1989...