Front Burner - Carney supports Iran war with ‘regret’

Episode Date: March 4, 2026

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Mark Carney reaffirmed his support for the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.Carney spoke about the need to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and threatening international peace and security. But Carney also said his government supports the goals of the attack with “regret” and that Israel and the United States acted without engaging the United Nations.Is Canada trying to have it both ways by professing support for international law, while also backing what Canada’s former Liberal foreign affairs minister, Lloyd Axworthy, has called an act of aggression by Israel and the U.S. carried out in defiance of the U.N. charter?Dennis Horak joins Front Burner to navigate those questions. He served as the last head of mission for Canada in Iran. He also served as Canada’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. As the war in Iran continues to escalate across the Middle East, we wanted to turn our focus to Canada's response to it. On Tuesday afternoon, Prime Minister Mark Kearney again declared his support for the goals of the U.S. and Israel strike against Iran. Canada stands with the Iranian people in their long and courageous struggle against the regime's oppressive rule.

Which is why? We support efforts to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security. Because Canada is taking the world as it is, not passively waiting for a world we wish to be. Then he offered a caveat. We do, however, take this position with regret because the current conflict is another example of the failure of the international order. despite decades of UN Security Council resolutions, the tireless work of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the succession of sanctions and diplomatic frameworks,

Iran's nuclear threat remains. And now the United States and Israel have acted without engaging the United Nations or consulting allies, including Canada. So is Canada trying to have it both ways here? Supporting international law while also supporting what Canada's former minister of foreign affairs has called an act of aggression by Israel and the U.S. carried out in defiance of the U.N. Charter. My guest today is Dennis Horach. He served as the last head of mission for Canada in Iran right before the embassy there closed in 2012.

He also served for several years as Canada's ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Mr. Horace, thank you so much for making the time today. Thanks for having me. So you and I are speaking at around 5.36 p.m. on Tuesday, Eastern time, and we just heard the Prime Minister make the case for his kind of tacit support of the U.S. strike on Iran. And how would you summarize what we just heard from the Prime Minister about an hour ago on Iran? Yeah, what did you hear? Yeah, I mean, it's a difficult needle to thread, I think, in some respects. I mean, we agree with so much of what forms the basis of the U.S.

complaints and the Israeli complaints in terms of Iran's new. nuclear program in terms of Iran's regional activities, its support for terrorism, it's brutal treatment of its own people. We share, we're in very much policy alignment on those issues. And dealing with the Islamic Republic in a decisive way that could perhaps deal with those important issues, is something that's hard to oppose from a policy perspective. On the other hand, there are real questions about international law. There were real questions about sort of this whole Mike Makes Right kind of situation that seems to becoming more and more prevalent today. And certainly we saw it with the U.S. and in Venezuela.

And it's trying to sort of balance those two issues. You know, the government also doesn't want to be too offside with the United States, particularly given the policy alignment. I mean, we saw some reaction today earlier with President Trump and his sort of critical comments regarding the British position in Spain, although Spain has another issue. regarding NATO. And now Spain actually said that we can't use their bases. And that's all right.

We could use their base. If we want, we could just fly in and use it. Nobody's going to tell us not to use it. But we don't have to. But they were unfriendly. And so has UK. Now the second one is shocking. But this is not the age of Churchill.

I will say the UK has been very, very uncooperative with that stupid island. It's not about going against our policy positions to play K-Trump. It's we agree with the motivations here, not wanting also to get offside with the U.S. For bilateral relations perspective. But also there's a political dimension here in Canada as well. We have a very large Iranian diaspora, tens of thousands of which came out onto the streets of Toronto, Vancouver, other cities to protest against the regime following the absolute brutality we saw. in Iran in January. And so I think there's a political consideration as well.

So they're sort of caught between Iraq and a hard place, I think, in summer. I just want to make sure you agree with what I think I heard there, which was essentially, if I could boil it down, Canada supports efforts to stop Iran's nuclear program, but this effort may have been illegal. Am I totally off base, sir? He was fudging a little bit because he's not a lawyer, and he was saying, you know, that some of the, you know, some lawyers would be. certainly have an objection to this. And there would be others who would make another case. And again,

I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not sort of advancing this as this is what the law says. But I could see, and I have seen some arguments made, that Iran's consistent violation of international law, particularly its hostility and support for attacks against Israel. That would give Israel at least some justification for taking action against the regime, which has, taken repeated actions against Israel. And Israel is the American argument might be a little bit less a clear cut than that. They have had Americans that have been killed by the regime as well, going back to the Marine barracks in Lebanon in the 80s. The emphasis, I think, at least from what I saw in the press conference, he was, I think a lot, his comments on international

law were pretty much a lot focused on the question of the conduct of the war. and that Israel and the United States and Iran, for that matter, need to follow the rules of war in how this is being carried out. I think that was a particular emphasis, emphasis that I heard in any case. Though I'm not sure, you might have missed it because it happened afterwards when he was taking questions for reporters, and there was this exchange with a reporter from the Toronto Star. Carney replies, well, Canada was not asked to participate. You know that. We were not informed in advance.

We were not asked to participate. prima facia, it appears that these actions are inconsistent with international law. So we would not have been in a position earlier this week, or the weekend, I guess, to take a judgment that met our standards if we had been asked to participate. We weren't. Yeah, I mean, that is really sort of asserting the issue because, I mean, essentially what he's saying is we would not have participated because we would have considered it a violation of international law. However, now that it's happened, we do support some of the objectives of the mission.

It's kind of clumsy. I'm not sure I would have phrased it exactly the way he did, but it is certainly an issue that it's going to keep coming back at him. And it is complicated. And certainly we are and we are concerned about unilateral actions of individual. Joe Powers and that is a concern, you know, the whole question of the rules-based order. But that's the reality and he also made a point to reiterate, again, a line he just gave in Davos that, you know, to see the world as it is, not as we'd like it to be. And the reality is we're in an era where the rules-based international order is in jeopardy. And that is

the reality. And we have all these other elements that are driving some of our positions. on this issue. So it's very complicated. Before these statements on Tuesday, former Canadian diplomat Sabina Anoki said that this is support for a doctrine of preemptive strike to support the U.S. and Israel here, which Canada has not traditionally supported. John Allen, who has Canada's ambassador to Israel from 2006 to 20 Chen, said that this essentially gives the U.S. free reign to topple whatever. regime it wants to. I mean, we have already seen them go into Venezuela. And do you worry that Canada's kind of tacit support of this strike is essentially a support of Trump's brand of imperialism? I know

you were touching on that before, but if you could go into it with a little more detail. Yeah, I mean, it certainly can be read that way. But I think what the government has done, because they had a very different position when it came to Venezuela. And I think what they're doing is looking at it at a case by case, that the threat that Iran posed, to international peace and security, to security in the Gulf region, security in the Middle East generally. It was a very different order of magnitude

than whatever Venezuela was up to that upset the Americans so badly. I understand that you can't pick and choose, you can't cherry pick which law you're going to support or when you're going to support particular laws. But I think part of what the government is dealing with here is it's dealing with a threat level of a very different kind than what was in in Venezuela.

And whether we agree with it or not, if the Americas are going to act the way they're going to act, oh, all what we're going to do about it anyway. So I think the thing is to try and make the best of a difficult and perhaps bad situation. Could we not have done something more boring, though? You know, just said less, right? Well, no, yeah, ideally, I mean,

they tried to say as little as possible, but. But, you know, he came out. with that statement on February 28th. It was a written statement. It was one of the first statements of any G7 ally. And it said, quote, Canada supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security. Was there another path here? Well, I mean, I think what it reflects is is the two minds that a lot of us are facing with this situation. I don't think anybody is upset, would be upset with the removal of this regime. It is a threat. It would continue to be a threat. So there is that impulse to sort of cheerlead this and say, great.

Now, there's a lot of repercussions that are not so positive that potentially we can get into that later. you know, I understand the legal challenges here, and I understand the potential for precedent, although, frankly, I don't think any of the great powers need precedent in any case. But nonetheless, but on the other hand, I do have the same impulse that I'm really not sad that this regime is feeling the repercussions of their actions for decades. Do you worry, though, that the message sent to the regime from these strikes will be that they didn't try hard enough to get a nuclear weapon, like that that's the lesson.

That a much harder line could replace this current iteration, and that the lesson will be that they have to go get the bomb. Well, that's always been at risk. That realization would have hit them in June of last year. It would have hit them when their entire sort of axis of resistance, their entire network across the region was basically, degraded to, you know, minimal levels. North Korea's position is not lost on them.

And, you know, the fact that they have nuclear weapons and now, that's not the only reason why North Korea is relatively safe, but certainly a big part of it. I don't believe they had made a decision on getting nuclear weapons. This has been a debate they've had internally within a revan for ages. They wanted the capability to have one. But it's that desire to that stubbornness. about the program, which has raised suspicions, that this is ultimately where they want to go.

This is ultimately what they want to have. And frankly, a nuclear-armed Iran, given its attitudes, its behavior up till now, would be a much more dangerous animal than North Korea. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always overdelivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little.

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from Iran. You know, many people have viewed it as kind of like a paper tiger. And then on the nuclear front, the UN's nuclear-washdog chief, Rafael Grossi, said this week, inspectors have not found evidence of a coordinated Iranian program to build nuclear weapons. Before the strikes, the foreign minister of Oman said that they had made progress in negotiations that Iran was willing to give up stockpiling, which is, I understand it. I'm no expert in this, but it would make it practically impossible to make a nuclear weapon. And so was Iran really such

an imminent threat here? I think the key word there is imminent. Their capacity for mischief has been severely degraded, certainly since last June in the so-called 12-day war. And their nuclear program was very much under control under the JCPOA, the nuclear agreement, and the Obama had negotiated. But the risk with Iran is always, you don't know what you don't know. And yes, there had been inspections. And yes, there had been, there have been, you know, a general sense that they haven't been pursuing a bomb. I don't disagree with that at all. They wanted to maintain the capability.

That's true. So, no, I agree. I don't think there was an imminent threat. Now, in terms of what Iran agreed to or what they weren't going to agree, too. I do take the Amani's at the word. They're very honest negotiators. But with Iran, with negotiations, and I know this from personal experience, until it's actually signed, what they say they agree to, is often very different from what they're willing to sign. This is a tactic that has been perfected by the Iranians. I've experienced it myself. It's, so I'm somewhat skeptical

that that's ultimately where they would have gone. Part of the issue, with them. It's, and it's understandable to a degree. The right to enrichment is something that they hold very strongly to. They, they've seen from experience from the entire life of the Islamic Republic, that you can't rely on the ability to import things, that blockage, blockages of goods or anything into Iran are susceptible to the pressures from the international community, mostly driven by Iran's behavior, but nonetheless. So they want to have this independent ability to produce what they believe they need for their civilian program, or ultimately a weapons program should they make that decision. So the idea of retaining the enrichment capacity and ability is something

that they're really going to stay hard to. The Americans and Israel and others don't believe that if enrichment is allowed in Iran, then it could be fully safeguarded, that there wouldn't be diversion and that there wouldn't be the development of nuclear weapons. Right. What do you believe? It's hard to say.

I do agree with the point you made earlier that the experience they've suffered over the last, particularly the last six or eight months, has reinforced probably in the minds of some within the regime, or who were in the regime, that the only real safeguard for them is a nuclear deterrent

if they could figure out a way to do that clandestinely. So there may have been increased pressure to do that based on what had happened before, that all of their grand plans for their forward defense and their influence and taking on Israel all collapsed and the sense being that the only safeguard they would have would be a nuclear weapon. I mean, the irony in a lot of this, I mean, the message really they probably should have taken from the events of the last two and a half years since October 7th is that, you know, maybe all of that, maybe they're on the wrong track to begin with.

Maybe 47 years of hostility towards Israel, meddling in regional affairs, of hostility towards the United States. and the repercussions, the sanctions repercussions, and the impact that has had on the economy and on the lives of the average Iranian, maybe that's not all worth them. This open, active, very active, and it's not just rhetorical, but active hostility towards Israel. It's got them where they are now, both internally in terms of their economy, and now sitting there facing a war and facing threats that wouldn't be there otherwise. But I'm not sure ideologically they can find that. Maybe the next government will, I don't know.

I would be remiss as I have you here. You have during a couple times in this discussion, talked about your own experience. Carney today pointed to a pretty bad relationship between Canada and Iran over the decades. The regime and its proxies have murdered hundreds, including Canadian civilians and caused untold suffering for millions of people in the Middle East and beyond. despite more than two decades of negotiations and diplomatic efforts, Iran has not dismantled its nuclear program nor halted its enrichment activities. Canada has long supported the imperative of neutralizing this grave global threat. And I wonder if you could just remind people what he and what you are talking about here. Yeah, it's been bad from the very beginning, from the opening days of the revolution, to be honest.

We, as many of the listeners will remember, Canada gave safe haven to six American diplomats during the hostage crisis. And we helped them escape Iran. The Canadian ambassador, Kenneth Taylor, offered them the hospitality of the embassy despite the obvious risks. Taylor, proud of his embassy's security, was under no illusion, though. He knew that if the militants at the U.S. Embassy had learned about his hospitality, they might have stormed his embassy too. And that set the relationship on a particularly precarious footing right from the very beginning. And just as a small anecdote to that, I was at one point director for the division in foreign affairs that was responsible for the Gulf region, including Iran. And we were having, as we often did, some particular problems with Iran.

And so I went to Tehran. This was before I was posted to Iran. I went there with our assistant deputy minister to try and resolve this issue. And it was an issue regarding embassy staffing and visas and all of that. So not sort of a grand political issue, but it was sort of the usual sort of harassment we got from the Iranians. Anyway, so he turned up with the assistant deputy minister. We met with the foreign minister on sort of just a very sort of introductory meeting. And the very first words out of his mouth were 40 years.

ago, you guys made a big mistake helping those American spies. That reflected a mindset that they brought to the relationship. And there were moments where we had an okay relationship with them when President Ahatami was in Iran. But for the

most part, it's been hostile. We've reviewed as a puppet of the U.S. and a puppet of Israel and told that to my face on more than one occasion. So it's been a, it was a challenging relationship from the very beginning. And it really didn't approve a whole lot over the years. Okay. I just want to come back as we end this conversation to how our position here might be

kind of remembered. And just I think as people watch the communications around this coming from the United States, I don't think it would be out of line for me to say that it seems like a mess. we've already seen them out many different reasons for why they struck Iran starting with it being about dismantling their nuclear program and regime change.

On Monday there was a talk of a need to destroy ballistic missiles, the Navy eradicating its support for proxy groups. Marco Rubio was making the case that essentially Israel forced their hand that they struck because they knew Israel was going to strike

and they were trying to prevent an attack on America after Israel's strike. We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces. And we knew that if we didn't preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even higher those killed. As this continues to evolve, and as we see more outrage directed at how the U.S. is doing this, what they're doing here, do you think that there is a real potential for Carney and Canada's

position age quite badly? A couple of things. I don't see a lot of outrage. I see some criticism, but I don't see a lot of outrage. And I've long since stopped expecting coherent policy statements coming out of Washington under this administration. I think in some ways, on policy side, they fly by the seat of their pants, and certainly on the communication side they do. And it was interesting because Rubio's comments about following Israel were actually contradicted today by President Trump. Does Israel force your hand to launch these strikes against Iran? Did that we all pull the United States into this war?

I might have forced their hand. Again, it's part and parcel of a communications strategy that is consistent with this administration. Now, in terms of Canada's position, how it's going to age, I'm going to give the cynical point of view that if it goes well, if somehow, and I think this, it's a big challenge to get there, but let's just say this results in a swift, peaceful, and positive regime change. And ultimately leading to a new, more democratic, focused Iran, I think Canada's position

will not be heavily criticized going forward. If, however, as we saw with Iraq, things go terribly badly, and a place descends into chaos, then I think our position will be something that's studied for a while in terms of and questioned about whether this was a mistake or not. So I think a lot of it's going to depend on events. And I think those outcomes are unknown at this point. Of course the Canadian government is saying that we are not getting involved militarily in this war. But if this does continue to spiral, the British, for example, put planes in the sky,

as part of a regional defense strategy. Again, they're saying it's just defensive, but they do have people in sort of harm's way here. France is deploying fighter jets to protect its bases in the UAE. Do you see a scenario in which we get more involved here? No, not really. I mean, we don't really have the asses. We have people to protect.

That's for sure. We got tens of thousands of Canadians that are living there, both in Iran and around the Gulf and in Lebanon, of course. So, I mean, that's the primary focus. And there may involve the Canadian military in helping evacuation at some point if some way could be figured out to do that. And I don't know how you do that in the middle of a war zone, but that's an area we could get involved. There are probably, there are likely, as usual, there are likely Canadian forces personnel that are seconded to various American military units. I think that's likely. So there may be some individual involvement. But we really don't have the assets to bring to bear. We don't have assets to protect, like others in the region, like the British or the French do. It's already a wider war, but it's not a wider war that's involving four countries on one side and five on the other. It's basically everybody against Iran, so I don't think we're going to have to worry about, for example, the Russians piping in or the Chinese or any of that sort of thing that could spiral into a much broader war,

out-of-region war. So I really don't see that there's much scope for Canada being involved military, and I'm not sure what we would bring to the table in any case. Okay. Mr. Hark, thank you so much for this. Really appreciate it. You're welcome. All right. That is all for today. I'm Jamie Plesson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.