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Hugh Segal has written a clear and compelling book about a complex and confused problem — why has Canada seemingly lost its way in making a foreign policy with impact and what can be done to fix the rot? His answer is summarized in a thesis that is simple to state but tremendously difficult to implement: Canada must have a foreign policy of purpose, anchored by the two overarching values of freedom from fear and freedom from want. “It is time,” he writes, “to engage the best minds of every society and culture to shape a foreign policy deployed against the root causes of fear and want and the way in which they spawn violence, war, disorder, and dysfunction.”

Segal’s analysis is informed by a wealth of experience. He has held senior positions in the governments of Ontario and Canada; headed the Institute for Research in Public Policy (one of Canada’s best-known think tanks); contested the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party; and served in the Senate, where he chaired the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade and the Senate Committee on Anti-Terrorism. He was chosen as Canada’s Special Envoy to the Commonwealth and Canada’s representative on the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group. More recently, following his resignation from the Senate, he has become the Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto.

This impressive background in politics, government, Parliament, academe, and the not-for-profit community gives him the insight to make a non-partisan but thoroughly devastating critique of the West’s record in foreign policy. Highlighting the crisis in Syria, he contends that the Obama administration, the United Kingdom’s coalition government under David Cameron, and the French government under President Hollande have allowed every “Responsibility to Protect line” to be broken, sending a “a clear message to other juntas who, being able and willing to open fire on their own people with aircraft, artillery, and gunships, understand that ‘the international optimistic liberal consensus’ is content, through a series of omissions, to simply look away.”

In this regard, according to Segal, Canada is no better than our Western allies. In the Ukraine crisis, for example, Canada’s stance is best described as “big hat, no cattle,” with a yawning gap between our rhetoric about Ukraine’s needs and the meagre substance of our actions. He writes that the Canadian Forces, for example, “have a patrol deficit, a logistics deficit, a materiel deficit, an intelligence deficit, a training deficit, and a reserves deficit, and the federal budget has an operational deficit.… This is worse than a shell game. A shell game actually has a pea.”

If this book was only one more “cri de coeur” about Canada’s commitment-capability gap, it would join several others in trying to wake Canadians up from ignoring the state of our armed forces and the relative stinginess of our foreign aid donations. But Segal also has a prescription for the ills he so eloquently identifies. He wants an ideas-based, moral foreign policy founded on the twin goals of freedom from fear and freedom from want.

There are many ideas and things to value in society and a myriad of instruments that serve to guarantee the maintenance and promotion of these, but Segal argues that certain goals must be given priority, with freedom from fear and want holding pride of place. This “radical reboot,” he argues, would give clarity and ambition to our foreign policy:

For Canada, putting these basic freedoms at the top of its foreign policy priorities list as the key requirements for trade, economic progress, and peaceful and civil societies would have two clear benefits: it would make clear and compelling the reasons for what it does in the international bodies in which it participates, the rationale for its military and humanitarian deployments, trade policies, and policies on immigration, development, and diplomacy; and it would be a valuable litmus test for choosing, calibrating, funding, and deploying its human, financial, and diplomatic resources.

Hugh Segal knows government and is quite aware that in advocating for a values-based foreign policy he is flying in the face of conventional bureaucratic and academic wisdom. Harassed diplomats desire a peaceful posting, and Segal’s advocacy, for example, for a Canadian foreign policy that is forthright in opposing the plethora of anti-gay measures in Africa and elsewhere is a fight that many diplomats would prefer to avoid. Similarly, those dazzled by the wealth of China would whisper about human rights to the Chinese leadership rather than make a clarion call. Canada’s Department of Finance will certainly groan about Segal’s call for one hundred thousand regulars, fifty thousand reservists, and a sixty-ship navy to end once and for all the “big hat, no cattle” embarrassment of Canada’s current foreign policy and defence capacity.

Yet, Segal’s call for a values-based foreign policy, one with the capacity to back it up, could not come at a more opportune time. In a chapter on the challenges posed by Russia and China today, Two Freedoms: Canada’s Global Future shows that the West, as it tries to adapt to the realities of the twenty-first century, does not today enjoy the certainty it felt in the 1990s, when it believed itself the victor in the Cold War and that the world would soon be made safe for democracy and capitalism. The values enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights are now under siege in many parts of the globe. China has become more authoritarian; Russia is turning the clock back toward tsardom; extreme interpretations of religion oppose women’s equality and choice; and in ISIS, we have a return to barbarism, which not only bedevils the Middle East but attracts young recruits from Western cities such as Birmingham, Marseilles, and Calgary.

The tragedy of the civil war in Syria is an augury of the globe’s future if we continue to turn our eyes away from the interrelationships of fear and need. The West broke its commitments on the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, thereby causing a desperate migration of millions of refugees, who are now swamping Europe and creating in their wake a new cycle of fear and misery.

The choice is ours. Live by our professed values or see them destroyed bit by bit — at first in seemingly faraway places, but inevitably on our shores too. Hugh Segal makes the case for a values-driven foreign policy and provides a prescription on how to achieve it. In a West paralyzed by doubt, and in a Canada complacent about its role, Two Freedoms: Canada’s Global Future is an appeal for both wisdom and the courage to meet the challenge. It should be heeded by us all.

Thomas Axworthy is secretary-general of the InterAction Council, and senior fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs.