Trudeau dismissed Mackenzie King's conscription policy, which was to avoid drafting people for overseas service, as an "imbecility," because it required any participation in the war effort at all. When King denounced German concentration camps in a Victory Bond speech in 1942, it was "pure propaganda." (We will find out in the next volume, presumably, what he thought of the death camps.)

Trudeau blamed the English for promoting the French Revolution, a completely original historical theory that has not picked up many adherents. He also blamed the British for not accepting Mussolini's offer of mediation after Hitler's and Stalin's invasions of Poland in 1939. He admired the Duce, Salazar of Portugal and particularly the octogenarian Nazi puppet, Petain, for their "authoritarian corporatism," and was unfazed by their shabby despotism [perhaps he admired this Dictator too]...

...in most policy areas, he had no imagination and little success. His attempts at arms control were sophomoric nonsense, and only Ceausescu and Honecker took them seriously, and they, like Trudeau's Canada, were already disarmed. His attempt to promote foreign trade with countries other than the United States was a fiasco. His energy program was a disaster. He preferred the Russians to the Americans, saw nothing wrong with the Russians shooting down a Korean airliner (with Canadian passengers among the victims), disapproved of the Russian dissidents and was happy for Cuba to intervene militarily in Angola with air-stops in Newfoundland.