Anger Management and the Future of US - Canadian Relations

Resurgent US and Canadian nationalisms have stoked divisions and rocked bilateral relations. Ottawa and Washington need to start thinking about the future of this relationship.

It is not often that I am tempted to use the term “cringe-worthy” in describing an article. For one thing, I am too old to use trendy phrases credibly. And for another, if something makes me cringe I usually stop reading it. Life is too short for my remaining time on Earth to be spent cringing.

But I read Stephen Marche’s essay “Profound and Abiding Rage: Canada’s Answer to America’s Abandonment” in the New York Times Sunday edition. All the way to the end, cringing.

Then I watched the “Paikin Podcast” episode titled “Will Canada Survive?” in which Marche and the founding director of the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy Janice Stein (a great friend of mine for many years) debated whether the US was an ally of Canada anymore — they thought not — and host Steve Paikin compared Canada to Ukraine before the Russian invasion.

This essay was inspired by the cringe. Why does this debate make me cringe, and why do I pay attention to it if it makes me cringe (I am not a masochist).

US Policy and Canadian Relations

One reason for my discomfort is that I agree with the late, great American diplomat and scholar John Sloan Dickey that Canadian nationalism, both French Canadian and English Canadian variants, is bad for US-Canadian relations. Dickey’s career at the US State Department included servings as assistant to Francis B. Sayre, then-assistant secretary of state, and as special assistant to Secretaries of State Cordell Hull and Dean Acheson. Dickey was president of Dartmouth University from 1945 to 1970.

Dickey is remembered for his impact on Canadian Studies principally for his 1975 book, Canada and the American Presence: The U.S. Interest in an Independent Canada, published by New York University Press on behalf of the Council on Foreign Relations. In the mid-1970s, Quebec nationalism was on the rise, and would lead to the election of an avowedly separatist Quebec provincial government led by René Lévesque in 1976. Dickey’s book argued that an independent Quebec would be bad for the United States, which drew more attention than his accompanying argument that Canadian nationalism was a growing problem for bilateral relations.

The resolution of the Alaska Boundary Dispute, addressed by a series of panels and commissions between 1898 and its ultimate resolution in 1903, had an important influence on US foreign policy toward Canada in that it revealed a passionate and even pugnacious nationalist spirit in Canada that was distinct from British approach to the management of Canadian affairs. The Anglo-American political and economic rivalry was among the leading issues in US foreign policy and after the resolution of the Alaskan boundary it was a central problem during the presidential administrations of Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909), William Howard Taft (1909-1913), Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921), Warren G. Harding (1921-1923), and Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929) during which the United States pursued a policy of encouragement toward the Dominion of Canada toward independence from the British Empire.

The policy of encouragement was favorable toward Canadian nationalism, open to the extension of direct commercial linkages between the United States and Canada in a version of Taft’s concept of “Dollar Diplomacy” that eschewed the Roosevelt administration’s view of the United States as a Great Power that had to acquire military means to act globally and instead promoted US commercial interests and capitalist dynamism to wield global influence as a new kind of power on the world stage.

Taft’s economic influence concept culminated in a new Reciprocity Treaty, something that Dominion governments had pursued for decades after it was canceled in 1866 by Congress, angry that Britain had violated its claim of neutrality in the US Civil War and that Canadian territory was used to attack the border states. Confederation in 1867 established the Dominion of Canada and its first Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald and his successors hoped to restore reciprocity. But Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier called an election to win a mandate to agree to Taft’s Reciprocity Treaty with the United States — and lost.

The US policy of encouragement of Canadian nationalism was undermined by the US policy of encouragement of economic linkages. After the defeat in 1911, US foreign policy sought to reconcile these two aims with a direct challenge to the British Empire: a policy of encouragement of Canadian sovereignty. In other words, independence from Great Britain. The establishment of direct diplomatic relations with Canada in 1927, during the Coolidge administration, was an important achievement of the new Canada policy.

However, after half a century and a second World War, Canadian nationalism was a force to be reckoned with, and Dickey cautioned that it would be used by Canadian politicians to rally resistance to close partnership with the United States, as had been done in Latin America and elsewhere. Nationalism as an idea proclaims an “us” and thereby defines everyone else as “them” and it has been the most successful policy of governments seeking to limit globalization historically. For Dickey, the emerging economic nationalism of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was a mirror image of the statism of Quebec nationalism and would divide Canadians and Americans and make bilateral relations management more difficult.

Dickey’s analysis was influential for three reasons: it was rooted in an American foreign policy tradition of thinking, and it addressed issues that the United States was grappling with globally at the time, and it rejected the Nixon administration’s foreign policy.

America’s founders were ambivalent about nationalism’s excesses after seeing the French Revolution descend into violence and disorder. If anything, the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and his ambitions to rule Europe made them even more skeptical. However, as the United States expanded, appeals to nationalism helped build an identity that subordinated state-affiliations, and in the years after the Civil War, nationalism was a staple of US Republican administrations trying to rally the country together during and after Reconstruction. Presidents McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft knew Canada’s nascent nationalism when they encountered it, and believed that they could use it to drive Canada toward independence from Britain. This was not an academic response to a change in Canadian attitudes, but a visceral political reading of Canadians and their mood. And Americans watched this mood harden after the First World War, when some Canadians expressed the view that many Americans had: that European empires were constantly at war with one another with tragic results, and the peaceful relations of Canada and the United States were both superior and perhaps best kept in isolation from the European world.

But in the 20th century, capitalism was being challenged by socialism as an alternative economic model. Karl Marx abhorred nationalism, but his socialist theories were embraced by nationalists in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Russia and extended to find favor with anti-imperialist independence movements across the Global South, including China, Vietnam, India, Mexico, Brazil, the Arab world and sub-Saharan African countries like Angola, Zambia, Rhodesia, and South Africa. American foreign policy was anti-Imperialist but also pro=capitalist. Hence the ambivalence of people around the world toward American leadership of the postwar order.

Yet the United States fostered the development of what became the European Union through the promotion of market liberalization as an antidote to the nationalisms that had torn Europe apart and the empires that were now unsustainable. If West Germany and Italy had defeat to motivate a turn away from the past, Britain and France had the end of their empires to motivate the switch. The Cold War saw this American idea compete with the national socialisms and international communisms promoted by the Soviet Union. And when American foreign policymakers read Dickey, they saw Canadian nationalism embracing statism in a European-style, and eventually Presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush concluded that free trade and sovereignty (instead of nationalism) was the right set of policies to adopt in a new policy of encouragement toward Canada.

But first, there was President Richard Nixon. Nixon saw Pierre Trudeau as an international socialist whose sympathies lay with Cuba, North Vietnam, Maoist China, Marshall Tito’s Yugoslavia, Julius Nyerre’s Tanzania, and Indira Gandhi’s India. Nixon was blinded by this prejudice to viewing Trudeau as he was, a social democrat and statist nationalist. But Nixon was right that Canada’s social welfare programs were a luxury made possible by neglecting military spending that was possible for Canada (like the Europeans) by the United States military and its expensive nuclear umbrella. The ingratitude led Nixon back to American nationalism and a national economic policy that included import surcharges on allies (including Canada) to pay for their defense — a kind of neo-tribute policy — and a revision of the Bretton Woods order that included the abandonment of the gold standard.

In past essays in the US Canada Eye, I have discussed the linkages between the Nixon and Trump administrations, and so I won’t belabor the point here. The publication of Canada and the American Presence should be understood nonetheless as coming in the wake of the Nixon era that had prompted many fruitful re-examinations of American foreign policy in Washington and American international leadership in Ottawa and other allied capitals. Dickey’s standing in the foreign policy community gave his learned analysis of Canada serious attention, and his framing of the book in light of American foreign policy debates the 20th century helped readers to understand Canada as one of a select group of valuable US allies who were all experiencing similar tensions and debates.

The post Nixon US policy of encouragement of free trade and Canadian sovereignty is at the heart of the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the United States Mexico Canada Agreement. Unlike the Europeans, the North Americans did not delegate or devolve national sovereignty to new governing institutions , despite the encouragement of this approach by leading thinkers like the late Robert Pastor — someone whose CV bears more than a passing resemblance to Dickey’s, albeit as someone of a later generation. Sovereign independence is the place where the United States meets Canada, and Mexico, as a sovereign equal.

This was an essential insight for Annette Baker Fox, an American foreign policy scholar who directed Canadian Studies at Columbia University. Her 1976 book, The Politics of Attraction: Four Middle Powers and the United States, looked at postwar relations between the United States and Australia, Brazil, Canada, and Mexico. Each of these relationships became lopsided when the United States became the preeminent world power after 1945, and yet Fox argued that these relationships were complex and less lopsided than expected. Using the literature that argued that habits of domestic political culture shaped the foreign policy behavior of states, she suggested that in the United States, the sovereign equality of the 50 states despite their relative disparities in population and territory meant that success in US domestic politics was achieved by leaders willing to court Delaware as well as California, and therefore US foreign policy tended to treat secondary powers in the international system with a greater respect for their sovereign equality to the United States.

Together, Dickey and Fox explain the success of a US foreign policy toward Canada that encourages economic linkages and sovereignty, and avoids provoking nationalism.

Yet I imagine that Trump administration officials are ignoring these arguments and paying too much attention to the work of two scholars whose work came later. Robert O. Keohane and Joseph Nye first published Power and Interdependence in 1977, but it gained wider attention after the second edition came out in 1989, just as the United States and Canada began implementing the Canada - United States Free Trade Agreement. The book, which included a chapter on US-Canadian relations, observed that complex interdependence between two states such as the United States and Canada altered the expected outcome of dominance by the larger state (the United States) because many of the larger state’s advantages could not be used against a smaller state with which it was closely intertwined. For example, imposing tariffs on Canada would hurt American interests by raising the cost of Canadian imports from US owned manufacturing plants in Canada and hitting the company’s profits in the short term and its competitiveness over time. Keohane and Nye argued that interdependence placed limits on American power that allowed our partners to win some battles, and US restraint discouraged secondary powers like Canada from acting defensively toward US investment and imports.

In the Trump administration’s view, interdependence may have caused US forbearance but thereby sapped US strength as jobs and investment with US multinational firms located abroad, enticed by subsidies and lower wages, and sometime tax breaks from foreign governments. But the US administrations who negotiated trade agreements that secured the rights of US investors abroad and eliminated US tariffs on imports permitted trade partners to prosper through export-led growth in output by selling their products and services to Americans, in effect, at the expense of the US economy. US partners continued to shirk defense expenditures, as in Nixon’s time, leaving the United States to pay for global security.

Like Nixon’s policies, Trump’s put the US national interest ahead of the interests of others; “America First” is a guiding principle of US domestic and foreign policy today. This is a nationalist appeal to US voters that provokes other countries to adopt nationalist policies themselves.

In the campaign leading up to the April 28 federal general election in Canada, all parties adopted nationalist stances, including Liberal leader Mark Carney and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. Canadian voters were in no mood for leaders who wanted to knuckle under to the United States, or sell-out Canadian jobs or prosperity even if it was the fruit of US investment or interdependence. Canadians have traditionally been a tough people. Like Americans, they had to establish themselves in a rich but rugged land, and generation after generation of immigrants contributed to the country’s success. They are a proud people and will accept the loss of economic prosperity to preserve their dignity, at least to an extent.

The Cringe…of Recognition

The Trump administration has adopted a nationalist policy approach, and Canadian political leaders have stoked nationalism in Canada in response.. It has also sought to reverse the policy of encouraging economic linkages between the United States and Canada (and other countries) claiming the results had become unfair; Canadians have highlighted the benefits of interdependence to American firms and workers.

But President Trump also attacked Canadian sovereignty with his suggestion that Canada should become the 51st US state. Although he has dismissed the suggestion of a military invasion (though Marche and Paikin remain un-reassured) he has said that the US “economic force” would bring Canadians to the realization that they can’t beat us and therefore might as well join us.

Stein’s argument on the Paikin Podcast is worthy of attention here. She is a seasoned international relations scholar and not given to nationalist rhetoric, despite being a very proud Canadian. For Stein, the root of the current crisis is that the United States has become “unreliable” as an ally, and as a market. Canadians no longer know what to expect from the United States, and are suspicious of US motives and claims.

As neighbors, we have been here before. Experimentation over the course of the 20th century allowed US leaders to develop an approach to Canadian relations that allowed for mutual prosperity and good will through encouragement of Canadian sovereignty and economic integration. Nationalism has flared up from time to time, making bilateral relations hard to manage, particularly when economic issues are affected by nationalist politics as Dickey observed.

President Trump and Prime Minister Carney have made things more difficult for themselves by stoking nationalist sentiments, despite the initial energy this provides. They unite their sides, but that makes coming together after harder.

Leaders have managed these moments by returning to first principles of respect for equal sovereignty and openness to economic linkage. As Fox argued, when the United States forbears in using its size and power as leverage against smaller partners, this builds trust.

I am old enough to remember what US-Canadian relations were like before the Canada - United States Free Trade Agreement, and lived through the Nixon period of American nationalism and grievance that rattled the bilateral relationship. Canadians then liked Americans as a people, but nursed a deep skepticism about American power and motives that echoed the critiques of US foreign policy scholars like William Appleman Williams and others abroad who felt that the United States had lost its way.

There is an anecdote told by the Canadian diplomat John Holmes in his 1980 book cum memoir Life with Uncle: The Canadian American Relationship that captures this Canadian attitude well. Holmes, who was a younger contemporary of Dickey and Fox and knew them both, tells the story of a classified briefing for Canadian officials at the Pentagon. US military officials had state-of-the-art transparencies of maps and charts they presented using an overhead projector. After the presentation ended, Holmes notes, “the Canadian delegation reacted with silent skepticism.”

When the passions of the moment pass, Stein reminds us that this skepticism has returned and will remain a factor in US-Canadian relations. If future administrations change the course of US policy toward Canada , this skepticism and distrust means that it will not be enough to just reclaim the former policy of encouragement of sovereignty and economic linkage; Canada is no longer a recent colony and its economy has ties beyond the United States to markets around the world where rules seem for now to be more predictable.

So I cringe that we have come to this point, but I do not despair. No one said that international relations was easy, and US-Canadian relations are challenging always. We have come to the end of a period of stability and good will, but the 20th century was a period of experimentation and evolution in US Canada policy as the 21st will be as well. I think that Marche and others who catastrophize this moment go too far. Both countries are changing, and as they change and behave differently than before, they are less predictable and as Stein says, our understanding of the relationship is less reliable.

Still, the United States and Canada remain neighbors and a relationship between them is inevitable. Figuring out a way forward that is mutually acceptable and beneficial is the essential work we must now undertake now that the cringing is done.