Paradox #2: Ambivalent Admirers

The United States and Canada are among the world’s closest partners. But the very familiarity that sustains the relationship also breeds ambivalence, which is now tilting to anger on the Canadian side

Few countries are admired by Americans as consistently as Canada, and few countries admire the United States as openly as Canadians do. Yet admiration between neighbors rarely remains simple. Proximity breeds familiarity, and familiarity exposes flaws. Over time, the relationship between the United States and Canada has oscillated between admiration and ambivalence, warmth and disappointment. This paradox—of two societies that admire one another yet are frequently unsettled by what they see—has shaped the relationship for generations.

Many Americans admire Canada and many Canadians admire the United States. Yet the two peoples are too familiar with each other, at least superficially, to overlook flaws. The foundation on which the U.S.–Canada relationship was built—and still sustains it—is the friendship between Americans and Canadians. So when flaws on either side are on display, admiration becomes ambivalent, affection contingent, and trust diminished.

For officials engaged in managing bilateral relations, the cycles of admiration and ambivalence are atmospheric. Sunny days make it seem that anything is possible, and then storm clouds roll in and gloom rises.

The period following World War II was a peak of mutual admiration never seen before. As in World War I, Canada joined the conflict before the United States. But the American role was even more essential to the Allied victory and may have saved Britain, the mother country for both Canada and the United States. American soldiers, sailors, and airmen were impressed by Canadian grit on the battlefield and frustrated that European rivalries and Asian antagonisms had led to war for the second time in living memory. Canadians were sympathetic to this view.

As the United States worked to establish a postwar order that would make another world war less likely, a generation of American leaders shaped by these conflicts wanted Canadians on their team. From the founding of the United Nations to the Bretton Woods conference and later the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the United States ensured Canadians received a place at the table. Later, this instinct to include Canada in major Western initiatives persisted. Canada joined the newly created summit of industrial democracies—what became the Group of Seven—in 1976 during the Ford administration.

Canadians welcomed American invitations and joined in each new initiative with energy and enthusiasm. The good times for bilateral relations seemed as though they might last forever. But predictably, they did not.

The admiration of the early postwar decades did not disappear, but it began to fray in the late 1960s. The relationship entered a familiar cycle: admiration shaded by ambivalence.

The Vietnam War and the campus protests across the United States that produced clashes such as the National Guard shooting of students at Kent State University shocked Canadians. So did the civil rights struggle of African Americans, which exposed segregation and discrimination in law, and the race riots that ravaged major American cities from Detroit to Los Angeles. These events alienated Canadians from their American friends, whose attitudes about these upheavals were passionate and often puzzling to Canadian observers.

If these societal upheavals alienated Canadians, they also led many Americans to look at Canadians differently. Political differences were soon compounded by economic disputes. During the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations, Americans asked why Canada was not joining the Vietnam War as Australia had done. In Washington, long-standing grievances about Allied burden sharing during the Cold War sharpened.

Economic tensions soon followed. The Nixon administration accused Canada and other allies of maintaining undervalued currencies to gain export advantages in the American market. American politicians objected to Canada’s quiet solicitation of investment, production, and employment commitments from U.S. automakers and threatened to cancel the Auto Pact. In 1971 President Nixon imposed a ten percent import surcharge across the board without exempting Canada, breaking with the tradition of shielding close allies from such measures.

U.S. and Canadian leaders began reevaluating one another and downgrading expectations. The popular mood was uncertain, with people on both sides of the border calling for a return to the earlier spirit of goodwill. There were prominent voices on both sides who aligned themselves with the grievances of their neighbor. Some Americans argued that Canada should spend more on defense and avoid going behind Washington’s back in dealings with automakers. Some Canadians insisted that the United States was struggling through its own internal upheavals and deserved patience.

Canada was hardly immune from internal strains. Quebec nationalism began advancing arguments about unfair treatment by English Canada. Although these grievances were not comparable in scale to the racial injustices faced by African Americans in the Jim Crow era, the tensions were nonetheless profound. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s invocation of the War Measures Act in October 1970 following the kidnapping of Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte and British diplomat James Cross by the Front de libération du Québec shocked leaders around the world.

Nixon’s resignation following the Watergate scandal provided an opportunity to move past many bilateral irritants and restore goodwill in time for the U.S. bicentennial in 1976, the year Montreal hosted the Summer Olympics. The Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations demonstrated that the American constitutional order had survived a major test.

In Canada, the election of the separatist Parti Québécois in 1976 and the peaceful referendum on sovereignty in 1980—and the acceptance of the result by Quebec nationalists—demonstrated that constitutional politics could manage even profound national divisions.

And yet the ambivalence with which Americans and Canadians viewed one another remained strong until the late 1980s, when the Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement sparked a new mutual understanding between Washington and Ottawa. For many Americans and Canadians, admiration returned as the United States and Canada prevailed in the Cold War. Trade liberalization increased interdependence and boosted prosperity on both sides of the border. Canadian anti-Americanism faded, as historian Jack Granatstein documented.

Ambivalence Returns with Anger

Like our childhood innocence, the conditions of the immediate postwar era that fostered unconditional goodwill between Americans and Canadians are unlikely to return. The two countries will probably never again see each other as best friends, blood brothers, or soul mates. But the current phase of the relationship has moved beyond simple ambivalence toward something sharper: alienation and estrangement.

There is also a structural dimension to this paradox. American political institutions bring disagreements into public view in vivid ways, exposing passions on all sides. Canada’s parliamentary system often channels those same disagreements into cabinet discussions, party caucuses, and federal–provincial negotiations that appear in public only after they have been mediated by participants and the press. The result is a difference in political style as much as substance. Canadians see American contention in raw and sometimes theatrical form—from the Nixon tapes to the highly publicized investigations and hearings that punctuate American politics. Americans, when they observe Canadian debates, often look for similar displays of passion and conclude—sometimes incorrectly—that Canadians must be concealing deeper disagreements.

How did this new cycle of ambivalence and alienation begin, and what can be done to improve the relationship now?

During the first administration of President Donald Trump, his claims that Canada treated the United States very badly on dairy, steel, and aluminum gained wide acceptance among many American supporters and independents. Trump also amplified the longstanding U.S. demand that Canada and other allies spend more on national defense.

As Frédérick Gagnon has noted, many Americans do not follow the bilateral relationship closely. As a result, Trump’s repeated criticisms shifted public attitudes toward Canada from benign admiration—or simple indifference—to wary suspicion. Social media spread this critique, to which disinformation campaigns by malign actors added their own distortions.

The Joseph Biden administration ended the angry rhetoric but continued policies that placed pressure on Canada, including industrial strategies designed to secure American leadership in artificial intelligence, clean technology, and electric vehicle manufacturing. Trump’s return to office, however, brought an escalation of hostile rhetoric, including threats to make Canada the fifty-first state and taunts dismissing Canadian contributions to the U.S. economy.

Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau admired President Barack Obama yet found ways to work with Trump, maintaining defense and security cooperation and preserving U.S. market access through the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA). Trump’s reelection nevertheless triggered renewed estrangement between Canadians and Americans, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic reduced the in-person contact between the two societies that had long softened political disagreements.

To be fair, earlier American actions had also unsettled Canadians. The U.S. response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 shocked many Canadians. Americans were, for a time, very intolerant of suggestions that the attacks might be connected in any way to U.S. foreign policy. Canadians were also aggrieved when Congress mandated passports for Americans returning home from Canada—and for Canadians hoping to enter the United States. Many of the post-9/11 security policies adopted by the George W. Bush administration eroded the easy border crossing that Americans and Canadians had long taken for granted.

Today the anger is palpable. Justin Trudeau has become the target of remarkable mockery and disparagement on social media by American—or purportedly American—voices. More Americans now have opinions about the Canadian prime minister, positive or negative, than has traditionally been the case.

In Washington, Canadian anger—not merely indignation but anger—is now mentioned at nearly every think tank conference discussing the bilateral relationship. For much of the twentieth century, admiration and ambivalence coexisted. Today, anger has begun to displace ambivalence in political discourse, shaking the foundations of the relationship.

The paradox of ambivalent admiration is that admiration does not disappear when disappointment sets in. Many Canadians still hold American ideals—and many Americans themselves—in high regard. Their frustration arises in part because the United States no longer appears to be living up to the idealized image many Canadians once held.

Part of the damage to the relationship stems from the relative silence of Americans in response to Trump’s treatment of Canada. If more Americans publicly dissociated themselves from that rhetoric, it might help cauterize the damage and confine the anger more clearly to the administration and the president rather than the country as a whole.

Americans, after all, continue to hold broadly favorable views of Canada and Canadians. Numerous public opinion surveys over the years—including those conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs—have documented this enduring goodwill for more than three decades. Nevertheless, Canadian politicians have come to be viewed more skeptically by many Americans, particularly on questions of national and economic security.

Younger generations have introduced a term— “situationship”—to describe relationships that are neither clearly stable nor openly hostile, but unsettled and uncertain. A U.S.-Canada situationship would be the logical form as ambivalence and the tentative nature of current commitments is tinged with mutual suspicion and anger.

What would the future hold for both countries in a U.S.–Canada situationship scenario? Paradoxically, if Canadian anger abated, it would be likely to improve slowly as Americans and Canadians rebuild trust. Ambivalence may remain an enduring feature of the relationship for some time.

For now, admiration remains alongside the ambivalence—and despite the anger that has recently entered the relationship.