A Changing North Atlantic Triangle

Abstract

r I ^he North Atlantic Triangle which we are considering is a -*■ very old one, but for our purposes today it can safely be dated from 1871. In that year the Treaty of Washington not only settled a host of differences between Great Britain and the United States, but by it both of those great powers committed themselves enduringly to acknowledging the distinct existence of Canada, a state whose transcontinental extent barred the completion of what Americans had recently regarded as their Manifest Destiny, and of what Britons had recently regarded as irresistible American expansion. Luckily for Canada, the AngloAmerican understanding which was achieved in 1871, although threatened and marred on numerous subsequent occasions, proved to be basically so advantageous that it carried the two states through three periods of warthat of the South African and Spanish-American wars, and the wars of 1914 and 1939. At first Canada's role in the Triangle seemed to be a distinctly minor one, indeed between 1895 and 1903 the other two parties felt that Canada was unduly exploiting what might be called her nuisance value. Both were overlooking the fact that about 1896 Canada, after twenty-three years of almost unmitigated distress and disaster, had hit the highroad of success. A rise in world prices made her various kinds of enterprise and production pay as never before. It was a Canada which had been booming for fifteen years which rejected the long-sought American offer of trading reciprocity in 1911 and declined to furnish three dreadnoughts for the British Navy in 1912. The point to be made here is that Canada's status as a distinct national entity was an achievement of 1896 to 1918, not merely of 1914 to 1918. This is not to disparage the very remarkable achievements of Canada during the War of 1914, but to assert that they were the fruits of what had gone before. If Borden fought day by day from 1911 to 1920 to make Great