Game Changer: The Impact of 9/11 on North American Security, by Jonathan Paquin and Patrick James, eds.

Abstract

Jonathan Paquin and Patrick James, eds. Game Changer: The Impact of 9/11 on North American Security Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014. 310 pp., $95.00 (cloth) $34.95 (paper) ISBN 978-0-7748-2706-5 (cloth): 978-0-2707-2 (paper)When I attended high school in Michigan in the early 1980s, students accepted that our US history classes would delve deeply into the causes and consequences of the American Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the world wars of the twentieth century before touching lightly on the Korean War and the Cold War more generally. As the end of the school year approached, however, we knew that we would run out of time before getting to the Vietnam War. For our teachers, that war, which was ongoing when we were born and entering elementary school, was too painful and too personal. Some of our parents were veterans of the conflict, which led to sharply divided opinions within the country, and many of us knew someone who had died in the war.Something similar seems to have happened when it comes to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington-events that have profoundly affected and reshaped the relationships between the US, Canada, and Mexico. Just like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 9/11 engendered political division and ongoing controversies that linger today, 20 years after NAFTA and more than a decade since the World Trade Center fell.In the spring of 2012, I had the honour of co-teaching a course on US relations with Canada and Mexico at American University's School of International Service with the late Robert Pastor. Bob was one of the leading US scholars to address North American integration, its shortcomings and latent potential, most notably in his last book. The North American Idea (Oxford University Press, 2011). I sat beside Bob as he revisited the 1993 televised debate between then-vice president Al Gore and former presidential candidate Ross Perot, and presented a careful rebuttal of points made by CNN host Lou Dobbs. Yet, as we came to the events of September 2001, apart from a few choice words about President George W. Bush, it was a challenge for either of us to put these attacks, which had been among the formative events of our students' childhoods, into any kind of theoretical or scholarly perspective. These events were painful to us. We knew people who had died in the attacks and in the wars that followed in Afghanistan and Iraq. So we spoke of the border, wait times, and Mexican migration.Game Changer, edited by Jonathan Paquin and Patrick James, provides readers with what Bob and I laboured to give our students. The book is a collection of sparkling and provocative essays by leading scholars from across North America, including Mexico, on 9/11's impact on North American security.Paquin and James include four excellent theoretical chapters to lead off the volume. Charles F. Doran of Johns Flopkins University employs realism and his own power-cycle theory in a chapter that questions whether 9/11 was a watershed moment for the North American continent as a whole. Dalhousie University's Frank Harvey considers the political psychology and bargaining strategies of public attitudes and political and governmental reactions. …