The North Atlantic Triangle Revisited: (Geo)Political Metaphor and the Logic of Canadian Foreign Policy

Abstract

Introduction Old political metaphors, like General MacArthur's old soldiers, never seem to die; they just fade away. So it has been with perhaps the most Canadian of such metaphors, the geopolitical construct known as the Atlantic Triangle. Metaphors in politics are usually purposive entities, and in the main this article seeks to explore a couple of the principal policy uses to which the North Atlantic Triangle has been put by Canadian decisionmakers over the past 125 or so years. But the article also ends by querying whether this metaphor might yet be brought back from the obscurity into which it has faded, and be imbued with policy meaning regarding the contemporary discussion surrounding the scope and content of regionalism in Canada's foreign policy--perhaps even its grand strategy. In addition, this article examines the claim that the North Atlantic Triangle has been put into service by policymakers who have sought to generate principles and operational rules for the management of the country's foreign and relations, and has done so in two broad senses. It has been a useful shorthand means of conceptualizing approaches to safeguarding important Canadian and political interests; this usage of the metaphor I label defensive-positionalism. But the metaphor has also been a device for articulating and promoting ends that Canadian policymakers have sought to project rather than merely to protect; in this sense, it has had, therefore, significance. It is with the first, defensive-positionalist, set that this article is chiefly concerned, although I will have a word or two to say about the imaginative-generative application in my concluding section. Defensive-positionalism, in the literature on international relations, is usually equated with a certain realist logic associated with relative as opposed to absolute gain, and with zero-sum as opposed to positive-sum games. It strikes me as an appropriate rubric within which to discuss the two policy extrapolations of the Triangle metaphor that I have selected as my focus in this article. In saying this, I do not mean to suggest that international politics within the North Atlantic Triangle has been simply a replication, in miniature, of the conditions of international life elsewhere under anarchy. Quite the contrary; for if, as I discuss below, security community came to categorize the North Atlantic Triangle well before it did some other parts of the world, it could even be maintained, as did more than one writer in the mold, that Anglo-American-Canadian relations represented an ideal toward which the international system should strive for the sake of world peace. It may be, as two historians have recently suggested, that there was altruism in the North Atlantic but it does not follow that there was no idealism.(1) Be that as it may, the quality of life for entities in the North Atlantic Triangle, whatever it may later have become, did in its early stages bear the hallmarks of the state of nature as imagined by Hobbes; until the latter third of the nineteenth century, the North Atlantic Triangle could legitimately be conceived as a state of war, if by that we mean not that war was ubiquitous within the Triangle (for it was not), but merely that there was always a chance it could break out.(2) For the most vulnerable member of that Triangle, Canada, defensive-positionalism was a natural enough response. And even after fears for the country's physical were abated, there remained--and possibly in some sense remains to this day--more than a bit of anxiety as to the future ability of Canadian leaders to navigate the rapids of international relations with anything like a completely sovereign hand upon the tiller. For these reasons, I have chosen to concentrate my inquiry upon the two dominant images that have been derived, sequentially, from the defensive-positionalist application of the Triangle metaphor. …