THE PURPOSE OF THE ARTICLES in this special issue of the International Journal is to offer suggestions on foreign policy for the new prime minister. In this context, my own task is to review, in very broad terms, some of the challenges and opportunities that he and his colleagues in the Cabinet will be confronting. Other contributors consider similar sorts of questions, but in reference to more specific issues or to particular regions of the world.CURRENT CIRCUMSTANCES--SOURCES OF STRESS AND STRAINIt may be useful to begin by identifying some of the more fundamental changes in Canada's international position that policy-makers in Ottawa must now recognize and accept. Most of them are obvious, but it is easy to lose sight of them all the same. The tendency to do so is aggravated, moreover, when their policy implications are inconvenient or demeaning. No one likes to hear bad news and when it threatens to break through, it encourages us not to want to listen further. But those who have the responsibility for making efficacious decisions have to confront the realities head-on if there is to be any hope of Canada being genuinely useful.It is impossible not to begin with the demise, more than a decade ago, of the Cold War. Its departure has affected the geopolitical conditions that confront almost every state in the international system and has had a particularly profound impact on Canada, and on its diplomatic capacity. This is because it shattered the rigid bipolar structure within which Canadian representatives abroad (among others) were able to find, from time to time, a little room in the margins for constructive diplomatic manoeuvre. More specifically, it removed the political glue--the deep sense of mutual self-interest--that had bound the western powers together in a kind of desperate embrace. Among other things, it released the United States from its longstanding assumption that it needed to maintain a consistently composed phalanx of loyal allies if it was to be successful in containing the Soviet Union and its acolytes. This assumption had fostered in the American policy community a certain acceptance--reluctant, perhaps, and operative only within narrow limits--of the need to pay at least some attention to the preferences of the allied powers as the price of maintaining their amity, loyalty and cohesion. In the Canadian case, one of the happy results was that Ottawa could sometimes win out in bilateral bargaining with Washington on functional and other backyard issues because the Americans were anxious to ensure that Canada continued to be helpful on matters related to both continental and global security. In effect, paying off the allies in the little things was regarded at the presidential level, if not always in the Congress, as part of what it would take to serve the most vital American interests in relation to the big things.This urgent sense of a shared security interest in the face of an overriding Soviet menace affected other players too, and the Europeans especially. Like the Canadians, the Europeans knew that the Americans needed them on side, but they also understood that they were themselves on the frontline and therefore needed the Americans on their own side even more. The creation of NATO had issued, after all, from a European, not an American, initiative. Acutely aware of what their security required--and it required, above all, the willingness of the United States to use its atomic arsenal to contain the Red Army--they soon learned not to put too much stress on American patience and to dance the diplomatic dance (as the Canadians did) with an eye keenly focused on what the Americans would tolerate--and what they would not.All this had the effect of giving Canada at least some room to manoeuvre. The Europeans wanted the Canadians in--if only to help them keep the Americans in--and both camps were therefore prepared from time to time to accommodate Canadian preferences, even if these sometimes seemed tiresome, ill-conceived, or beside the point (as in the case of Article 2 of the NATO Pact). …
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Jan 1, 2006
Élodie Bertrand 
Open Access