ShareThisPresident Obama, reflecting predecessors, made Canada his first foreign destination in office with a brief visit this week. He and Prime Minister Stephen Harper found common environmental ground and avoided an open clash on the "Buy American" provision of the U.S. economic stimulus plan.
President John F. Kennedy eloquently summed up the relationship in an address to the Parliament of Canada in early 1961, noting: "Geography has made us neighbors, history has made us friends, economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies." Kennedy's national security adviser McGeorge Bundy said that the British represent "someone to talk to," and the same is usually true of Canadians.
All three nations are now heavily engaged in efforts to address the ongoing global financial crisis. Regional trade agreements further strengthen Canada-U.S. ties. The 1994 NAFTA accord dramatically lowered trade and investment barriers between Mexico and the rest of North America. An essential predecessor was the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement of 1988, in turn facilitated by the successful Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations.
Canada's government professionals traditionally foster cooperation with Britain and the U.S. on military security and wider diplomatic as well as economic matters, and are very heavily represented among the professionals who staff the United Nations, NATO and other intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations.
Ditchley Park near Oxford is an extremely influential conference center born from the Anglo-American special relationship of World War II. When the focus of a meeting is the UN, crisis intervention, international development and law, and associated topics, Canada is very well represented among participants.
Such cooperation in promotion of international community has deep roots reaching back to the earliest phase of the war. During that desperate time, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met for their first summit on naval warships off the coast of Newfoundland, Can.. The meeting was held in August 1941, several months before the attack on Pearl Harbor brought America directly into the war.
The principal result was the Atlantic Charter, a dramatic declaration of Allied strategy and goals, including the postwar period. Reflecting extraordinary determination and optimism during the bleakest phase of the global struggle, FDR and Churchill explicitly proposed the United Nations. Throughout the war, a series of conferences were held to hammer out the details of the new world organization, including the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organization), the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.
JFK was challenged by very nationalistic Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. At the end of the 1961 presidential visit, Bundy accidentally left behind a briefing memo on which the president had scrawled a note asking his aide how to deal with "the SOB." The memo was delivered to Diefenbaker, who flew into a rage and threatened to involve the press.
Kennedy pleaded poor penmanship and said he actually had written "OAS", the Organization of American States. At his next press conference he went out of his way to praise Bundy. Early the next morning, the national security adviser arrived at the office to find a staff note: "Congratulations, you can stay."
The U.S.-Canada special relationship, reaching from FDR to Obama, effectively survives passing political storms.
(Arthur I. Cyr is Clausen Distinguished Professor at Carthage College in Wisconsin. E-mail him at acyr(at)carthage.edu.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
