Playing by the New Washington Rules: The U.S.–Canada Relationship, 1994–2003

Eight years after its publication, the issue of American Review of Canadian Studies on The State of the Canada-United States Relationship, 1995 seems almost surreal. Co-editors David Leyton-Brown Joseph T. Jockel entitled the volume Weathering the Calm; their introduction described comfortable unruffled relationship. The big bilateral issues have been dealt with, they concluded, and the current big issues are not bilateral ones, words trilateral, multilateral, even plurilateral recurred in the articles that made up the volume. United States Canada, editors contributors agreed, would work together with Mexico in trilateral North American context, but would work together also in multilateral contexts within the hemisphere around the globe. (1) lead article in Weathering the Calm was Promoting Plurilateral Partnership: Managing United States-Canada Relations in the Post-Cold War World, by John Kirton. The United States--Canada relationship during the mid-1990s, Kirton argued, become an even more close partnership. Canada the United States would work together, he predicted, to operate, deepen, broaden...the new NAFTA regime. new independent institutions that the countries created for NAFTA would remove trade environmental disputes from high-level political controversy, make possible a more equal balance of beneficial outcomes. Kirton applauded new policy between Canada the United States, exemplified by U.S. acceptance of the core Canadian values of global peace respect for human rights, democracy, the rule of law the environment. United States Canada, Kirton predicted, would work as partners to create new institutions to manage the P ostCold War multilateral order. Such cooperation would be critical to meet transnational challenges at time when new centers of power polarity in world politics are reducing the ability of each North American country to accomplish its objectives alone. new global challenges, Kirton concluded, increase Canada's importance, both as proximate partner as country that can build the transregional linkages required to mount an effective collective response to the new challenges. (2) John Herd Thompson Stephen J. Randall, the authors of Canada the United States: Ambivalent Allies, reviewed in the Weathering the Calm edition of ARCS were less reckless than Kirton. (3) With historian's caution, Thompson Randall warned that, two centuries of ambivalence inhibit even the most sanguine historian from the conclusion [that there would be] new consensus convergence between Canada the United States. We also argued that there was not, had not been, any special relationship between Washington Ottawa. terms of U.S. foreign policy, we insisted, what is striking about relations with Canada is how unexceptional the so-called relationship has in fact been. Instead, the United States applied the basic principles of its foreign policy to Canada, principles we described as liberal, capitalist, internationalist, anti-colonial. In that first edition, however, in subsequent second third editions of Ambivalent Allies, Steve Randall I made clear that we believed that the U.S.-Canada relationship in the twenty-first century would be intense, close, cooperative, even if the relationship was conflictual in both its details in some of its fundamentals. Far from predicting dramatic change in the ground rules of the U.S.-Canada relationship, Randall I explicitly predicted that we believed that the future of the U.S.-Canada relationship would be very much like that of the fifty years just past. We entitled the epilogue of Ambivalent Allies Plus ca change. If readers buy enough copies of the third edition to allow fourth, Randall I will need very different title for very different epilogue. …

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