U.S. Helps Push Us To Margins

At one level, all of this is typical of post-1945 Canadian foreign policy. We are the middle power, the interlocutor, the mediator. We explain America to Europe and vice versa. Straddling the Atlantic has been both our habit and our virtue. Now we may find that feat trickier. Europe and the U.S. are growing ever farther apart. Increasing friction between the two is eliminating Canada's manoeuvring room. We've long been known as America's little pal. We now face the embarrassing prospect of being identified as its stooge. Certainly, Bush's presidency has accelerated this development. His Manichean world view ("either you are with us or for the terrorists") has irritated many U.S. allies. Even those European governments that cleave to Bush do so in the face of considerable domestic opposition. Britain, in particular, is searching its soul. Many Britons argue that their so-called special relationship with the U.S., one that began with the anti-Hitler alliance of World War II, has finally run its course. "We should be questioning whether it (the special relationship) is a national delusion," former British foreign secretary Robin Cook wrote in the Guardian after Bush's re-election. "The political values and global priorities of the U.S. and Europe are diverging rather than converging. Clinging to an outdated special relationship is to stay in denial of that uncomfortable truth." At one level, such remarks may be dismissed as the sour grapes of an MP who resigned from Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet over the Iraq war. But they also reflect a growing Western European self-awareness. Ironically, America helped to create this self-awareness. In the early days of the Cold War, no one was a stronger fan of European integration than the U.S. American policy-makers waxed enthusiastic about a new United States of Europe that would stand with Washington against the Soviet Union. The European Common Market (now the European Union) was to be the vehicle. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization would tie this entity militarily to the U.S. To a large extent, Europe had to be prodded, kicking and screaming, into this arrangement. But as long as the Soviets were deemed a threat, things worked. The end of the Cold War forced Europe and the U.S. to re-evaluate matters. In 1999, the Europeans used NATO to draw the U.S. (and Canada) into the Kosovo conflict. The American are now using the alliance to draw the Europeans (and Canada) into the Afghan pacification. But it is not clear what the future is for this kind of quid pro quo. Under Bush, the U.S. is switching its attention, and some of its military bases, to Eastern European nations like Bulgaria that better fit its redefined global interests. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Western Europe and the U.S. — their interests never identical — are striking out in different directions. Washington seems content to take its lead from Israel while the Europeans, including the British, hang onto what they see as a more balanced approach. In the world of finance, the common European currency, the Euro, is now powerful enough to challenge the hegemony of the U.S. dollar. Canada's position in all of this is unenviable. Like the Western Europeans, we too are finding our political values at odds with those of the Americans. Yet, circumstance and our own cupidity have drawn us increasingly into the U.S. economic orbit. If the polls are right, most Canadian would like to tell Bush to take a flying leap. But we fear that if we displease the Americans overmuch, they will frisk our truckers at the border and stymie exports. So we continue our merry old strategy of being helpful. We'll help out here, we'll help out there. Bush may find it politically difficult to visit Libya in order to praise terror sponsor Moammar Gadhafi, a man America used to bomb but now lauds. But France's Jacques Chirac and Britain's Blair have already made the pilgrimage to this oil-rich nation and someone should show the flag. So Prime Minister Paul Martin will do the job instead. In a sense, it's the same, old pattern. The key difference is that now our isolation from the world outside North America is both more accentuated and more evident.