After World War II

Today we’ll look at the last of seven periods of upheaval that have affected the US and Canada.

In the twentieth century the two countries developed common points of interest where they had previously been competitors. Britain’s decline meant Canada was no longer a satellite of an overseas power but a power vacuum on the US border.

Rather than see Canada become a staging point for German, Japanese and later Russian projects, it served the US to develop ties of mutual defense with her northern neighbour.

These culminated in the 1940 Ogdensburg Agreement and 1941 Hyde Park Declaration. They were facilitated by close personal relations between US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King.

The two shared a common approach to economic and social policy. King had studied at Harvard and worked at the Rockefeller Foundation. Roosevelt genuinely liked King, Canada’s longest serving PM, and called him “MacKenzie.”

The economies of the two countries became increasingly integrated. The US used Canada as a bridge to Britain before it entered the War II in 1941. Later it would use Canada as a bridge to China before it opened its own relations in the Nixon years.

In both world wars, isolationist sentiment delayed American participation. But the US emerged as Western leader in a the nuclear age with a Military Industrial Complex,

Readiness for future conflicts could not be left to chance. Beyond the real challenges of Soviet expansionism was a manufactured climate of constant standoff. Even remote conflicts came to be seen as parts of a struggle between the two superpowers.

The Cold War & fears of Global Terrorism

This close ties that had grown up in World War II began to come apart with the death of Roosevelt and the rise of a continuing Cold War mentality in the US.

As a buffer state between the US and the USSR, Canada’s presence helped prevent a greater number of incidents that would have occurred had the two shared a continuous adjoining airspace.

Canada was a founder of NATO, with troops station at NATO bases in Europe. But her postwar participation in US military projects was selective. She supported the US in Korea, the First Gulf War and Afghanistan but not in Cuba, Vietnam, Grenada or Iraq.

Canadian refusal to go on immediate alert in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis contributed to US support of a Canadian régime change the following year. But Lester B. Pearson, the candidate who emerged as Prime Minister with tacit Kennedy support found himself at odds with Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon Johnson, over Vietnam shortly after.

PM Brian Mulroney attempted to rekindle the closeness of the King-Roosevelt years in his relations with Presidents Reagan and George Bush I. He joined the Organization of American States (long an American goal) and participated in the US led Gulf War.

After breakup of the Soviet bloc, the George Bush II administration attempted to rekindle Cold War fears towards Islamism using pro-US sympathy in the wake of 911. Canada remained largely aloof here and from the Strategic Defense Initiative (antimissile shield).

These tensions have occurred between US and Canadian leaders of both political parties on both sides of the border. This shows that the issues are more deeply rooted than partisan politics.

A divergence of Canadian and American interests has occurred since the Second World War once the real issues that brought them together had passed.