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COPYRIGHT 2002 Canadian Institute of International Affairs
My instructions were to speak about trends in Canadian foreign policy, past, present, and future. About the past, I will declare only this: Canadians have come increasingly to exaggerate the significance of their past performances in world affairs. This error of interpretation has been systematically cultivated, with embarrassing enthusiasm, by politicians, bureaucrats, educational establishments, and others who should know better, for nation-building and related purposes--psychic comfort and political reward not least among them. One of the consequences has been a lamentable tendency to think that, in world affairs, Canadians are holier than just about everyone else. Such thoughts, moreover, appear impervious to the power of countervailing evidence. They persist, for example, in spite of our transparent reluctance to devote a serious measure of our public treasure to maintaining our foreign policy instruments or to pursuing the international objectives we pretend to hold so dear.
This sounds mischievously glib. Maybe it is. But I am prepared to defend every word.
What I would like to consider here, however, is what our central foreign policy problem really is, given the circumstances in which we now find ourselves. And by 'central foreign policy problem,' I am not thinking of the battery of what we used to call 'functional' issues--issues that now crowd the foreign policy agenda more than ever before. These are important. Sometimes, as Lloyd Axworthy and others have argued, they have life and death implications, and on a large scale, too. A few of them offer occasional opportunities for useful Canadian initiative. But, in the end, as we have recently re-discovered, they are easily trumped (in the short run, at least) by politico-security issues of the more traditional sort. The central foreign policy problem is thus still posed by the politico-security agenda. It is difficult to consider this matter with detachment when we are all immersed in a fog of intemperate discourse coupled to dramatic events. The discourse, though damaging, will eventually fade away, and the dramatic events will end (although others will inevitably follow). What matters are the traces they will leave behind, and these are hard to know.
Nevertheless, we can get some pretty good clues from what has been happening over the past few weeks. For over a decade now, the United States has been released from the discipline previously imposed upon it by the presence of a countervailing superpower. That being so, it has gradually come to understand that it no longer depends for the successful prosecution of its security interests on a fixed stable of allies, locked together in an amiably institutionalized embrace. It feels freer than before to manoeuvre on its own. It still needs help,...
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