Forgotten Partnership Redux: Canada-U.S. Relations in the 21st C ...

or rejected a notional common imperial foreign policy after the war, the British were more than inclined to give the Canadians room to do so.

In retrospect, the war occasioned an easy transition from a world in which Britain took the political and strategic lead and defined the common cause to a world in which the United States assumed that role. It is difficult not to associate this development with Britain’s declining military and economic power and Canada’s need, therefore, to find an alternative. For some years after the war, the normal mode of Canadian diplomacy was tripartite, after the wartime pattern. It was useful and natural for all three parties: For the British, Canada provided aid without some of the strings attached by the Americans, and for the Americans, it was important not to be alone in the world as an aid-giver. In this period, the Canadians seldom took the initiative, responding rather to British requests or American urgings, but there was little need to prove that the cause was just and usually urgent. In some cases—for example, the Canadian loan to Great Britain in 1946—the amount of Canadian aid outpaced Canada’s ability to sustain it.

Skeptics from a later age were inclined to view Canada’s accession to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 as an obvious sign that Canada had moved from one empire to another. Yet the actual motivation for Canada’s active support of NATO was rather different and was rooted in its past as a country with British associations. To Mackenzie King, still prime minister when the NATO negotiations started, the transatlantic alliance was a handy device for diluting what would otherwise be, in his mind, a disproportionate dependence on the United States. Put another way, the NATO signing ceremony was not the wedding of Canadian and American interests and destinies but (at the very least) a ménage à trois—effectively the bigamy that I earlier suggested, if not outright political polygamy. Canada’s early participation in NATO and in the Korean War had a distinctly British cast, placing Canadian troops alongside or even in British units, as in the Second World War. More realistically, NATO provided only a little bit of extramarital spice: It masked but could not reverse the relative and relatively rapid decline of Great Britain, as well as of the other European powers. It was the