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Partnership is project oriented, not merely an expression of good feeling or asserted intention.
In 1984 the United States and Canada had gone a number of years without much record of joint accomplishment. Interdependence, of course, continued to prevail. Distilled from U.S.-Canada relations in the early work of Joseph Nye and expressed more fully in the book Power and Interdependence, the idea of interdependence had become a mainstay of the politics among democracies, eventually elevated to the status of the Kantian democratic peace, as Michael Doyle exhumed the concept, and Bruce Russett and his associates validated it empirically (Keohane & Nye, 2001).
But partnership extends beyond interdependence. If interdependence is the strategy of governmental cooperation, partnership is the tactic. Partnership signifies active and positive output and material choice—hence the question in 1984 whether partnership had been “forgotten.” Two years later partnership was rediscovered with the advent of the Canada-U.S. free trade negotiations; partnership continued among Canada, the United States, and Mexico with the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The United States and Canada were unable to coordinate in every policy area, but partnership reemerged in the George W. Bush and Steven Harper era of NATO security commitment to operations in Afghanistan. As the commitment of both countries to Afghanistan nears its end, and with no prospect for further trade liberalization (either at the bilateral or multilateral level) nor any significant progress in environmental or energy matters in sight, will a U.S.-Canada partnership again perhaps become a thing of the past?
Forgotten Partnership was written in order to explain why partnership ebbs and flows in the relationship between governments, and it offers three ways to probe this enigma. (1) The book argues that the bilateral Canada-U.S. relations look very different set in the larger, international relations context. Is that still valid today? (2) It examines the comparative pushes and pulls on the relationship’s three dimensions—security, trade and commerce, and cultural-political matters. Is such dimensional assessment still useful? (3) In terms of issues and structures, how much