|
|
relations. Reagan’s rise to the White House dramatically reasserted America’s role as a leader and underwriter of a liberal global economic system. At the same time, Canada was struggling to find its place in the world, trapped between the economic nationalism of initiatives like the National Energy Program and its dependence on an open global economy for economic survival; this period represented a crossroads for the relationship, indeed.
Yet only a year after the publication of Forgotten Partnership: Canada-U.S. Relations Today (1984), as President Reagan and Prime Minister Mulroney sang “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” together in Québec City, Doran’s assessment of the state of Canada-U.S. relations may have seemed overly pessimistic. The two leaders had just committed to negotiating a comprehensive free trade agreement, which composed two thirds of the Continental Accord, and this pact seemed to herald the renewal of partnership. The dramatic reversal of Canada’s economic posture in response to Reagan’s challenge had set the two countries on a course for a dramatic deepening of the relationship through economic ties.
In spite of the apparent convergence of Canada and the United States during the last 25 years, driven in large part by the economic integration fostered by the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Forgotten Partnership has proved remarkably prescient in describing the contemporary state of Canada-U.S. relations; indeed, an updated Forgotten Partnership would require little more than a change of publication date. Unfortunately for bilateral relations, the CUFTA did not usher in a golden era of bilateral amity. In fact, to borrow the cliché, “the more things change, the more they stay the same”: The precise combination of circumstances that regularly bring Canada-U.S. relations to a crossroads change, but the durability of Forgotten Partnership’s analytical frame as applied to those relations is as important as ever.
This volume emerges at a time when a historic American presidency struggles to navigate one war that is winding down (Iraq) another that has been accelerating (Afghanistan), as well as the worst economic downturn