World Policy Journal
Volume XX, No 2, Summer 2003

Macho America, Diffident Canada
Karl E. Meyer ^*

 

To visit Canada in late spring 2003 is to enter a county bewildered and baffled by its big macho neighbor to the south, to which Canada is normally as invisible as the undefended frontier, some 5,525 miles long, that famously divides the two lands. Canadians know everything, some would say even too much, about us; we rarely return the favor. Who, for example, invented peacekeeping? What country exports more oil than Saudi Arabia or Venezuela to the United States? Where can one find more than a million bodies of water in a territory boasting nearly a tenth of the globe’s fresh water? The answer in each case is either Canada or a Canadian.

Hence rudimentary self-interest would suggest that Washington give higher priority to keeping that undefended fence mended. Instead, Canada has long been treated as a faithful and undemanding supplier of cool air during summer, of paper for America’s insatiable printing presses, and as a lucrative marketplace (73 percent of Canada’s imports come from the United States, and 19 percent—the biggest share—of U.S. imports are from Canada). In all this for the most part, America’s essential ally has been Canadian forbearance. Canada has become a byword for self-deprecation even to Canadians themselves. Publishers in Toronto recount with relish that at a Frankfurt book fair there was once a straw vote for the most boring title; the winner by acclamation was a culinary work, Great Canadian Desserts.

It is in this context that the strained state of Canadian-U.S. relations are of special interest. To Washington’s dismay, Canada refused to join the U.S. war on Iraq. Earlier this year, along with Mexico, Canada failed to support a Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force to depose Saddam Hussein. With courage and some dignity, Canada’s long-serving prime minister, Jean Chrétien, urged containment and aggressive United Nations inspections to keep Saddam tightly boxed while pursuing the unfinished war against Osama bin Laden. None of this sat well in the White House. Chrétien, who will soon step down after a decade in office, then perhaps unwisely chatted with reporters while flying to Europe in late May. Speaking off the cuff, he twitted the "right-wing" Bush administration for its huge budget deficit, while amiably commiserating with the president on the last-place showing of his former team, the Texas Rangers ("it’s their pitching"). Small wonder government press handlers dread these airborne encounters.

A thunderclap ensued from President Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. Her photograph, with its frosty expression and extended forefinger, dominated page one of the May 31 National Post, Canada’s principal financial newspaper. The adjoining headline compressed her message: "Rice Lays Bare U.S. Disappointment with Canada." Ottawa’s failure to support the U.S.-led war against Iraq, she said "will not go...[away] easily" and "will take some time [to heal]." As she explained: "When friends are in a position where we say our security’s at stake, we would have thought, as we got from many of our friends, that the answer would have been, ‘Well, how can we help?’"

Yet wait a minute. Canada did help wholeheartedly after September 11 on matters of border security and pooled intelligence. Ottawa promptly dispatched 2,000 peacekeepers to Afghanistan (some later killed by friendly fire). Regarding Iraq, by every reasonable measure, Canada’s elected leaders were in accord with national sentiment. A common view was put forward just before the war by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s principal foreign affairs commentator, Gwynne Dyer, in his thoughtful book, Ignorant Armies: Sliding into War in Iraq (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2003). He wrote presciently last February:

When you start a "preemptive" war, you are in effect deciding that all these people must die right now to avoid something bad happening in the future. It is almost impossible to make that equation work for the attack on Iraq, because with UN arms inspectors all over the country, it was certainly not the time Saddam Hussein would choose to hand over some of his chemical or biological weapons (if he had any) to his terrorist friends (if he had any). Waiting six months or even a year for UN inspectors to find the weapons of mass destruction, or to confirm that they’re not there, would have been a good deal saner and more humane than plunging into the unknown. Even if the war causes none of the larger disasters that are possible, it still involves too many deaths for too little gain.

Is it Condoleezza Rice’s contention that in a war fought in the name of democracy, allied leaders should scorn the reasoned objections of their own citizens? Is it Washington’s view that Canada is obliged, when a president so wishes, to face south and salute, like a Warsaw Pact satellite? My wife and I chanced to be in Toronto when this mini-tempest broke, coinciding with the SARS panic. Canadians wondered if Washington’s instant initial concurrence in the World Health Organization’s warning against visiting Toronto was a form of punishment. The question was put half seriously, as was a related query we heard in British Columbia about the immediate U.S. embargo on Canadian beef that followed a few reported instances of Mad Cow disease in western provinces. Was this fallout from Iraq?

On Mending the Fence
In fairness to the Bush team, the fraying of relations is hardly a new problem. In 1965, as the war in Vietnam escalated, Canadians questioned the wisdom of Rolling Thunder, Lyndon Johnson’s bombing campaign, fearing it might lead to a wider war (which it did). Speaking at Temple University in Philadelphia, Prime Minister Lester Pearson suggested that a bombing halt might encourage Hanoi to think afresh about peaceful unification. This mild criticism of U.S. foreign policy, writes Scott W. See in his History of Canada (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001), triggered a remarkable diplomatic incident: "In a meeting following the speech, a livid Johnson grabbed Pearson’s lapels and berated him for questioning American war tactics while he was a guest in the United States. Badly shaken by the episode, Pearson publicly threw his support behind the bombing."

The episode is long since forgotten south of the border, where Lester Pearson, Canada’s Liberal prime minister (1963–68) is scarcely remembered. Yet it was Pearson, then serving as foreign minister, who first proposed U.N. peacekeeping in the wake of the 1956 Suez Crisis. He urged "a truly international police force" large enough to separate belligerents while a political settlement was negotiated, earning Pearson a Nobel Peace Prize. From the Suez deployment to the present, Canada has provided U.N. blue helmets to 30 strife-ridden areas; in Cyprus alone, a generation of Canadian troops thanklessly policed the green line separating Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot antagonists. And it was in Rwanda in 1994 that Maj. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian commanding a small U.N. contingent, pleaded vainly for reinforcements as genocidal massacres turned rivers scarlet. (The Clinton administration threatened a veto if the Security Council considered Dallaire’s urgings, a point discreetly omitted when Rice cited Rwanda as an example of the Security Council’s failure to act.)

With this history in mind, how splendid if President Bush, or his secretary of state, could say something like this concerning Canada: "You know, Americans take Canada for granted, forgetting the heartening recent achievements of our northern neighbor, where threats of secession in Quebec have been resolved peacefully, where the absence of handgun violence offers a shaming example to our own citizens, where free trade has benefited both our countries, and where the rights of native peoples are generously recognized under a new flag and new constitution. I suspect most Americans are unaware that 17 percent of our imported oil comes from Canada, and that new oil reserves are being found off the coast of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. We are both melting-pot societies, and Canada’s success in welcoming so many diverse peoples has been affirmed anew with the choice of Vancouver as the venue for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. In the international sphere, Canada has pioneered in peacekeeping, and I hope we may yet benefit from Canadian experience as we send our own troops into Liberia and other troubled regions. Yes, we regret that we differ with Canada on the matter of Iraq, but it is a disagreement among friends, and there are plenty of matters on which we entirely agree. Let us thus move forward, and learn from each other, O Canada!"

As for the Canadians, traveling from Victoria and Vancouver eastward by rail, stopping for two nights in Jasper, then continuing through Alberta’s rolling fields and Ontario’s forests to Toronto, I found myself agreeing with the comments of an earlier visitor, Jan Morris, writing in O Canada: Travels in an Unknown Country (New York: Harper Collins, 1984): "Almost despite myself, I have come to identify with this frequently perverse nation. Presumptuously I feel myself to be on its side in its battle with destiny. I think it deserves better of itself—more recognition of its own virtues, more readiness to blow its own trumpet, a little less becoming diffidence, a bit more vulgar swagger. Sometimes Canada’s modesty touches me, but sometimes it makes me feel like giving it a kick in the seat of its ample pants to get its adrenalin going."

Janik’s Overgrown Encyclopedia

The postbag brings four hefty volumes titled Encyclopedia of the United Nations and International Agreements, published this year by Routledge in New York and London at the no less hefty price of $495. It is indeed a valuable reference, but I much prefer the first and second editions, in one volume. And I fault the United Nations and the volume’s editors for failing entirely to inform readers about the remarkable Pole who initiated this project, Edmund Jan Osmanczyk, known to his friends as Janik. Not even his dates are given in the prefatory notes to the reference work he had the wit and energy to devise.

Janik was born in 1913 and died in 1989; most of his adult life was devoted to journalism. I knew him well in Washington, where he wrote for the Polish News Agency, and where he charmed younger colleagues with a vast repertory of anecdotes spun out in any of his seven languages (Polish, Russian, German, French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese). He had covered the League of Nations in Geneva, attended the University of Berlin during the Third Reich, and reported on the Red Army’s advance into Germany in 1944–45. On his desk was a vial of poison that he had found in the ruins of Hitler’s bunker, which he encountered when its ashes were still warm. He then reported from Nuremberg at the War Crimes Tribunal, and returning to Poland fought long and hard for a freer political system as an independent member of Parliament and subsequently as a Solidarity-sponsored senator from his native Silesia. He loved Mexico and Brazil, from which he reported, and deservedly spent his final years with his wife Yolanda in a lovingly restored townhouse in Warsaw’s old city (where I had the good luck to bid him farewell in 1988). In between, he somehow wrote scores of books.

"You know," I recall his telling me in the 1980s, "it’s been very frustrating for me as a correspondent—there is no single volume with the texts of major international agreements, or at least their important points, along with descriptions of the global or regional organizations we constantly write about. So I have compiled such a work, first in Polish, then in Spanish and now in English." The first English edition, which he kindly presented to me, was published in 1985, and I turned at once to the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, which partitioned Poland. As he had assured me, the entry listed all the details of the secret protocol through which Hitler had agreed to Stalin’s grab of the Baltic republics, then a taboo subject in the Soviet empire. I am not sure Janik would have approved the massive reincarnation of his work, with its 6,000 entries. But he richly earned his name on its title page, and his just-the-facts spirit still dwells in its 3,500 pages.

Television’s Black Hole
Some of us are old enough to remember when U.S. television networks took pride and earned prizes for their hour-long documentaries on foreign subjects. NBC had its "White Paper," ABC its "Close-Up," and CBS had "CBS Reports." All have vanished, and except for Public Television’s "FrontLine" series and occasional ABC documentaries featuring Peter Jennings, the long form is defunct. Hence the good news that a series called "Wide Angle" is being funded for a full season on PBS after a summer’s tryout in 2002. Its executive producer is Stephen Segaller, director of News and Public Affairs for Thirteen/WNET, and programs will be hosted by James P. Rubin, formerly U.S. assistant secretary of state, and Dajit Dhwaliwal, an anchor for BBC World. Tryout programs dealt with Iraq, the war in Chechnya, the economic travails of Argentina, the drug lords of Central Asia, and the plight of the Serbian media under former dictator Slobodan Milosevic. The new series is to begin in September, thanks to funding by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Jacob Burns Foundation, the Florence and John Schumann Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Miriam G. and Ira D. Wallach Foundation. Let the cameras roll (if digital images qualify for that venerable phrase).

Anniversary Waltz
Our fall issue will mark the twentieth anniversary of World Policy Journal, which was launched in 1983. Among the founding editors was Sherle Schwenninger, who continues as a senior fellow of our parent World Policy Institute. Sherle was succeeded by James Chace, until the baton passed in the year 2000 to the undersigned. All were present for a reception last May at the Century Association, hosted by President Bob Kerrey of New School University, our academic sponsor, and by Walter A. Eberstadt, chairman of the World Policy Institute’s advisory board. Additionally, we were privileged to hear Sir Brian Urquhart, formerly the U.N.’s chief peacekeeper and its under secretary for political affairs, at a luncheon at the world organization attended by the journal’s editorial board. We hope our anniversary year will realize its promising start, and pause here to thank all who have made these pages possible. In the immemorial shorthand of foreign correspondence we sign off with MTK, meaning more to come.

—Karl E. Meyer