Brebner’s North Atlantic Triangle at 80: A (Second) Retrospective Look at a Retrospective Book

Introduction

This article is a second retrospective assessment of a book I published back in 2000, under the title The North Atlantic Triangle Revisited. This book, through its explicit ‘Brebnerian’ framing, sought to show how Brebner’s metaphor had figured in Canadian statecraft from the time of Confederation through the Cold War. It also dared to hint that the metaphor was likely to continue to possess relevance, notwithstanding claims by many analysts of Canada’s foreign and defence policy (what I labelled, its ‘grand strategy’) during the 1990s, that the country would finally experience a relative ‘liberation’ from the conceptual confines of the Brebnerian imagery. My first retrospective assessment of the book came in 2005, in an article published in the London Journal of Canadian Studies. This second retrospective assessment, published in the same journal on the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of the appearance of the Brebner book is a minimally rewritten version of the 2005 article, with a new postscript added to bring the reader up to date with developments of the past decade. As with that earlier article, so too does the current touched-up iteration reach the conclusion that the North Atlantic Triangle metaphor continues to enjoy some influence over Canadian grand strategy, not so much explicitly as implicitly, for its contemporary expression is rooted in the cognate Brebnerian metaphor of ‘atlanticism’, standing for a strategic approach privileging such values as liberal democracy, the rule of law and respect for minority rights.

Looking backward

At its start, the twentieth century was being touted by Canadian Prime Minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier as certain to develop into ‘Canada’s century’. At its conclusion, there were many in Canada who were prepared to accept that Sir Wilfrid had been pretty accurate in his optimistic forecast. And though few might have been so rash as to join him in staking out a literal claim to the past 100 years as having been Canada’s own (after all, was putting a national brand upon a century something only the Americans would do?¹), there was nonetheless a barely suppressed satisfaction that Canada had it fairly soft in an otherwise very hard world. Some attributed the felicific situation to a combination of good luck and good geography, but many were prepared to accept that it must have had much to do with virtue (good ‘values’) and resisted with only partial success the impulse to incessant self-congratulation.

Interestingly, in a manner not so different from that of their southern neighbours, Canadians at the end of the twentieth century were taking comfort in the conviction that they lived in the best country on earth and were in no doubt that they were also the world’s best people.² It was as if Walter McDougall had only got the story half right in his bestselling work on American foreign policy, Promised Land, Crusader State; North America – at least that portion of it north of the Rio Grande – was quite the blessed place, containing as it did two such advantaged national communities.³ Some Canadians might even have gone further and insisted (had they but taken the time to read it) that McDougall’s book was not even half right, so strong was the compulsion to assert Canadian virtue by counterpoising it against a presumably deficient American national character – and this, even before the strains introduced by the onset of the Bush administration and the beginning of the ‘Global War on Terrorism’ (or GWOT, to use a Pentagon acronym) combined to darken the American image in Canada. This pre-Bush mood was best captured in a bizarre, emotion-laden beer commercial that aired in the spring of 2000. In it, the actor Jeff Douglas, playing ‘Joe’, the quintessential Canadian, resorted to jingoistic imagery intended to hop up an audience whose thirst for being told how much better they were than the Americans never could be slaked.⁴

More sober minds accepted that their country was, if not perfect, still a decent place to live and attributed both the good luck and the good values that had so characterised it to the historical circumstances in which Canada had been founded and had grown to mature statehood. For these analysts, much of the Canadian story required telling in a ‘Brebnerian’ manner, one that emphasised not the peculiar bliss of a continent favoured by God or nature (or both), but rather of two countries that had come to their separate paths of development from a common historical, imperial, origin. That empire was Britain’s and for Brebner the geographic context would be immortalised in the metaphor ‘North Atlantic Triangle’, the most fecund symbol ever applied to the study of Canada’s foreign policy.⁵

By the end of the twentieth century, however, the Brebnerian tale was becoming time-worn, some even held it was a cliché and Canadians were directing their geopolitical gaze tous azimuts. The implication appeared obvious: the triangle had long since passed its metaphorical expiry date and warranted nothing so much as a decent burial by folks who, in the twenty-first century, were about to go ‘global’ in such a way as to render baseless any appeal to ‘North Atlantic’ geography or political values. It was in this period of scepticism about the Brebnerian imagery that I embarked upon a research project that had at its core the triangle metaphor. The results of that research appeared in print 25 years ago under the title The North Atlantic Triangle Revisited: Canadian grand strategy at century’s end.⁶ This article is intended to be a retrospective on that retrospective, in which I try to determine how much has and has not changed since I first conceived the project in 1996 and whether the time has finally arrived for the concept to be set aside.

Strategic culture and the North Atlantic Triangle

I am a political scientist, not an historian, but I confess to a strong belief that history, even and perhaps especially for political scientists, must ‘matter’. How it should matter, of course, is not easy to determine. In my 2000 monograph, I thought that guidance could be had from the symbolic depiction of the past; in other words, I was attempting to import ‘cultural’ analysis into my study of Canadian foreign policy and to look for meaning in what I hoped would be a systematic analysis of symbols because, as Michael Walzer once so elegantly put it, symbols and images tell us ‘much more than we can easily repeat’.⁷ Since I wrote the book, I have come to realise that the approach I had taken could be lodged under the rubric of ‘strategic culture’, currently in vogue among some students of international relations.⁸

Now, strategic culture is hardly a straightforward concept and that it has been experiencing a burst of popularity in some scholarly quarters of late does not detract from the reality of its being surrounded by more than a bit of semantic and logical confusion. At the risk of oversimplifying, let us say that among those, such as myself, who profess to be labouring in the vineyards of strategic culture, there are two principal means of harvesting the crop: some prefer to take their concept to refer first and foremost to ‘context’, by which they mean to apply culture to help them explicate a given state’s policy record in terms either of (1) how that state has acted in the past (namely, its previous behaviour is argued to have great, possibly determinative, bearing on its current and future options), or (2) how that state is thought by its own and other peoples as being likely to act based on the ‘way we are’ (namely, its identity, or character, is said to predispose it towards certain policies).

Other culturalists, however, like to put the emphasis elsewhere, on ‘cognition’, albeit while recognising that the boundary line between context and cognition can at times be a blurry one. It was in this second, cognitive, camp that my work on the triangle landed me. One of the merits of the cognitive approach is that it enables strategic culturalists to build on earlier work in the discipline of political science centred upon the cognate category of ‘political culture’. And what they most hope to come up with is a means of ‘operationalising’ strategic culture.

For just as strategic culture is today, political culture used itself to be marred by definitional confusion; indeed, one critic observed that there were almost as many different meanings of political culture as there were political scientists professing an interest in it.⁹ When it first burst on the scene in political science, during the 1930s and 1940s, it was as a result of the same interdisciplinary transfusion process that would later bring culture into the purview of those who contemplated strategy; by 1956, some two decades earlier than in the case of strategic culture, ‘political culture’ even acquired a name. However, while Gabriel Almond might have told us what we should call this category of analysis, he could not decree what it meant. Debate continued as to whether it was to signify the ‘generalised personality’ of a people, or the collectivity’s history, or something else altogether. By the late 1960s, terminological mayhem had political culture well on the way to the conceptual dust heap.¹⁰

Political culture’s rebound owed a bit to changes in the international system attending the Cold War’s end, but it was primarily discontent on the part of some analysts with rational-choice modelling and game theory that gave the concept a new lease on life in the 1980s and 1990s.¹¹ For while the concept might have taken a nose dive in the late 1960s and early 1970s, its core question – namely, how to tap the subjective orientations of societies’ members so as to account for political differences cross-nationally – never had gone out of fashion.¹² What had changed in the period between the decline and re-emergence of political culture was that a new element had been injected into the discussions of political scientists when they pondered how to assess ‘culture’. That element was symbolism.

Symbolism helped resuscitate political culture in two ways. First, it solved the ‘level-of-analysis’ problem hobbling political culture, for much of the early work by Almond and his associates relied upon survey data that, while it might indicate much of value about the perceptions and psychological state of individuals, seemed incapable of generating usable knowledge about the cognitive patterns of collectivities. Individuals, after all, had personalities, but only collectivities could be said to possess cultures and the trick was to find a way to go from the individual to the collective level of analysis if culture was to mean anything. Symbolism provided the answer, enabling theorists to explore the social ideas of individuals.¹³ Symbolism could do this because of its second major contribution, which was to draw us to the cognitive devices that social groupings rely upon, as Lowell Dittmer phrased it, to ‘transmit meanings from person to person despite vast distances of space and time’. Dittmer invited us to think of those devices, which include but are not limited to imagery and metaphor, as being identical to what the poet T. S. Eliot called ‘objective correlatives’, namely mechanisms for the efficient expression of feelings. In this regard, symbols become a ‘depository of widespread interest and feeling’. And for Dittmer, the task of those who would employ political culture must be nothing other than the systematic, scientific analysis of society’s key symbols.¹⁴

Enter John Bartlet Brebner. My book was predicated upon the assumption that nonliteral forms of communication can tell us a great deal about a country’s strategic choices and that Brebner’s metaphor and its numerous derivatives told us more than anything else about how and why Canada acted internationally throughout much of its history. This metaphor – or, to put it more accurately, family of metaphors – has featured in policy debates intended to generate principles and operational rules for the management of Canada’s foreign and security relations, and has done so in two broad senses, as I try to show in the following section. First, it has been a useful shorthand means of conceptualising approaches to safeguarding important security and political interests – this usage of the metaphor I label ‘defensive-positionalism’. But the metaphor has also been a device for articulating and promoting ends that Canadian policy should have sought to project rather than merely to protect – in this sense, it has had ‘imaginative-generative’ significance.

As is clear from the paragraph immediately above, metaphors have a tendency to spawn other figures of speech, including other metaphors. That is not all they do, however, for these methods of nonliteral expression can also serve as tools for the development of theory. Although there are many ways of understanding how metaphor might contribute to the analysis of foreign policy, the one I prefer would have us recognise, in the words of philosopher David Cooper, that ‘metaphor’s essential role is a cognitive one, sustained by our need to explain and understand through comparison . . . The reason we speak metaphorically is closely akin to the one why scientists construct imaginative models.’¹⁵ That is, we seek to comprehend and explain novel phenomena. As another philosopher, Earl MacCormac, has put it, ‘explanations without metaphor would be difficult if not impossible, for in order to describe the unknown, we must resort to concepts that we know and understand, and that is the essence of metaphor – an unusual juxtaposition of the familiar and the unfamiliar’.¹⁶

Yet political scientist Andrew Fenton Cooper has noted that the analytical use of metaphor, no matter the insights it may have sparked elsewhere than in Canada among those who specialise in international relations, has not had much impact on the study of Canadian foreign policy.¹⁷ In light of the lengthy service the constellation of metaphors associated with the North Atlantic Triangle has had in policy debates, such an observation might seem curious, to say the least. Nevertheless, there may be a basis for it, insofar as it is restricted to political scientists concentrating on Canadian foreign policy; historians, by contrast, have been more inclined to employ the Triangle metaphor and its derivatives.

My book was therefore an attempt by one political scientist to atone for his discipline’s neglect of Brebner’s contribution. In particular, I wanted to employ Brebner to demonstrate the necessarily comparative nature of the study of Canadian strategy. It may only have been 80 years since Brebner coined the term, but the North Atlantic Triangle did represent a cognitive reality of Canadian policymaking that is almost as old as Canada itself: the omnipresent, and obtrusive, character of interdependence as an element in the framing of Canadian foreign policy choices by sentient decision-makers. More so than most countries, Canada was born interdependent and, in John Holmes’s words, it ‘grew up in traction’. The Brebnerian metaphor has provided a valuable means by which Canadians could seek to gauge and manage, at times successfully, that geostrategic interdependence.

Mostly, my book set out to make the case for the metaphor’s early and lengthy employment in Canadian statecraft, from Confederation through the Cold War. I had a second motivation, however, and that was to try to assess whether, in the immediate post-Cold War period, the metaphor still mattered to anyone. Now, in this article, I ask the same question in respect of a different strategic era, that of the still unnamed post-post-Cold War period, which began on 11 September 2001.

The North Atlantic Triangle to the 1990s

Although scholars might agree that the North Atlantic Triangle is a Canadian conceptual invention, they are less clear about the period when it began to figure in the moulding of Canadian statecraft. For instance, historians Brian McKercher and Lawrence Aronsen believe that this metaphor first assumed policy import in the aftermath of the Imperial Conference of 1926, and did so as a result of Mackenzie King’s desire to play the role of mediator and interpreter between the Americans and the British.¹⁸ Other scholars believe the origins of the North Atlantic Triangle to reside in the more distant past and to be more directly rooted in security – some say survival – considerations.

Even if the naming of the metaphor had to await the publication of Brebner’s 1945 classic, the thought behind it stretches further back into history. John Holmes maintained that the thought – in both its descriptive and evaluative content – originated in the 1880s and was simply another way of recognising what would later be implied by ‘atlanticism’, a cognate figure of speech appropriated for the purpose of specifying the geographic and even normative setting of Canadian foreign policy. But Brebner himself dated the metaphor to 1871 and the Treaty of Washington, and in this claim he is not alone. Robert Wolfe has likewise discerned atlanticism’s descriptive and evaluative content to reside in that earlier pact and not, as is more customarily maintained, in another Treaty of Washington, the 1949 one creating the Atlantic alliance.¹⁹

A few even trace the metaphor and its transoceanic derivative, atlanticism, to the eighteenth not the nineteenth century. For Kim Richard Nossal, atlanticism in the Canadian context means that Canada is (or was) in some sense a ‘European nation’, a self-identification that took on meaning with the ‘defining decision of the 1770s not to follow the United States into independence’.²⁰ Frank Underhill, in the same vein, identifies the American Revolution and its ending in 1783 as marking the onset of an era in which Canada’s very existence would depend upon the skilful manipulation of the North Atlantic Triangle.²¹

I think one can err by pushing back too far in time the onset of the age in which conscious manipulation of the Triangle characterised Canadian policy. Accordingly, I suggest we regard the post-Confederation period as marking the beginning of the ‘triangularisation’ of Canadian diplomacy. To begin with, it would be more than a bit premature to speak of a Canadian diplomatic manipulation of the North Atlantic Triangle – at least insofar as concerned the ‘high politics’ of security – prior to the founding of the country itself, and this even though a political unit called Canada did pre-exist today’s federation of the same name. Moreover, the context of Canadian strategising did alter after 1871, for the treaty of that year resolved a variety of contentious issues between Britain and America, and in so doing reduced greatly (though did not eliminate entirely) the worry that the United States might seize or otherwise aggress against Canada as part of a broader struggle with Britain. In Underhill’s suggestive phrase, the 1871 treaty brought to an end the Anglo-American ‘Hundred Years War’.²²

During the 120 years spanning the ending of that Anglo-American contest and the East–West struggle we called the Cold War – that is to say, the period 1871–1991²³ – the triangle metaphor helped structure Canadian strategy in the two ways I indicated in the preceding section of this article. The earliest invocation of the metaphor was done for purposes we might call ‘defensive-positional’ in nature. Defensive-positionalism, in the literature on international relations, is usually equated with a certain ‘structural-realist’ logic associated with relative as opposed to absolute gains and with zero-sum as opposed to positive-sum games. Defensive-positionalism yielded in its own right a pair of policy extrapolations rich in symbolic content.

The first of these, which dates from the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Brebner called the ‘bookkeeper’s puzzle’. This puzzle consisted in determining how Canada could best manage relations with both Britain and the United States so as (a) to be able to invoke the assistance of the former against the latter’s political (and perhaps military) pressure, while at same time as (b) ensuring that British desire for Anglo-American rapprochement would not result in any ‘sacrifice’ of Canadian interests.

The second image, somewhat more recent in inspiration and certainly more long-lasting in effect, is an offshoot of the bookkeeper’s puzzle, conjuring up yet another metaphor, the ‘counterweight’ – usually taken to apply to attempts to invoke Canada’s allies from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in an expanded triangle to counterbalance the United States politically and economically. At times, the counterweight aspiration has even led to Canada’s invoking the United States as a diplomatic and economic counterpoise in the North Atlantic Triangle, though this is not as widely appreciated as perhaps it should be. As a result, policy analysts have tended to equate the counterweight aspiration solely with NATO, when in reality, the metaphor – or at least the logic subtending it – seems to have predated the formation of NATO by more than two decades.

In Canada the bookkeeper’s puzzle reflected real fears of being abandoned by the British, just as the latter worried about being trapped into a war with the United States as a result of their commitment to defend the Canadians. Not surprisingly, the British way out of the dilemma pointed in the direction of detente with America – with all that this would imply for Canadian political interests. Although the claim would later be made that Canada’s triangular relations were more satisfying to it during the period of British rather than of American hegemony in the Atlantic world, it is hard to deny that for Ottawa, the most uncomfortable political moments occurred at the turn of the nineteenth century, that is, during that earlier period, and in respect of an issue – the boundary line of the Alaskan Panhandle – that put Britain into the awkward position of having to choose between supporting Canada in a legal claim of some dubiety or, conversely, endorsing the aggressively nationalistic tactics of the Theodore Roosevelt administration.

If in London the Colonial Office may have been moved to side with Ottawa, the more influential Foreign Office was not, and the latter’s fundamental alignment with America’s position – whether arrived at purely on the basis of geostrategic reasoning or out of an aspiration to foment ‘Anglo-Saxon’ political harmony (or both) – served not only to convince Canadian elites that they had been hung out to dry by Britain but also to lead some of them to assess in a new light the wisdom of seeking Canada’s own rapprochement (its ‘regional detente’) with the United States.

Whatever the costs to Canada of the lesson in Realpolitik it was forced to absorb during the Alaska controversy, the consequences of that debacle, ironically, would be favourable for the longer-term health not only of the country’s triangular relations but also for the settlement of other disputes outstanding with the United States on terms rather more than less favourable to Canada. Alaska, write two historians of the Canadian–American relationship, at least had the merit of paving the way for a new kind of diplomacy in North America:

Against the background of rising Anglo-Saxon sentiment and celebrations of the tranquillity of the border between Canada and the U.S., the two countries settled all their outstanding diplomatic problems . . . The reality was that Canada had done extremely well during the slate-cleaning era, bettering or breaking even with the United States in agreement after agreement.²⁴

It was during this new era in Canadian–American relations that the second defensive-positionalist instantiation of the triangle metaphor began to feature more centrally in Canadian diplomacy. This adaptation of the metaphor found its logic in the notion of counterpoise. Counterpoise, or counterbalancing, would in turn come to be expressed through yet another derivative metaphor, the ‘counterweight’.

Beginning in the decade following the First World War, Ottawa would seek to foster, in its trilateral diplomacy, an environment in which both its British and its American ‘problems’ might be felicitously managed through the playing off of one against the other – not in any military sense, obviously, for by this time the North Atlantic Triangle was beginning to look like what in contemporary terms would be called a ‘zone of peace’, or a ‘security community’, by which is meant a grouping of states concerning which war or even the threat of war has become inconceivable as a means of intragroup dispute resolution.

The counterweight imagery did, however, possess both economic and political significance. For counterbalancing to work best in the North Atlantic context, it helped if the triangle was an isosceles one, as it indeed seemed to be from the turn of the century until what has been termed the ‘revolution of 1940’. Once this equality was lost through the rise of America to superpower status, it was felt essential by a generation of Canadian atlanticists to re-equilibrate the North Atlantic Triangle by extending its easternmost angle to include all of Western Europe and as time went on, to concentrate increasingly upon that region’s most important country, Germany.

During the Cold War experience with counterweight diplomacy, a succession of Canadian governments, both Liberal and Conservative, would sound as if they understood (some more clearly, some less so) the importance of Western Europe as a means of lessening Canadian dependence upon the United States. One advantage of seeking a counterweight within the alliance is that the United States could hardly object to Canadian efforts to ‘balance’ against it by courting the very allies that Washington itself sought to support. And if, as many remarked, there was an obvious military price to be paid for cultivating the ostensible political and economic gains to be had from counterpoise, this, too, served America’s interests, for presumably Canada’s successful counterweight strategy would be one requiring it to contribute more to the collective defence of Western Europe; at least, that is what the Western Europeans believed, and demanded, of Ottawa. This, then, was something to which the United States could hardly object, as it, too, was constantly imploring Canada to shore up its European commitment during the Cold War.

But there were problems with the counterweight strategy and these became glaringly obvious as the Cold War entered its final decade. First, it was not clear, given the ambiguous (not to say metaphysical) nature of political balancing, whether there could be any knowable consequences of the strategy. How could one be certain that a counterweight effect was stemming from a counterweight strategy, when the ‘dependent variable’ was so difficult to define and measure?

More problematic were two other dimensions of counterweight diplomacy, the economic and military. Let us start with the latter. Although no one seriously believed that Canada would or should seek a military counterweight to the United States – which was, after all, its closest ally during the Cold War – there was, as I indicated above, a military cost associated with striving for political and economic counterpoise in Europe. The problem with trying to use defence assets to secure political (counterweight) gains is that it is possible to quantify defence costs, yet impossible to quantify the political gains of a counterweight strategy. Allocating scarce funds to defence is hard enough in Canada when there is a security threat against which defence assets are needed. It became even more difficult, if not impossible, to allocate scarce defence dollars to ill-defined political ends in an era when the threat seemed to have vanished in Europe.

As for the economic side of counterweight diplomacy, the best that can be said for the effort to diversify more Canadian trade away from the United States and towards Europe is that it represented, in Robert Bothwell’s apt words, ‘an attempt to secure the triumph of politics over geography’.²⁵ Again, as with the political counterweight so with the economic one: it was hardly a cost-free option and in some measure the Europeans, as was discovered during the ill-fated Third Option years, were expecting a greater Canadian military contribution to their defence in exchange for their undertaking to provide enhanced access (of a sort) to a market that in economic terms could never be demonstrated to be more beneficial for Canada than was the American market.

Ultimately, the costs of a counterweight strategy within the North Atlantic Triangle came far to outweigh the putative gains of such a strategy. The failure of the Third Option and its replacement with a ‘Second Option’ that assumed a greater economic integration in North America to be in Canada’s interest may have combined to spell finis for the European counterweight,²⁶ but if the counterweight logic had dropped out – perhaps temporarily, as we shall see below – of the policy menu supplied by the North Atlantic Triangle, did it follow that the latter metaphor had also become passé?

Not really. For there was a second set of policy lessons that also took on symbolic expression and were themselves offshoots of the triangle – this set, we may call the ‘imaginative-generative’ applications of Brebner’s metaphor. Although the defensive applications of metaphor were the ones most frequently encountered during the first several decades of Canadian statehood, they did not exhaust the inventory of policy ideas associated with the North Atlantic Triangle. It would take some time, naturally enough, before Canadians could start to conjure more imaginative purposes to which the metaphor might give rise, in the process generating other figurative means of expressing policy goals transcending those associated with the logic of defensive-positionalism, concerned as it was with matters of survival and security-driven power balancing.

Those policy ends can be grouped into two categories. One included normative-aspirational objectives linked to the enhancement of Canadian diplomatic status. What would evolve from this employment of metaphor was a reinforcement of incipient views as to the merits of Canada’s aspiring to a ‘middle power’ role in world politics. The other set consisted in the desire to tap US military and economic strength as a means of advancing both particular Canadian interests and more diffuse world-order goals. In the case of both sets of objectives, one derivative metaphor stood out above all the rest, the ‘linchpin’ (supplemented, as time went on, with the images of the ‘bridge’ and, especially, of ‘atlanticism’). What the bookkeeper’s puzzle and the counterweight were to defensive-positionalism, the linchpin, bridge and atlanticism would be to imaginative-generative diplomacy.

Atlanticism, in particular, served Canada well and if there was a clear defensive aspect to it (namely, the counterweight), there was even more of an imaginative-generative cast to it. Through atlanticism, Canada was able to assist in constructing an arrangement thought capable not only of ‘balancing’ the United States but also of enabling Canada and other allies to tap into and utilise for their own ends American power. John Holmes expressed this side of the imaginative-generative coin as well as anyone in recalling the aspiration of Canadian diplomats in the early post-Second World War years: ‘In stark terms we would support [the Americans] not because we were on their side but because we wanted them on our side’.²⁷

There was much more, however, to Canadian atlanticism during the Cold War than this. Atlanticism came to represent a value set that would not only survive the ending of East–West tension but would animate Canadian policy during the post-Cold War decade. Thus, you could say that of all the figurative derivations of the North Atlantic Triangle to emerge during the period 1871–1991, atlanticism was the one whose prospects most were enhanced by the ending of the Cold War. For the ending of that struggle would result in a new mood of Idealpolitik in international relations, and what ideals could be more appealing than the tried-and-true values of atlanticism, synonymous with, and the very normative basis of, the Western liberal-democratic ‘zone of peace’? Spreading those values and extending that zone, both within Europe and elsewhere, loomed as the challenge for Canadian strategy during the 1990s, in ways that would become apparent as the decade went on.

The Triangle during the 1990s

Notwithstanding the looming promise of Idealpolitik, a superficial reading of Canada’s strategic situation during the first half of the 1990s led more than a few observers to conclude that the Brebnerian metaphor’s days were done. Part of the reason for this assumption was to be found in the expectation that the most robust institutional manifestation of atlanticism, namely the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was about to follow the Soviet Union into oblivion. Who, after all, had need of an alliance constructed to contain Soviet expansionism now that the Soviet Union was no more? Part of it was based on the expectation that the Europeans, in forming their own more perfect union, would be turning inward, effectively foreclosing any prospect of meaningful interaction with Canada even if the latter had sought it.

But the most significant source of certitude regarding the triangle’s impending disappearance had to do with so-called ‘objective’ realities at home. Canada was changing in a variety of ways that led inexorably to only one conclusion: that Europe, and therefore by extension, presumably, the North Atlantic Triangle, must fade into total eclipse as a guiding element of Canadian strategy. For economic, demographic, cultural and political reasons, Canada’s European age had ended: of this many were convinced. All that remained to be determined, as the 1990s began, was the identity of the country’s new regional cynosure.

In one of those quips everyone seems to recall but few can remember who uttered it, Canada was dubbed (by Herman Kahn) a ‘regional power without a region’.²⁸ In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth: it has never been a regional power, say on the scale of a Brazil or a Nigeria, nevertheless it had possessed a distinct region – the North Atlantic Triangle. By the 1990s, Canada was being newly conceived by some as possessing many regions, having before it in the new, post-Cold War dawn, a rich menu of geographical choice. Proponents of an enhanced Canadian concentration upon their district of professional specialisation and emotional commitment mixed it up with each other in a lively geopolitical jamboree.

What Kahn, one of the pre-eminent American strategic gurus of the Cold War period, no doubt meant was that Canada was one of the world’s ranking countries, as indeed it was then and, in many ways, remained in the early 1990s; and were it not for the fact that it lived in the overwhelming shadow of the United States, its aggregate capabilities would have endowed it with the wherewithal (if not necessarily the will) to stake out a claim for regional pre-eminence. For sure, the government of Canada, in official professions of strategy, preferred to give a wide berth to regional modes of conceptualising roles; to hear it said by those in power in Ottawa, Canada had a universalistic strategy, such that it became unnecessary and even counterproductive to attempt to appraise parts of the world on the basis of their particular importance to Canadian interests.

Official statements to the contrary notwithstanding, the ground was thick with advocacies for providing a regional focus to strategy, mainly grouped in a trio of camps that pitted atlanticists, Asia–Pacificists and Western hemispherists against each other. The latter could in turn be divided into two groups, those few for whom the United States alone represented or should represent the Polaris of Canadian strategy, and the many who imagined that it was the United States in the Americas and not the United States of America that would be the focal point of Canadian foreign and security in the coming century.

At the start of the decade, it would have taken a daring person to place a wager on the atlanticists acquitting themselves well in this jamboree. Already, as far back as 1974, John Holmes had discerned the onset of Euro-fatigue and predicted that for Canada, the ‘triangular Atlantic community [was] nearing the end of a long death’.²⁹ The ocean separating Canada from Europe was widening.

Some of the causes of this widening could be located in the military sphere and related to the travails of a collective-defence alliance grappling with the challenge of ‘flexible response’. But other causes were to be found in the secular trends affecting Canadian economic, demographic, and political life. These trends would all, in their way, contribute to the growing sense of disengagement from Europe and, so it seemed, from atlanticism.

Nothing, it turned out, was capable of arresting the long process of economic interdependence and even integration in North America, which had resulted in the reorientation of the Canadian economy from its traditional East–West and transatlantic axis towards a North–South, and continental, one. What two authors have recently argued in respect of the Ontarian economy applies a fortiori to the Canadian one: it has gone from being a ‘heartland’ of the commercial empire of the St Lawrence basin to a ‘regional state’ of the North American economy.³⁰ Emblematic of this shift had been the relative proportions of goods and services exchanged within the continent as opposed to across the ocean: in 1984, the value of Canadian exports to the United States was already 11 times greater than the value of the country’s exports to the entire European Community (now Union); ten years later, that gap had grown to a factor of 14. The same trend held for imports (although not for investment flows).

The second secular trend was the changing ethnic composition of Canada. As anyone who spends even the briefest time in the country’s major urban centres cannot help but notice, the old cliché about Canada being ‘so European’ seems very time-worn. In some respects, Canada has become even more multiethnic and multicultural than its southern neighbour, and in the case of both North American countries the proximate cause is the same: the massive upsurge in immigration from ‘non-traditional’ (understand non-European) sources. According to the 1996 census, for the first time the European content of Canada’s total immigrant stock dipped below 50 per cent: only 47 per cent of all immigrants then living in Canada were born in Europe. On an annualised basis, of course, the European inflow of immigrants had for some time been much slighter than that, as the vast majority of arrivals originate from non-European lands. The result is that by the mid-1990s, only about half of all Canadians, no matter where they were born, could trace their ‘ethnicity’ to Western Europe (as compared with two-thirds of Americans who were still able to do this).

The impact of these two secular trends has been magnified by a third trend: the continued erosion in management capability of the federal government over civil society. On the one hand, this is reflected in the ongoing struggle between Ottawa and Quebec (as well as between Ottawa and the other provinces) for control over power and resources. On the other, it is more broadly felt in the diminishing sway of government – at the federal as well as provincial level – over the lives of those on whose behalf it professes to serve. This third trend, with its overtones of ‘globalisation’, can compound the difficulty the state encounters in designing schemes for the regulation of the national economy.

For all of these reasons, then, it seemed as if Europe could hardly have been less in geopolitical fashion among Canadians as the 1990s began. And with Euro-fatigue came a second impression, that atlanticism itself had become a spent force. Fortifying that impression was the chorus of voices advocating an alternative regional focus for Canadian foreign policy. What was striking about the claim made by proponents of an alternative regional focus in Canadian grand strategy is the degree to which it was predicated upon materialistic considerations, commercial ones in particular.

It is true, to recollect what Frank Scott said long ago,³¹ that trade has been an invariant component of Canadian grand strategy for as long as there has been a Canada. But the nakedness of the economic determinism of much of the advocacy for an Asia–Pacific, or a Latin American, focus did stand out. Let us start with the Asia–Pacific case. Although it is sometimes said that Canada’s changing demographic make-up, all things being equal, should be reflected in its grand strategy, such that (to paraphrase an expression favoured by the Clinton administration) the country gets a foreign and security policy that ‘looks like Canada’, it is hard to escape the conclusion that it had primarily been the colour of money, not of people, in the Asia–Pacific that so tickled the fancy of policymaker and policy wonk alike. To be sure, there is nothing wrong, and much right, with an approach that seeks to enhance Canadian economic interests, assuming in the process that other Canadian values do not get traduced.

The problem with the Asia–Pacificists was not their stress upon the economic content of the region. It was how they sought to endow economics with meaning. They mishandled economic reality in two ways. First was to exaggerate the importance of the extant level of trade that Canada conducted with countries of the region by conjuring up as their regional referent something known as ‘the Asia–Pacific’, within whose confines could be situated fellow member of the Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation, the United States. But remove the United States from the equation, and it was apparent that Canada’s economic ties with Asia per se remained limited, with only some 9 per cent of exports destined for that region by the second half of the 1990s. Moreover, even though that decade had been one in which Asia–Pacific business was increasingly coveted, the reality was that Canada in those years was losing, not gaining, market share in Asia, its minuscule proportion (1.6 per cent) of that market lagging behind other G7 members.³²

Even more problematic was the tendency of many analysts to succumb to the fallacy of projection and assume that conditions of today would continue to be relevant tomorrow. Back in the 1960s, Brazilians had a way of disarming enthusiasts of their country’s prospects with the Pickwickian boast that Brazil was the land of the future – and always would be! The same looked like it deserved to be said of the Asia–Pacific after the profound collapse of the region’s ‘miracle’ economies that set in with the currency crisis in Thailand during the summer of 1997.

And what of the case for a growing concentration upon the western hemisphere? In many ways, it mirrored the Asia–Pacific advocacy. To the extent that the hemispherists limited their focus to the Americas north of the Rio Grande, it might even be said that they carried the day, based solely on a reading of material factors, such as trade and investment flows. But few of the hemispherists were prepared to stop at the Texas–Mexico border and their advocacy really did have to be assessed in terms not of Canadian–American relations but of Canadian–American–Latin American ones.

As with the Asia–Pacificists, there was an assumption that economic regionalisation was occurring, was deepening and had enormous implications for Canada, whose region was being said, more and more, to be ‘the Americas’. Although contemporary commercial statistics could not support the contention that Latin America had in fact emerged as a major area of Canadian economic activity, recent political arrangements, including the formation of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the conclusion of a bilateral free trade agreement with Chile, held out two hopes. The first was that the Americas would assume more importance for Canadian economic interests, to the benefit both of Canada and Latin America. And the second was that the flame of a rules-based, multilateral, free trade order could be kept burning against the impending threat of regionalised trade elsewhere in the world and this through the fomenting of a gigantic free trade bloc in the western hemisphere.

What was most significant about the geopolitical jamboree is the extent to which it was inspired by a conviction that domestic political variables had become the primary shapers of grand strategy. It may very well be that Innenpolitik had become uppermost in determining grand strategy after the disappearance of the Soviet threat; for that matter, perhaps it always had been. But it should not be imagined that domestic factors necessarily were forcing a reorientation of Canadian grand strategy away from the North Atlantic Triangle. In fact, if one wanted to make a materialistic, ‘objective’ case for the ongoing centrality of the North Atlantic Triangle to Canadian strategy, it would not have been all that difficult, given that the United States is itself one of the angles of the North Atlantic Triangle.

Nor did it in any way follow that a country whose population was becoming less ‘European’ had to be disengaging itself from atlanticist values. Survey data in the 1990s revealed that Canadian public opinion remained solidly atlanticist and that there were only marginal differences in the support shown for atlanticism on the part of the country’s ‘Asian’ or other non-European population.³³

In the end, not only did the mooted economic and demographic changes of the post-Cold War decade fail to reorient Canada decisively away from the familiar confines of the North Atlantic Triangle, but they were incapable of preventing a relative deepening of Canada’s transatlantic ties in the security domain. At the start of the 1990s, no one could have foreseen that a decade after the ending of the Cold War, Canada would still have a significant proportion of its armed forces deployed in Europe. No one could have imagined that NATO would remain the central vehicle for the promotion of Canada’s transatlantic and, perhaps global, security agenda – even becoming stylised, on the eve of the Kosovo War in early 1999, as the ‘human security alliance’ par excellence. But improbable as it seemed in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, NATO would become reconceptualised for a Canada that, in 1999, not only was waging war in Europe but was playing a much greater part in security operations in the Balkans than even Germany, and nearly equalling, in its contribution to the aerial campaign against the Serbs, the efforts of Britain and France.³⁴

In steering itself away from its earlier collective defence concentration and towards a new role of conflict management and ‘cooperative security’ (through its embrace of former adversaries in the Warsaw Pact), NATO had become very much a more congenial institution for Canadian instincts than had been the old, Cold War NATO. It certainly did look to have emerged as the alliance of Canada’s dreams.³⁵

Conclusion: Brebner at 60

It was in the context of a looming war in Serbia that I completed the monograph in late 1998. The ensuing combat reconfirmed me in my opinion, expressed in that book, that those who were prepared to write off the Brebnerian metaphor were either misguided or, more charitably, premature in their judgements. Seven years later, I remain uncertain as to which it is, though I suspect it may well turn out to have been the latter.

Many things have changed since the book’s publication in 2000, the most important being the alteration in the threat environment. And even if not all of America’s allies share its assessment of the threat (how could they, as they were not targeted on 11 September 2001?), all understand that an aroused America, seeing itself to be very much at war, is going to be a different kind of partner for them. Some allies, as the 2003 Iraq War showed, were prepared to differ radically from the perspective of Washington, making the Kosovo conflict look, in retrospect, to have been a model of interallied harmony (which it really was not). Other allies, the majority of them as it turned out, supported the United States in the decision to go to war, a few even helping militarily.

Canada was caught in a bind, to put it mildly, by that war. Sharing a continent with an America that was demonstrably in the cross-hairs of terrorism made it both wise and necessary for Canada to be – and to be seen to be – a committed partner in the job of securing the North American homeland. But outside North America, as the Iraq War showed, Canada could and did develop a different assessment of threat and response from Washington’s, agreeing with its large ally on the need for military action in Afghanistan as part of the GWOT but disagreeing that Iraq was a necessary front in that struggle.

Not surprisingly, the downturn in relations with the United States has led some in Canada to envision, once again, some kind of ‘counterweight’ being found in Europe and particularly in the ‘old Europe’ that had opposed the Iraq War. This mood has been bolstered by an increase in the number of Canadians who were prepared to look for, and find, growing divergences in social ‘values’ between themselves and their American neighbours, so that Canada was being increasingly regarded by Canadians as at least as much of a European entity as a (North) American one: in Lawrence Martin’s words, ‘in the struggle for our future, Canada will remain as close to the European model as the American one, which is the way, it seems, the people prefer it’.³⁶

In a manner not seen in the 1990s, when Canadian strategy was characterised by an underlying ‘Holmesian’ preference for working with the United States so as to enable Canada to avail itself of American power as a means of achieving Canadian ends (namely, combatting ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, or spreading the ‘zone of peace’ eastward in Europe), Canadian diplomats were beginning to debate the merits of what could be called a ‘Porfirian’ stance towards the United States (though these diplomats would assuredly not so stylise matters) – so-called because of the lament of early-twentieth-century Mexican President Porfirio Díaz about what he took to be his country’s geographical predicament: ‘Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States’.

And while some of the contemporary Porfirians might imagine the erstwhile European ‘counterweight’ as Canada’s deus ex machina, there is no evidence that the government of Canada today pins much hope in any economic counterpoise being obtained from the old continent. Canada’s latest international policy statement (IPS), released after much delay in the spring of 2005, does reflect upon the wisdom of developing new markets outside North America but one looks in vain for evidence of their being found in Europe. Instead, the document mentions Japan, Korea, the members of Mercosur – and China.³⁷

This gets us to the second major change since I wrote The North Atlantic Triangle Revisited. There has been, in Canadian foreign policy thinking, what one analyst labels a ‘re-emergence of the re-emergence’ of Asia as an object of interest.³⁸ In retrospect, I was wrong to have minimised the medium-term impact that Asian economic vitality – especially on the part of China – might have on the manner in which Canadian policymakers contemplated the country’s strategic interests. My doing so was a result of my having overstated the long-term significance of the Asian currency crisis of 1997, coupled with an inclination to give greater relative weight to a stagnant Japan than I was prepared to accord to a dynamic China. Thus, if it could be said by the late 1990s that the North Atlantic Triangle was holding up rather well in the geopolitical jamboree, and this on economic grounds, something different would have seemed to apply to the first two decades of our current century, when China’s ‘rise’ looked to be the closest thing yet to a geopolitical perpetual-motion machine.

So, if some Canadians would have the triangle become important for the old, defensive-positionalist aim of counterpoise, many others would tell you that the metaphor deserves oblivion. On one final point, however, there is reason to suspect that the Brebnerian imagery, even if not explicitly invoked, will continue to be a feature of Canadian policymaking. Recall that among the derivative metaphors of the triangle was atlanticism. This label has come to stand for a value set that embodies all that Canadian policymakers hold near and dear: liberal democracy, the rule of law, respect for minority rights and reliance upon market economic forces accompanied by a societal safety net. This value set is an historical legacy whose geographic heartland was, even if it does not remain, the North Atlantic Triangle. It is a value set that Ottawa, if it only could, would disseminate as widely as possible throughout the world. And it is a value set that has been given renewed emphasis in the latest IPS, where the ‘fundamental interests’ of Canada are now being identified as prosperity, security and responsibility, with the latter understood as implying the aim of bringing to others the quality of ‘good governance’ that Canada is thought to enjoy.³⁹

Postscript: Brebner at 80

As I write these words today, in 2024, it strikes me that I was being far too timid, in both the 2000 book and the first retrospective assessment of it five years later: if the triangle metaphor had, as I suggested, become transfigured through the complementary symbolism of atlanticism, then ‘Brebnerianism’ is more than alive today. It is alive and kicking, as the transatlantic dimension of Canadian foreign policy continues palpably to be the most vibrant stage upon which Canadian security and defence planning takes place; illustratively, it remains the most relevant site of what foreign military deployments the Canadian Armed Forces undertake. Much more than at either the beginning of the 1990s or even the midpoint in our new century’s first decade, Canadian grand strategy continues to be anchored to NATO. This recentring upon the transatlantic alliance, of course, has a lot to do with Vladimir Putin’s unintended reinvigoration of the alliance, through his decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022.

But there are some other developments that have also resulted in the anchoring. First, the ‘China dream’ of the post-Cold War era has turned into a Canadian nightmare. Few in Ottawa today entertain visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads when thoughts turn to China – visions that at one time were easy and, quite possibly, obligatory – to entertain within the policymaking community. Instead, that community now contemplates the meaning of China for Canadian interests much more as threat and much less as promise, given how Xi Jinping’s ‘wolf-warrior’ diplomacy has made of Beijing a worrisome token of a future order in which great power trumps all other considerations, including and especially those associated with liberal-democratic values.

Second, Canada’s relations with Asia’s other great power, India, have also hit rock-bottom, helped along by allegations publicly voiced by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that India has carried out the assassination of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil. Together, the souring of relations with both China and India has combined to basically put paid to the notion, often bruited in the first flush of post-Cold War optimism, that not only was the twenty-first century to be Canada’s century, but that it was also to be an ‘Asia–Pacific’ century.

The third and final element that has brought the old triangle back to centre stage, albeit garbed in the symbolic cloak of atlanticism, is heightened concern about the future of the American political system, and this at a moment when it becomes ever more possible to imagine Donald Trump as the reincarnation of Grover Cleveland – as the only incumbent president defeated in a bid for re-election to emerge victorious in a third try at the White House (Cleveland accomplished this in 1884 and then again in 1892, after having lost to Benjamin Harrison in 1888). Canada works more closely with the European liberal democracies, hence stresses the importance of the easternmost angle of the Brebnerian triangle, for reasons related to both defensive-positionalist and imaginative-generative diplomacy. In other words, the balance between Holmesian and Porfirian orientations will continue to be in flux, pari passu with the rise or fall in populist-nationalist trends in the United States. What will not change will be the allure of atlanticism to those charged with promoting Canadian strategic interests, as both an inspiration for foreign policy activism and a safe harbour against gathering storms at sea.

Note on contributor

David G. Haglund is Professor of Political Studies at Queen’s University, Canada. His research focuses on transatlantic security, including the concept of a North Atlantic triangle which he explored in his book, The North Atlantic Triangle: Canadian Grand Strategy at Century’s End (2000). Among his other books are Latin America and the Transformation of U.S. Strategic Thought, 1936–1940 (1984); Alliance Within the Alliance? Franco-German Military Cooperation and the European Pillar of Defense (1991); The US “Culture Wars” and the Anglo-American Special Relationship (2019). He has recently completed a book on America’s relationship with France, entitled Sister Republics: Security Relations between America and France (2023).

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Tony McCulloch for his offer to me to revisit the meaning of Brebner’s celebrated book, four-fifths of a century after its initial publication.

Declarations and conflicts of interest