Friends with Benefits?

Ten kilometres from where I grew up in Placentia, Newfoundland, sit the remains of the most expensive overseas American military establishment built during the Second World War: Argentia. The Base, as it’s still affectionately known, was born out of great-power political deal making. Winston Churchill needed surplus American warships to sustain the Royal Navy’s fight against Adolf Hitler’s U‑boat scourge, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought basing rights in strategically located British colonies like Newfoundland, not yet a part of Canada.

For us locals, the Base was more than a matter of high-stakes Allied war planning. During its operation, from 1941 until it closed in 1994, the American presence in a patch of rural Newfoundland grew to symbolize the tight bonds between Canada and the United States. Citizens of both countries worked alongside one another, jointly monitored Soviet submarine activity, married one another, started families, and basked in dual Canada Day–Independence Day festivities.

These bonds may be specific to one part of this country, but they are representative of the incalculable number of daily interactions that still take place between the two peoples, giving credence to the idea that there is a “special relationship” between those who reside atop North America. We are, after all, among each other’s largest trading partners (at $1.3 trillion a year), and we were, until 2025 at least, each other’s biggest source of tourists.

Canadians remain voracious consumers of American culture. We are also equally major contributors to it, through actors like Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Oh, filmmakers like Denis Villeneuve and James Cameron, musicians like Shania Twain and Céline Dion, and writers like Margaret Atwood and Malcolm Gladwell. Add an eighty-five-year-old military alliance, America’s oldest, and it’s easy to see why the term “special relationship” is seen by many as an accurate description. It also explains the shock to the psyche we felt when Donald Trump, newly re-elected, began threatening annexation and launching trade wars before he even formally took office one year ago.

That shock seeped into this country’s politics, contributing to the fall of one prime minister and the ushering in of another, while tarnishing the dreams of an aspirant. Suddenly the previous two years of national discussion on foreign interference, including an inquiry into the activities of China, India, Russia, and Iran, seemed quaint.

With generations of bilateral norms torn asunder, a century’s worth of shared institutional infrastructure in doubt, and a relationship that no longer seems special or mutual, Canadians would do well to take a breather and peer into the past, not only to figure out how we got here but to plot the way ahead. Fortunately, three books will help us do just that.

Asa McKercher and Michael D. Stevenson’s Building a Special Relationship: Canada-US Relations in the Eisenhower Era, 1953–61 examines the largely unexplored era of bilateral relations during Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency. Both authors are well positioned to tackle the subject: McKercher holds a chair in Canada-U.S. relations at St. Francis Xavier University and is the author or co-editor of another half-dozen books on international relations. Stevenson is a history professor at Lakehead University and the editor or co-editor of numerous volumes on John Diefenbaker’s foreign policy, as well as a former historian at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. In viewing the countries’ ties through the lens of one president, these authors make use of a novel framing, breaking from the standard approach of seeing Washington through Ottawa’s eyes (John Ibbitson’s The Duel is a recent example of that).

McKercher and Stevenson contend that Eisenhower, sandwiched between the better known Harry S. Truman and the highly revered John F. Kennedy, presided over the institutionalizing of trade and defence relations that endure — albeit under strain. Although such institutions as the St. Lawrence Seaway and the North American Aerospace Defence Command were designed to withstand the ups and downs of disagreements and personality clashes, it was the rapport and shared visions between the two countries’ leaders that made them possible.

Unlike many presidents, Eisenhower had a deep familiarity with Canada and Canadians, having overseen Canadian Army formations in the Second World War in his role as the supreme Allied commander in Europe. With Louis St‑Laurent and John Diefenbaker, Eisenhower had two prime ministers, one Liberal and one Progressive Conservative, who mirrored his own global outlook on the threat posed by Soviet expansionism. Both Canadians were steadfast believers in capitalist democracy and the need to contain Moscow.

But their commitment went beyond words. Canada spent heavily on defence, helping secure the northern half of the continent, waging war in Korea, and assisting NATO in tying down the Red Army in central Europe. It is telling that the 1950s was the last decade in which Ottawa allocated 5 percent or more of GDP to the armed forces, a goal that Mark Carney is now attempting to reach by 2035.

This shared burden earned both St‑Laurent and Diefenbaker a degree of influence in Washington rarely seen before or since. But spending and foreign policy alignment had as much to do with geopolitical realities as with personal vision. As McKercher and Stevenson put it, “The simple dictates of geography gave Canada an outsized importance.” The shortest trajectory for Moscow’s nuclear-armed bombers and missiles to the continental U.S. remains through Canadian skies.

While St‑Laurent and Diefenbaker could answer in the negative to Eisenhower’s requests to support his anti-Communist policies in Southeast Asia or the Middle East, they could not ignore their own neighbourhood. The president made this abundantly clear in an address to Parliament, noting that the continent “is a single physical and geographical entity. . . . Defensively, as well as geographically, we are joined beyond any possibility of separation.” The Eisenhower era also saw Canada break with the British imperial connection, a divergence that began in the First World War and accelerated through the 1940s. Here in North America was another liberal capitalist industrial country, no mere colonial appendage of London. St‑Laurent’s siding with Eisenhower in condemnation of the British-French invasion of Egypt, during the 1956 Suez Crisis, symbolized the rupture between the Old World and the New.

Of course, no decisions come without trade-offs. The turn to the United States saw a parallel rise in English Canadian nationalist sentiment that at times boiled over into outright anti-Americanism — an attitude notably evident in Diefenbaker’s time. Nor did trade disputes dissipate. Although Eisenhower told Hume Wrong, Canada’s ambassador to Washington, that his own free trade credentials “were as strong as ever,” the decentralized nature of the U.S. federal system, with its weak party control and competing interests, made dispute resolution difficult. Consequently, the 1950s saw measures that echo today: restrictions on Canadian dairy imports (clearly an enduring bugbear in Washington) and tariffs on minerals like lead and zinc.

Just as Carney faces obstacles in his quest to diversify trade and military alliances, successive attempts by his 1950s predecessors to stake out a more independent foreign policy proved challenging. St‑Laurent’s efforts to make continental defence a NATO responsibility — thus leaving Canada in a stronger bilateral position — went nowhere. Still, he and Diefenbaker were able to walk a fine line: breaking ranks with Eisenhower and establishing trade ties, however limited, with Communist China and Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

Like McKercher and Stevenson, the editors of History Has Made Us Friends: Reassessing the Special Relationship Between Canada and the United States explore the evolution of the bilateral relationship. Donald E. Abelson and Stephen Brooks, political scientists at McMaster University and the University of Windsor, respectively, have spent years researching American politics. Their book, comprising an introduction and twelve chapters by seventeen authors, moves beyond one era, president, or prime minister and adopts a thematic lens that touches on the border, the Arctic, Quebec, the environment, economic fissures, political leadership, and defence.

First and foremost, Abelson and Brooks are not interested in “semantic quibbling” over what constitutes a special relationship. Questions of definition are a distraction and lead, in Canada anyway, to fetishization and idolizing. They contend it’s our decades-old bilateral institutions that make the relationship, “by any reasonable standard, exceptional in many ways.” Whether it counts as special is beside the point. What matters is that it is a relationship with “few parallels in terms of ‘scope or amity’. . . and is likely to continue to be so for quite some time.”

Each chapter contains nuggets of insight that, taken together, reinforce Abelson and Brooks’s argument that what has emerged is truly a unique experiment in cooperation between two asymmetric countries. On the border, for instance, Trump’s comment last year that the line is “imaginary” provoked outrage in Canada, but it’s not inaccurate. Most frontiers are made up and do not mirror geographic realities or prior human societies. The Canada-U.S. border, still the world’s longest and still non-militarized, evolved over generations of infrequent negotiations, shaped by wars, threats, and politics. One of the earliest arrangements was the 1794 Jay Treaty, which resolved outstanding disputes emanating from the American Revolution. Other lines were drawn in the aftermath of the War of 1812. Only in 1909, with the Boundary Waters Treaty, did the line assume its current shape.

From the Canadian perspective, the border is a settled matter, but, as the political scientist Sara K. McGuire notes, this is not a view widely shared next door, especially since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. “Securing the border” remains a dominant bipartisan issue in Washington, contributing to the rise and fall of electoral careers for both Republicans and Democrats. Trump’s greatly exaggerated claims of fentanyl coming into the continental U.S. from Canada are only the latest instalment in a three-decade narrative that sees us as a lax ally and easy entry point. Even Hillary Clinton once claimed, erroneously, that terrorists came through the Canadian border.

It was not preordained that our countries would become close allies. Brooks writes in his own chapter that “US desires to annex Canada, be they real or imagined, have occupied an important place in the Canadian imaginaire since the early nineteenth century.” Confederation was in part a response to such anxieties, and for this country’s first few decades of life, efforts were made to defend against any American incursion. Canadian railways, for example, used different gauges than American railways to stall a potential invasion, and the Department of National Defence wrote operational plans designed to fight the Yanks as late as 1922. Later in the twentieth century, it became known that the American military brass maintained attack plans against Canada until the 1930s.

Annexation fears continue to have long-lasting cultural ramifications. As seen in McKercher and Stevenson’s analysis of the Eisenhower era, the more integrated Canada became with its southern neighbour, the more heightened sensitivities in postwar Canada became, focusing not on the potential loss of territory but on the erosion of our values, institutions, and sovereignty. Prominent books, such as George Grant’s best-selling Lament for a Nation, from 1965, reflected the public mood in English-speaking Canada. The 1988 federal election, fought on a free trade deal with the U.S., saw such sentiments rise again to the surface, famously captured in a Liberal Party ad showing an American negotiator erasing the border. The 2025 federal election, with its “elbows up” rhetoric, is just the latest illustration.

Geography and the Second World War made the turn to the south a reality. Britain’s struggle against the Nazis, including fending off a feared invasion after the fall of France, demonstrated that Canada needed a new great-power ally. In one of Mackenzie King’s lasting innovations, he and Roosevelt agreed in August 1940 to cooperate in the defence of North America. Building upon a consensus reached in 1939 — the so‑called Kingston Dispensation — the arrangement was grounded in the shared understanding that neither country had exclusive responsibility for continental defence and that neither should pose a threat to the other.

The arrangement remains, in the words of David G. Haglund and Wesley Nicol, “the most important constitutive norm in the realm of Canada-US defence and security cooperation.” And it ignited the building of institutions by St‑Laurent and Diefenbaker, most notably NORAD, the world’s only binational command. Given the contrast between the tone and the threats that Trump has aimed at Carney and the rhetoric deployed against his immediate predecessor, Justin Trudeau, readers might think the theme of personalities influencing bilateral relationships would carry more weight. But this book’s contributors convey mixed messages.

The former diplomat Roy Norton writes that rapport between leaders is great to have but is not sufficient for achieving Ottawa’s objectives. It’s also worth noting that the larger economic and defence relationship has survived relatively untouched during previous bursts of insults and bad blood, such as the frosty interactions between Richard Nixon and Pierre Elliott Trudeau. McKercher and the historian Susan Colbourn helpfully remind readers that for presidents, good ties with prime ministers rarely matter in domestic political calculations (in contrast to relations with Israeli leaders). That dichotomy symbolizes an ongoing “power disparity.” They contend that “Canada’s unwillingness to play a more serious role in the world has made it less special to the US.”

Although the link is not explicitly stated in History Has Made Us Friends, the connection between Canadian involvement in global affairs (be it diplomacy, defence, or development) and compatible personalities is where institutions are built and disputes are resolved. This is a point ably captured by the political scientist Adam Lajeunesse’s chapter on Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan, who overcame bureaucratic impasses in 1985 to settle a dispute involving a U.S. Coast Guard ship travelling through Canada’s Arctic waters.

Compared with either Building a Special Relationship or History Has Made Us Friends, J. L. Granatstein’s Friends and Enemies: Essays in Canada’s Foreign Relations lacks fresh insights pertinent to understanding Canada’s current predicament with the United States. Granted that all of these books were published before Trump’s return to the White House, but this weakness is disappointing considering that Granatstein, one of our most prolific public historians, has never shied from punchy takes (see, for instance, his 2004 book, Who Killed the Canadian Military?).

Here Granatstein has gathered twenty opinion pieces (“essays” would be a stretch given their brevity) that he wrote over several decades, from the 1970s to the 2010s. He contends that the chapters have value as “historical artefacts” and hence did not merit updates or contextualizing to connect with contemporary challenges in foreign or defence policy. Again, that is a shame, because it is easy to imagine where such effort could have taken his articles: providing explanations for how and why some dominant concern in 1970s foreign policy thinking no longer matters or, on the other hand, still persists.

Peacekeeping is one such subject. Granatstein includes four articles on the contributions of Canada’s famed blue berets. Largely repeating the same argument in each piece, he writes that “for too many Canadians peacekeeping has become a substitute for policy and thought” and that Canada’s reputation in these deployments was built on its American ties, including its use of U.S. transport aircraft to move equipment and troops into Cyprus and Suez. Fair enough. But in the 2020s, few Canadians and none of the main political parties are calling for additional support to United Nations peacekeeping missions. In fact, Canada is registering a historic low in troop contributions even while undertaking the largest defence buildup since the Korean War. Such facts should spur an examination of what the fall of peacekeeping means, as both a foreign policy goal and a national identifier. If Canada cannot even undertake such missions without American support, how distinct and independent can our foreign and defence policies be?

As the first year of Donald Trump’s second term ends, the trade war and tariff threats against Canada show few signs of abating. The annexation talk bubbles up occasionally while the president replays threats to seize Greenland and positions military forces for a potential strike on Venezuela. NATO, an alliance whose existence depends on American military and political backing, also faces an uncertain future given the president’s doubts as to its utility for his America First agenda. Mark Carney’s government is attempting to pivot quickly to meet this new dynamic by massively increasing defence spending, restarting trade talks with China and India, and pumping up existing trade and defence arrangements with the European Union.

Even if the prime minister can double exports to other markets in a decade and deepen military ties outside North America, geography assures at a minimum that the U.S. cannot be ignored. The relationship may not be special anymore — or even exceptional — but it is vital to Canada’s existence as a prosperous and secure country. The institutions and close personal relationships linking the two peoples for eight-plus decades could be just strong enough to withstand the rhetorical and fiscal blows of the next few years. If not, we may need to dust off those old defence plans and switch up some railway tracks.