Canadian foreign policy has evolved through five phases: lock-step with Britain up to the Second World War, lock-step with Britain and America from Roosevelt’s guaranty of Canada at Kingston in 1938 (“We will not stand idly by” etc.), to a role, sometimes real but usually imaginary, of bridging between those powers when they differed through the collective security post-war era; Pearsonian enthusiasm for international organizations and the aspiration to proactive peacekeeping; Mulroney’s enhanced intimacy with Reagan’s America, in between Trudeau’s and Chrétien’s reversion to Pearsonism with the affected flourishes of “soft power” and intermittently energetic truckling to Russian puppet leaders in East Europe and “Papa Castro” in Cuba.
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