Realism more than idealism governed Trudeau's relations with U.S. presidents from Nixon to Reagan
David Migicovsky
By Mark Hume
National Post
A few weeks after he became prime minister in the spring of 1968, an
American cartoon commented on Pierre Elliott Trudeau's image. Young,
striking, Trudeau was shown speeding his Mercedes convertible past two
toothless, gibbering relics, the then U.S. presidential candidates Hubert
Humphrey and Richard Nixon. "Style makes the man," Trudeau used to say, and
if style was his measure he made an impact, however briefly, on the
American imagination.
Nothing was quite as it seemed. Trudeau, at 48, was not as youthful as his
admirers wished; and Nixon was not as decrepit as his enemies prayed. The
cartoonist got one thing right: Trudeau would be a change of a kind that
the grey profession of politics had not seen before and especially in
Canadian-American relations. What would a self-professed outsider make of
the insider's game that was Canada's linkage to the United States?
Trudeau was, in politics, a realist. He knew that the United States was an
inescapable fact, Canada's major ally and trading partner. Americans had a
use for Canada, and Canadians for the United States. They were
geographically neighbours, and culturally similar. But he viewed the
Americans unsentimentally. They would, in a pinch, follow their own
national interests and if those clashed with Canada's, too bad. Great
powers, Trudeau believed, had their spheres of interest and influence, and
Canada lay within the American. Logically, therefore, Canada must do what
it could to get along with the United States.
Canadian-American relations were not in the best shape when Trudeau took
office. The previous prime minister, Lester B. Pearson, was barely on
speaking terms with the American president, Lyndon Johnson. The issue was
the Vietnam War, unwinnable on Johnson's terms and perhaps on any. The war
spawned riots and demonstrations in the United States and sent tens of
thousands of American draft-dodgers across the border to uninvolved Canada.
The Pearson government had tied itself into knots in attempts to bring the
war to an end and the result had been practically nil, except for American
ill feeling at Canada's obtrusive preachiness.
When Trudeau became prime minister, Vietnam ceased to be an issue in
Canadian-American relations. There was no danger of the war spreading, by
1968. The Canadian government would wait for the United States to make up
its own mind. When it did, and if it asked, then Canada would help, but not
before.
Trudeau concentrated instead on redefining Canada's basic interests in
foreign policy. After an exhaustive series of studies, in March, 1969,
Trudeau brought the issue of Canadian membership in and commitments to NATO
to the Cabinet. By noon, one minister recalled, the ministers thought an
alliance was a good idea, and somewhat later, with the United States, and
later in the day "we were in NATO." The process masked a fierce dispute
over the nature of Canada's alliances among ministers, and the result was a
compromise, halving the size of Canada's garrison in Europe.
It appeared to be a blow to Canada's American connection, yet some weeks
earlier Trudeau had carefully informed the new American president, Richard
Nixon, of what he might be doing. Interesting idea, Nixon replied. There
were those in the United States -- he might be among them -- who were
thinking along similar lines. It was the European allies who were outraged
at Trudeau's partial withdrawal of Canadian troops, not the Americans.
In Nixon's cold-blooded universe there was no special place for Canada, and
Trudeau was right not to count on American sentiment as a factor in U.S.
policy as long as Nixon was president. It was also true that Nixon did not
like Trudeau and left behind a few obscenities as his memorial to his
Canadian counterpart. To Nixon's staff this was ordinary behaviour from a
man deeply unsure of himself -- in Norman Mailer's phrase, Nixon was
someone who "violated himself in public" as his stock in trade. Lack of
self-assurance, of self-definition, was never Trudeau's problem.
Nixon posed difficulties for Canada. The U.S. president was not especially
skilled at alliance management -- he was better with adversaries -- and he
preferred to focus on great political issues. Ending the Vietnam War was
his first priority, and end it he did, eventually. Economics was something
Nixon unwisely left to his belligerent treasury secretary, John Connally.
When Connally unilaterally decided to rewrite the rules of international
trade and finance in 1971, Nixon backed him up, with no serious concern for
the interests of American allies. Only an accident, followed by the
intervention of the U.S. Secretary of State, saved the American auto pact
with Canada from the scrap heap. (The press release authorizing its demise
had already been mimeographed.) The relationship with Canada was too
important to be treated in this way, Nixon was told, and to Connolly's
irritation he ordered the press release pulled.
Trudeau had nothing to do with this episode. But when Connally insisted
that Canadian-American relations be recast according to his prescription,
Trudeau's government stood firm. In December, 1971, the prime minister
visited Nixon and together the two men poured oil on waters troubled by
Connally's unilateral exercise. The Canadians survived practically
unscathed and with fewer concessions to Connally than other allies.
In Ottawa, some mourned the end of the "special relationship" with the
United States. The same people, however, refused to believe that the auto
pact had ever been in danger, and that it was Americans who rescued it,
demonstrating, incidentally, that the "special relationship" still had some
life in it.
It was true that if the Americans had Connally once, they might get
somebody like him again. Trudeau and his foreign minister, Mitchell Sharp,
decided that putting all Canada's eggs into an American basket might be
unwise, and plumped instead for what was called "the Third Option." (The
name comes from the civil service practice of offering ministers three
options to choose among, only one of which, the third, is plausible.) The
Third Option prescribed special relationships between Canada and Japan and
Canada and Western Europe. It was an elegant formula, and it seemed to
contain an antidote to excessive Canadian dependence on the United States.
Canada would diversify its trade and distance itself somewhat from the
Americans. Its intellectual attraction of this idea for Trudeau was strong;
its only failings were the complete lack of interest by the Europeans and
Japanese, and a lack of enthusiasm among Canadian businessmen for changing
relationships that already served them well.
The significance of the Third Option was its failure. That took a while to
register, but when it did it propelled Canadian trade policy, even while
Trudeau was still prime minister, in an entirely different direction. It
was the Trudeau government that in 1983 proposed "sectoral free trade" to
the United States, itself an impractical idea, but the clear precursor of
the free trade negotiations that were to follow under Brian Mulroney.
With the election of a separatist government in Quebec in November, 1976,
Canadians were reminded of their dependence on the American neighbour. The
newly elected American president, Jimmy Carter, let it be known through
deed and word that the United States did not favour the breakup of Canada.
Carter invited Trudeau to Washington and arranged for him to address a
joint session of Congress. Trudeau rose to the occasion. "I say to you with
all the certainty I can command that Canada's unity will not be
fractured," he told his audience. American goodwill proved to be important,
and on the issue of Quebec separation it remained firmly on Trudeau's side,
an important if intangible advantage for anti-separatist forces in Quebec.
Carter was the only genuine liberal to occupy the White House during
Trudeau's time in office. The two men got on well, it would appear, but
more on general principles than mutual attraction. Remarkably, it was
Trudeau who found Carter too serious. The prime minister did not know that
members of his own staff tried not to sit next to him on long flights
because of his notorious gravity.
Trudeau helped Carter out on energy policy, and attended the signing of a
controversial treaty in Washington handing the Panama Canal over to its
host country, Panama. At meetings of the Group of Seven -- to which Canada
had been invited courtesy of Carter's predecessor, Gerald Ford -- the two
countries enjoyed common interests and said so.
Yet Trudeau and the didactic, earnest Carter were not soulmates; it was
said that Trudeau preferred the easygoing skiing companionship of the
unintellectual but solid Ford and regretted the departure of Ford's and
Nixon's brilliant secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. One of the perks in
being prime minister was that one could command occasional performances
from Dr. Kissinger, listening to the secretary range over the state of the
world. Kissinger, who liked a good audience, called Trudeau "elegant,
brilliant, enigmatic, intellectual," words that he might have applied to
himself.
Kissinger was the apostle of détente between the Communist and anti-
Communist powers, and the architect of the American breakthrough in
relations with China. These were policies that Trudeau approved, and
through the 1970s he seems to have been generally content with the balance
of power between East and West. The balance was never entirely stable. The
American defeat in Vietnam for a time deterred the United States from an
active foreign policy, and it encouraged the leaders of the Soviet Union to
believe that time as well as great historical Marxist forces were on their
side. When in 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and in 1981 when
the Communist government of Poland proclaimed martial law Trudeau was
reluctant to draw conclusions. When Carter began to rearm, Trudeau was
mute, and when Carter organized a boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow,
Trudeau was slow and obviously unwilling to go along with him.
Yet at the same time Trudeau, and Canada, went along with NATO's decision
to respond to the forward placement of Soviet missiles with missile
deployments of its own. When the time came to test American cruise
missiles, which were part of the deployment, Trudeau had no hesitation in
lending Canadian air space, dismissing opposition from the Canadian peace
movement as uninformed. (Officials around Trudeau regarded the peace
movement as at best unbalanced and uncritical of the Soviet Union, and at
worst Soviet-inspired.)
Carter was swept away in the American election of 1980. His successor was
no liberal and no intellectual: Ronald Reagan, the former movie actor and
governor of California, and the standard bearer of the right wing. Trudeau
and Reagan failed to get along. Reagan was a man of grand visions; he had
little interest in details and none at all in arguments, even of the kind
Trudeau had had with Nixon. Reagan's staff organized his meetings with
foreigners so as not to expose their chief to contradiction or argument,
knowing that if it ever came to illustrating his argument Reagan would not
know what to say. When Reagan visited Ottawa, time was set aside to discuss
important world issues. When the agenda got to Arab-Israeli relations,
Reagan launched into a five-minute joke about the misadventures of two
Israeli soldiers who fell asleep while on patrol. When they woke up they
were surrounded by the Egyptian army. Knowing there was a bounty for each
prisoner they brought in, one Israeli turned to the other and said, "look,
we're rich." Pleased with his punch line, Reagan sat back. "You should have
seen Trudeau's face," a witness later said. On another occasion, after a
Group of Seven meeting, Trudeau paced in the garden with his foreign
minister. "Grade Two," he said of Reagan's performance. "Grade Two."
Convinced that Reagan was not a serious person, and alarmed by his
assertion that the Soviet Union was "an evil empire," Trudeau began to
worry that he might actually bring on a confrontation with the Soviets, and
a nuclear war.
Canadian-American difficulties were not simply multilateral. In 1980 the
Trudeau government brought in the National Energy Program, designed to
assert Canadian control of Canadian oil resources, often to the detriment
of foreign (American) investment. The Americans protested, often and
bitterly. They considered retaliation, such as dis-inviting Canada from the
Group of Seven (something the French government would have welcomed). But
once again the importance of the Canadian-American relationship came to the
rescue. Retaliation would be disproportionate and the results as
distressing to American interests as to Canadian. Time and circumstance
would take care of Trudeau's energy program, which was premised on high and
perpetually rising oil prices. When prices fell, so did the National Energy
Program.
The final episode of Trudeau's prime ministership also involved the United
States and Reagan. Soviet-American relations seemed to be at their lowest
ebb in the fall of 1983, after the Soviet Union shot down a Korean
airliner, and with clear evidence from intelligence sources that the Soviet
leadership actually believed that a Western attack was imminent. That was
not true, but with tensions heightened there was the possibility that an
accident might set off an East-West war. It was in these circumstances that
Trudeau set off on what was called his "peace mission," preaching peace and
mutual trust to whatever world leaders he could find to listen to him. "Why
is he here?" one East European diplomat asked his Canadian counterpart as
Trudeau stepped off his official jet. The Canadian had no convincing
answer.
Trudeau did visit Reagan in Washington and was received politely. The two
men parted with official reassurances and superficial goodwill. But Reagan
(and more importantly Reagan's entourage) knew what the prime minister
thought of the president, and what the president thought of the prime
minister. The peace mission fizzled out, a reminder that the practice of
Canadian good intentions had not died with Lester Pearson, or with the
Vietnam War.
In Trudeau's 16 years as prime minister, the basic facts of Canadian-
American relations did not change. Canada continued to resemble the United
States -- even French Canada, where separatists liked to believe that they
and not pale English-Canadians were the true red-blooded pro-Americans. The
proportion of Canadian trade going to the United States continued to rise,
and Canada remained the United States' largest trading partner, as it had
been since the 1920s. Size, proximity and similarity worked their magic,
and did so practically without interruption. In the only serious threat to
the stable and smooth functioning of Canadian-American relations,
Connally's abortive attempt to cancel the auto pact, the "special"
relationship came to the rescue.
Trudeau had not been much attracted by the "special" relationship, but he
helped it function, for the most part, without difficulty. His style was a
bonus for the Americans who dealt with him. And the substance, after all,
remained the same.
>>David ========>
--
David Migicovsky, Evil Overlord of ACF
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