A Two-Edged Sword: The Navy as an Instrument of Canadian Foreign Policy by Nicholas Tracy (review)

As the winner of the 2013 John Lyman Book Award in Canadian naval and maritime history, A Two-Edged Sword comes with high expectations. But the award is justified. Nicholas Tracy, a University of New Brunswick professor, has produced a valuable monograph based on solid research and nuanced writing. His objective is to ‘explore the ways in which the Canadian government has employed its naval forces to manage its relationship with its powerful friends, Britain and the United States’ (p. 17). He argues that the Royal Canadian Navy since 1910 has been caught between the need to promote independent foreign policy objectives, and therefore also Canada as a sovereign state, while proving useful to its allies and collective security partners. Interdependence is a strong theme in this book and Tracy also stresses the relative insignificance of Ottawa’s maritime muscle in international politics. In the end, Canada’s navy was never meant to be used outside an ‘alliance umbrella’ (p. 316). Its modest influence on national independence and international security must be considered in this light.

Inspired in part by Sir James Cable’s 1971 taxonomy of naval power, Tracy’s balanced analysis details how the Royal Canadian Navy has employed symbolic and substantive force to promote various diplomatic and defence objectives worldwide. The topics and chronology should be familiar to Canadian foreign policy scholars. Well-written and engaging sections on imperial cooperation, the world wars, Canada–US relations, collective security, the Cold War’s emergencies and economic sanctions form the monograph’s core. Tracy also skilfully navigates controversial topics such as Canada’s imperial past and ‘Britishness’, the 1960s integration of the armed forces and the use of naval power in post-2001 humanitarian and policing operations. British imperial and international historians will benefit from this view of Canadian foreign and defence policy-making as much as security and naval researchers will profit from the treatment of international affairs. In an age of specialised academic monographs, this book should be commended for its depth, breadth and accessibility.

It is a great book but it could have been developed in two respects. Tracy’s research in British and Canadian archives is prodigious. Yet despite the strong American presence in this volume, US archival sources are few. Only one document from the National Archives Records Administration (NARA), a 1967 State Department despatch, is cited. He makes good use of published reference materials and the provocative WikiLeaks cables for exchanges after 2003, but relies heavily on secondary material for American opinions. More extensive use of archival sources could have provided new insight on how Washington has perceived Canadian naval politics in the past century. Also, the book’s traditional themes and chronology do not set Canadian foreign policy scholarship in any new directions. While Lincoln Paine’s The Sea and Civilisation: A Maritime History of the World (New York, 2013) offers fresh perspectives for the twenty-first century, it is not clear how Tracy’s volume fits within global and transnational history frameworks. A Two-Edged Sword does not break much new historiographical ground. Still, it charts the scholarly field (or seas) like no other book of its kind.