Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies

6. Canada in the New American Empire, 1948-1960

171 6 Canada in the New American Empire, 1948–1960 The modern U.S.-Canadian relationship dates from the intensified cold war that began in 1948. Britain’s military and economic weakness, made painfully obvious in 1946–47, created new dilemmas for the other two sides of the “North Atlantic Triangle.” Canada lost its historic British counterweight to the United States, and the United States was forced into Britain’s old imperial role. With dizzying rapidity , the American-led struggle against the Communist specter brought a degree of intimacy between Canada and the United States that the war against Germany had never demanded. Both countries became charter members of the multilateral North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, and a year later, Canada followed the United States into a shooting war in Korea. Soviet nuclear bombs and longrange bombers made Canada indispensable to continental defense against transpolar air attack and prompted a peacetime U.S. presence in the Canadian Arctic and the bilateral North American Air Defense Agreement (NORAD) in 1957. A series of Defense Production Sharing Agreements seemed the logical corollary to military merger, and America’s cold war quest for raw materials security further encouraged economic integration. Unlike earlier periods, U.S. direct investment in Canada and bilateral trade increased simultaneously. The U.S. domestic cold war “Red scare” echoed across the border in attempts to purge alleged Communists from the civil service, politics, the arts, and the labor movement. New cultural tidal waves of television and rock music rolled north as well. During the 1950s, Canada became an integral part of the new American Empire—a more integral part, grumbled nationalists—than it had been of the old British Empire. The main motif in U.S.-Canadian cold war relations was U.S. pressure for cooperation and conformity and an understated Canadian counter- 172 canada and the united states effort for an independent voice. This contest was an unequal one. By 1960, some Canadians came to feel that they had lost it. The United States, Canada, and the Origins of the Cold War The only certainty about the origins of the cold war is that historians will continue to debate them passionately. Historic geopolitical rivalries , prewar ideological conflicts, and strains within the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union perhaps made East-West tension inevitable. Post-1945 contingencies, however, gave momentum to the cycle of measure and countermeasure that launched the cold war in earnest in 1948. The Truman Doctrine, write historians Lawrence Aronsen and Martin Kitchen, “let loose the genie of anti-communism and it was never possible , nor even deemed desirable, to get it back into the bottle.” Thomas G. Paterson has shown how coercive U.S. programs for European economic reconstruction contributed further to ill will, and Gar Alperovitz has shown how the U.S. monopoly of atomic weapons fueled Soviet suspicion of U.S. intentions. Twenty million Soviet casualties in the “Great War against Fascism” left Soviet leadership determined to secure their borders against invasion by creating puppet regimes in Eastern Europe; a Communist coup backed by Soviet military force unseated the coalition government of Czechoslovakia in February 1948. In June, the Soviet Union closed the land corridor through Sovietoccupied Germany to Berlin. The West answered with a yearlong airlift of essential supplies until the Soviets lifted the blockade. After his narrow electoral victory over Republican Thomas Dewey in 1948, President Truman made “meeting the Communist threat” the centerpiece of his program, even if it required the occasional deliberate exaggeration of that threat. His 1949 inaugural address described the North Atlantic Alliance and the Marshall Plan as the foundations of U.S. foreign policy, and Truman won swift congressional approval of the Mutual Defense Assistance Act, which provided billions of U.S. dollars for the military buildup of the “free world.” As if on some perverse cue, 173 In the New American Empire the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic weapon that same year, and China “fell” to communism when Mao Zedong’s Red Army drove the discredited Chinese government of Jiang Jieshi into exile on Taiwan.1 In Washington, a powerful bureaucracy with a vested interest in demonizing the Soviet Union swiftly emerged. The National Security Act of 1947 created the unified organizational structure with which the United States fought the cold war: the integrated Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Council. The official assertion of...