Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies

9. Republicans and Tories, 1984-1993

261 9 Republicans and Tories, 1984–1993 After 1984, with Republicans Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in the White House, and Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s majority Conservative government in power in Ottawa, U.S.-Canadian relations shifted toward significantly greater ideological affinity that paved the way to accommodation on once-divisive issues. The international context for the relationship during the decade began with an escalation of the cold war and ended with the toppling of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Two developments symbolized the transformation in North America: Canada and the United States transcended the political barriers that had long defeated efforts to conclude a free trade agreement in 1987, and the Mulroney government made Canada a member of Organization of American States in 1989, although it did not sign the now obsolete cold war Rio Treaty. Military cooperation expanded after George H. W. Bush succeeded Reagan, as the Mulroney government endorsed the Bush administration’s invasion of Panama in December 1989, and Canada became America’s enthusiastic junior partner in the U.S.-led Gulf War against Iraq in 1991. The 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement among Canada, the United States, and Mexico created a North American free market that would have been unthinkable in the Canadian political environment a decade earlier. The United States and Canada in a Changing Global Context The tensions over the Trudeau government’s National Energy Policy and Canadian screening of foreign investment had eased by the time 262 canada and the united states that Pierre Trudeau left office in 1984. His replacement, Liberal finance minister John Turner, held the prime ministership for only weeks before Mulroney’s Tories drove the Liberals from power in Ottawa. Mulroney ’s arrival and Reagan’s second mandate marked a more general international trend toward the more conservative, probusiness policies labeled “neoliberalism” by scholars and “conservative” in popular discourse. Even Mexican president Miguel de la Madrid was drawn toward neoliberal economic policies in the new North American environment . This new conservatism depicted its dedication to market economics as nonideological, at the same time that it intensified the rhetoric of the cold war. This incongruity was heightened by Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascendance in the Soviet Union, which brought détente, internal economic reform, and eventually the demise of the Soviet system.1 Ronald Reagan entered office in 1981 and pledged to restore U.S. international prestige after what he described as years of humiliation for the United States: the defeat in a “noble cause” in Vietnam; the embarrassment of the Iranian hostage taking; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan ; another oil embargo; the fear of economic decline; and the perception that communism had won a new foothold in the hemisphere with the Sandinista ouster of the Somoza government in Nicaragua, all in 1979. The Reagan administration pledged itself to a Hollywoodstyle world struggle with the Soviet Union, the “evil empire” in the president’s idiom. Reagan ludicrously called the anti-Sandinista mercenaries in Nicaragua “freedom fighters” and praised Oliver North, the National Security Council member who ran the scandalous IranContra operation, as a national hero. The president articulated what came to be known as the Reagan Doctrine: a promise to support antiCommunist movements anywhere in the world that resisted Soviet and Soviet-surrogate forces. Reagan boosted the military budget and expanded U.S. forces abroad at the same time that his administration reduced foreign aid. George Ball, undersecretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, suggested that Reagan’s message to the poorer countries of the world could be characterized “by a cartoon of the Thomas Nast genre showing a bloated millionaire descend- 263 Republicans and Tories ing from his limousine to tell a group of ragged urchins: ‘Why don’t you do as I did, utilize the free market and you’ll all be rich.’”2 The sense of American decline did not originate with Reagan, however : it brought him to office. President Carter had warned Americans in 1979 against “a crisis of confidence . . . that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of national will.” The Reagan Republicans exploited this fear that the United States would yield world leadership to Japan and the European community. U.S. debt had mushroomed; the American share of world trade seemed threatened, and the United States appeared to have lost international leadership in technological innovation . The economic and political...