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107 5 The Inconsistent Neighbour: Canadian Resistance and Support for the US Foreign Policy Counter-Revolution stephen clarkson While all countries have to react to American foreign policy, the United States’ two continental neighbours experience this dilemma with a particularly acute intensity. Given their near-total dependence on selling their exports to American customers and given the enormous power asymmetry between the global superpower and its geographical periphery, Canada and Mexico have encountered unusual difficulty during the opening years of the twenty-first century. They have been forced to reconcile the management of important policy differences with Washington on global matters with the maintenance of good relations with their economic locomotive. Before raising the diplomatic dimension of Canada’s centre-periphery dynamic during the administration of George W. Bush, this chapter will examine to what extent the United States’ forty-third president actually did precipitate a foreign policy revolution. The Bush Counter-Revolution The Tough New International Economic Order Continuity was certainly the subtext as far as the United States’ global economic policy was concerned. Indeed, George H.W. Bush, Sr., had presided over the opening years of the Uruguay Round (1986–94), which had climaxed with the Clinton administration’s triumphant signing of the Marrakech Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization in 1994.1 The resulting World Trade Organization (WTO) signalled that American economic norms were being universalized in a muscular new hegemonic order in order to achieve the silent magic of the powerful new international legal order that President Theodore Roosevelt had begun ninety years earlier—an “open door” for US enterprise in every foreign state’s market. 108 Stephen Clarkson It was muscular because, as Sylvia Ostry observes, it had the strongest dispute settlement mechanism of any international regime (Ostry 2001). It was hegemonic because it was supported by all other capitalist states, in particular, the neo-conservative Canadian governments of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chrétien. This order was imposed on weak states in the global South, which were pressured to sign on with assurances that the liberated market would guarantee them perpetual growth. While these norms had already been challenged through anti-globalization demonstrations in late 1999 in the streets of Seattle by non-governmental organizations from the North and behind closed doors at the same WTO ministerial meeting by many states from the South, Governor Bush remained as committed to global trade and investment liberalization as had Bill Clinton, the man he was campaigning to succeed in the White House. Fostering trade liberalization, which imposed US norms on its economic partners, remained part of Bush’s vision for the world, whether multilaterally with the global defence of intellectual property rights for big pharmaceutical companies in the WTO’s Doha round of trade talks; hemispherically in the push to have the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) model prevail over Brazil’s preference for a more state-driven approach to a free trade area of the Americas;2 continentally with its Central America Free Trade Agreement (2004); or bilaterally by signing trade deals with Chile and Singapore (United States 2002, 18). The Soft Political Global Order While a global regulatory regime favouring the further expansion of US transnational capital suited the Republicans just fine, Governor Bush clearly wanted to change the Democrats’ internationalism. In light of the Clinton-mandated offensive to free Kosovo from Serbia, the Texan’s admonition that the United States should be humble in its foreign policy suggested a less interventionist, more withdrawn global stance. Once ensconced in the White House, however, Bush gave conflicting signals, appointing the moderate Colin Powell to the Department of State while giving the aggressive Donald Rumsfeld control of the Pentagon. His own positions on matters international were telegraphed by Condoleezza Rice whom he installed as national security advisor. Pupil and professor interacted constantly, whether in the White House gym or the Camp David woods. She talked about proceeding “from the firm ground of the national interest and not from the interest of an illusory international community” (Hirsh 2002, 32). He described his foreign policy as a “new realism” in which America’s efforts should steer clear of what he disparaged as “international social work.” Instead, it should return to cultivating great power relations and rebuilding the military (Ikenberry 2002, 46). In sharp distinction to Clinton’s foreign policy, the Rice doctrine’s implementation delivered a series of blows to the international order that had been [3.137.185.180] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 15:36...

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