Getting Back in the Game: A Foreign Policy Handbook for Canada by Paul Heinbecker

Author:Paul Heinbecker [Heinbecker, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Diplomacy, American Government, National, Political Science, Post-Confederation (1867-), History, Canada
ISBN: 9781459701670
Google: kzmqYA0s_VwC
Goodreads: 16251790
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2010-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

We must build a world with more partners and fewer adversaries. America cannot solve the most pressing problems on our own, and the world cannot solve them without America. The best way to advance America’s interests in reducing global threats and seizing global opportunities is to design and implement global solutions. That isn’t a philosophical point. This is our reality.

It is also Canada’s reality. And it is a major departure from the world view of the Bush administration.

Since Obama came to office, the US has paid its arrears to the un, or at least most of them, joined the Human Rights Council, signed the Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and embraced the Millennium Development Goals designed to set targets and time frames for economic and social development in the UN'S poorer countries. The same co-operative policy principles apply in the Obama administration’s approach to other multilateral organizations, both the old—the IMF, the World Bank, and NATO—and the new, such as the UN 20 and the Financial Stability Forum. NATO, which has long been dominated by the US, is central to managing two major files, Afghanistan and Russia, and significant on others, including arms control and disarmament.

To a considerable extent, the Obama administration has staked its reputation on inducing co-operation by others. Speaking to the Clinton Global Initiative in September 2009, former president Clinton’s international foundation, Obama stressed that isolation was impossible in the modern age, and that no one nation, no matter how large and powerful, could meet contemporary challenges alone. Nor could governments do so. New partnerships across sectors and across societies were essential. In short, what was needed, according to President Obama, was “a new spirit of global partnership.”

The Obama administration has been at pains to persuade the international community that the US means it when it says it seeks the co-operation of others. Still, after years of growing American unilateralism and imperial flirtations, Washington’s emphasis on working with others to meet common ends is met with understandable caution. The words have been very welcome, but judgments remain suspended pending actions.

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