bout de papier, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1989), pp. 42–43
Diplomacy of Fear: Canada and the Cold
War, 1941-1948, by Denis Smith, University
of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1988, 289 pp.
$35.00.
by Donald Barry
In recent years, the simplistic traditional interpretation of the cold war as a defensive American response to Soviet expansionism and its revisionist counterpoint, which presented the conflict as a necessary Soviet reaction to U.S. imperialism, have yielded to a more sophisticated understanding of the rise of postwar Soviet-American antagonism. In Diplomacy of Fear, Denis Smith sets out to reassess Canada’s wartime and early postwar foreign policy in the light of this “post-revisionist consensus.” Focusing on “how the Canadian government saw the political confusions of the post-war years from its unique perspective between Britain and the United States, and how it responded to them,” he traces the evolution of Canada’s policy from the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, through the creation and break up of the allied wartime coalition, to the negotiations of March 1948 that led to the establishment of NATO.
Smith accepts the inevitability of the cold war and recognizes that Canada, like Britain and the other western European countries, had little choice other than to rely on U.S. might to offset the Soviet challenge but, he asserts, “Fear of the Soviet Union overrode and suppressed Canadian anxieties about the potential misuse of American power. “ While agreeing that “Canadian diplomats sensed, and sought increasingly to make use of, the country’s limited range of diplomatic manoeuvre in the United Nations and the Commonwealth,” he suggests that Ottawa could have done more to moderate east-west tensions.
Smith’s case is not persuasive. Amplifying recommendations made within the Department of External Affairs shortly after the war, he offers only two suggestions as to how the government might have acted differently. These were increased military activity in the north as a means of reducing Canada’s defence reliance on the United States and enhancing its freedom of action vis-à-vis Washington, and the adoption of a crash program to train experts on American and Soviet politics and foreign policies “which would have sharpened Canadian perceptions and created fresh opportunities for Canadian initiatives on the margin of the Cold War after 1948.” It is hardly surprising that Canadian and U.S. attention should have focused on the North Atlantic area rather than North America during this period because it was in Europe that the Soviet challenge was first posed. And, with External Affairs resources stretched to the limit by the demands of early post-war expansion, it is far from self-evident that the proposed training program could have been implemented. Moreover, with Dana Wilgress, Robert Ford, John Holmes and John Watkins successively heading the Canadian mission in Moscow and Hume Wong following Lester Pearson as Ambassador in Washington, the Government assigned some of its most experienced officers to both capitals.
It should be noted that during the 1950’s, when External Affairs was in a position to do so, it adopted the British practice of providing Russian language training for selected officers and posting them to Moscow early in their careers and reassigning them to the Soviet Union in more senior positions later on.
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1989), pp. 42–43. Read the rest of this issue →
