Game Changer: The Impact of 9/11 on North American Security, by Jonathan Paquin and Patrick James, eds.
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702014564667 |
| Date | 01 March 2015 |
| Published date | 01 March 2015 |
| Author | Christopher Sands |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Jonathan Paquin and Patrick James, eds.
Game Changer: The Impact of 9/11 on North American Security
Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014. 310 pp., $95.00 (cloth) $34.95 (paper)
ISBN 978–0–7748–2706–5 (cloth); 978–0–2707–2 (paper)
Reviewed by: Christopher Sands, Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International
Studies and Hudson Institute
When I attended high school in Michigan in the early 1980s, students accepted that
our US history classes would delve deeply into the causes and consequences of the
American Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the world wars of the twentieth
century before touching lightly on the Korean War and the Cold War more gen-
erally. As the end of the school year approached, however, we knew that we would
run out of time before getting to the Vietnam War. For our teachers, that war,
which was ongoing when we were born and entering elementary school, was too
painful and too personal. Some of our parents were veterans of the conflict, which
led to sharply divided opinions within the country, and many of us knew someone
who had died in the war.
Something similar seems to have happened when it comes to the 11 September
2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington—events that have profoundly
affected and reshaped the relationships between the US, Canada, and Mexico. Just
like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 9/11 engendered pol-
itical division and ongoing controversies that linger today, 20 years after NAFTA
and more than a decade since the World Trade Center fell.
In the spring of 2012, I had the honour of co-teaching a course on US relations
with Canada and Mexico at American University’s School of International Service
with the late Robert Pastor. Bob was one of the leading US scholars to address
North American integration, its shortcomings and latent potential, most notably in
his last book, The North American Idea (Oxford University Press, 2011). I sat
beside Bob as he revisited the 1993 televised debate between then-vice president
Al Gore and former presidential candidate Ross Perot, and presented a careful
rebuttal of points made by CNN host Lou Dobbs. Yet, as we came to the events of
September 2001, apart from a few choice words about President George W. Bush,
it was a challenge for either of us to put these attacks, which had been among the
formative events of our students’ childhoods, into any kind of theoretical or schol-
arly perspective. These events were painful to us. We knew people who had died in
the attacks and in the wars that followed in Afghanistan and Iraq. So we spoke of
the border, wait times, and Mexican migration.
Game Changer, edited by Jonathan Paquin and Patrick James, provides readers
with what Bob and I laboured to give our students. The book is a collection of
sparkling and provocative essays by leading scholars from across North America,
including Mexico, on 9/11’s impact on North American security.
Paquin and James include four excellent theoretical chapters to lead off the
volume. Charles F. Doran of Johns Hopkins University employs realism and his
own power-cycle theory in a chapter that questions whether 9/11 was a watershed
Book Reviews 175
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