Review: Warming up to the Cold War
| Published date | 01 December 2009 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200906400420 |
| Author | Jack Cunningham |
| Date | 01 December 2009 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
WARMING UP TO THE COLD WAR
Canada and the United States’ Coalition of the Willing, from Hiroshima to Korea
Robert Teigrob
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. 288pp, $55.00 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8020-9923-5
Robert Teigrob’s is hardly the first book-length study of Canadian politics and
foreign relations in the early years of the Cold War. The milestones he cites
are familiar: Igor Gouzenko’s defection and subsequent revelations about
Soviet atomic espionage, the formation of NATO, and the Korean War. So is
his preoccupation with the shift in Canadian attitudes, from expectations of
great-power harmony under UN auspices to acceptance of American
leadership in a bipolar world. Teigrob examines both the making of Canadian
foreign policy and the domestic impact of anti-Communism, and promises
a fresh combination of diplomatic and cultural history.
But he largely misses the opportunity to advance a genuinely new
interpretation of the period. His present-mindedness, which the book’s
subtitle evinces, is one reason why. In Teigrob’s account, the creation of
NATO and the UN-authorized “police action” in Korea were exercises in
American unilateralism, much like the invasion of Iraq. In 1950 as in 2003,
he argues, the preservation of Canadian national sovereignty required
abstention rather than participation. But regardless of whether one agrees
with his recommendations in each case, the analogy between Korea and Iraq
is misleading.
Teigrob’s is a variation on the argument that Donald Creighton and
George Grant advanced. Like them, he holds successive Liberal governments
culpable of betraying Canadian independence by military alliance and
economic integration with the United States. His additions to the original
argument, including a wider apportioning of blame, hardly strengthen his
case. He places less emphasis on direct American pressure than did
Creighton or Grant, and suggests that the Canadian public—which, under
the influence of American media and...
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