Trudeau’s World: Insiders Reflect on Foreign Policy, Trade, and Defence, 1968–84 by Robert Bothwell and J.L. Granatstein
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| Author | S. Matthew |
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702018811378 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
somewhat naı
¨ve in counting on his personal relationships with other world
leaders to achieve foreign policy goals, an approach that ultimately disappointed
him in dealing with Deng in China during the horrendous Tiananmen Square
crisis, but which likely served him well in building what was a remarkable
international coalition, created to drive Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces out of
Kuwait during the Gulf War. The contrast between what George H.W. Bush
accomplished in building that coalition stands in marked contrast to the inef-
fectiveness of his son in the second Gulf War, and the disastrous unilateralism
of the current Trump administration. Bush’s cautious approach to foreign policy
may well have been the right one in retrospect. Engels argues that ‘‘even the
most experienced presidents take time to warm to their awesome new respon-
sibilities,’’ and that the worst sins a new administration might make would be
ones of commission rather than omission (477). Bush presided with caution over
the first years of the post-Cold War era, and in general avoided many of the
potential sins of commission in which US power might have enabled him to
indulge during that period of global transformation.
Robert Bothwell and J.L. Granatstein
Trudeau’s World: Insiders Reflect on Foreign Policy, Trade, and Defence, 1968–84
Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017. 412 pp. $45.00 (cloth)
ISBN: 978-0-77483-637-1
Reviewed by: Matthew S. Wiseman (matthew.wiseman@utoronto.ca), University of Toronto,
Toronto, Canada
During the late 1980s, two of Canada’s leading historians in the field of politics and
foreign affairs, Robert Bothwell and J.L. Granatstein, conducted a series of inter-
views as the research base for Pirouette: Pierre Trudeau and Canadian Foreign
Policy (1990), a book commissioned by the Canadian Institute of International
Affairs for its series Canada in World Affairs. The authors revived their original
research to produce Trudeau’s World, amassing scores of unpublished interview
text into a valuable curated collection about Canadian policy in the Trudeau era.
Informed by first-hand accounts, the fresh and prudent perspectives offered in this
book complement and build upon the existing literature.
The collection of interviews is impressive. Well-known ministers and diplomats
such as Paul Martin, Mitchell Sharp, and Gordon Robertson offer insight into the
inner-workings of the Trudeau government. Others comment from the outside,
looking in on the particular events and issues that marked Trudeau’s experience
with foreign affairs, defence, and trade in both the national and international
arenas. Bothwell and Granatstein use geography to organize five of the ten chap-
ters published in this book, providing the reader a separate engagement with
Canadian relations vis-a-vis the United States, Europe, the Soviet Union, the
Far East, and the United Kingdom. Four of the remaining five chapters cover
advisors and ministers, deputy ministers and senior diplomats, defence and foreign
Book Reviews 629
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