Foreign Affairs
Related: About this forumHow Obama Lost Canada
Permitting the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline should have been an easy diplomatic and economic decision for U.S. President Barack Obama. The completed project would have shipped more than 700,000 barrels a day of Albertan oil to refineries in the Gulf Coast, generated tens of thousands of jobs for U.S. workers, and met the needs of refineries in Texas that are desperately seeking oil from Canada, a more reliable supplier than Venezuela or countries in the Middle East. The project posed little risk to the landscape it traversed. But instead of acting on economic logic, the Obama administration caved to environmental activists in November 2011, postponing until 2013 the decision on whether to allow the pipeline.
Obamas choice marked a triumph of campaign posturing over pragmatism and diplomacy, and it brought U.S.-Canadian relations to their lowest point in decades. It was hardly the first time that the administration has fumbled issues with Ottawa. Although relations have been civil, they have rarely been productive. Whether on trade, the environment, or Canadas shared contribution in places such as Afghanistan, time and again the United States has jilted its northern neighbor. If the pattern of neglect continues, Ottawa will get less interested in cooperating with Washington. Already, Canada has reacted by turning elsewhere -- namely, toward Asia -- for more reliable economic partners.
Economically, Canada and the United States are joined at the hip. Each country is the others number-one trading partner -- in 2011, the two-way trade in goods and services totaled $681 billion, more than U.S. trade with Mexico or China -- and trade with Canada supports more than eight million U.S. jobs. Yet the Obama administration has recently jeopardized this important relationship. It failed to combat the Buy American provision in Congress stimulus bill, which inefficiently excluded Canadian participation in infrastructure spending.
Whats more, by engaging in protectionism, Washington has violated the substance and spirit of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the trade bloc formed in 1994 among Canada, the United States, and Mexico. As a result, NAFTA, which was initially intended as a template for broader trade expansion by all three partners, has languished while each country has negotiated a spaghetti bowl of bilateral trade agreements with other countries. Trilateral economic summits among the NAFTA partners have become little more than photo-ops accompanied by bland communiqués. Bilateral meetings between U.S. and Canadian leaders, which were a regular feature of the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush eras, have also mostly fallen by the wayside. Meanwhile, the United States demanded upfront concessions from Canada as the price of entry to negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a regional free-trade group, while preserving massive agriculture subsidies of its own. The protracted wrangling over a seat at the table does not augur well for meaningful progress.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137744/derek-h-burney-and-fen-osler-hampson/how-obama-lost-canada
Drunken Irishman
(34,857 posts)Autumn
(45,107 posts)Autumn
(45,107 posts)the election he will approve the pipeline.
sinkingfeeling
(51,460 posts)bemildred
(90,061 posts)amandabeech
(9,893 posts)Our strong relationships with Canada however, isn't even close to semi-new. The same goes for the UK.
While it is always good to make new acquaintances that one HOPES will turn into solid, new friendships, it is always a bad idea to neglect old friendships that have remained solid over many years, despite the ups and downs that go with established relationships. At times, I have thought that this administration and the previous one have been less hospitable to our old friends than would be optimal.
There's an old phrase in Texas politics: sometimes you hafta dance wit those that brung ya.
I think that the administration owes some of our old friends a few dances.