Canada consistently balances competing inclinations for proximity and distance with the United States. Yet the extant literature on Canadian foreign policy has rarely focused on this particular behaviour trait or readily accepted that such an ambiguous stance is actually underpinned by a strategic logic, let alone the crux of a purported grand strategy. And the few that that are open to the notion of a Canadian grand strategy often overlook the domestic decision-making determinants of behaviour, are largely empirical-descriptive in content, or are chronologically limited to either the early Cold War or a few key foreign policy episodes. This dissertation rectifies these shortcomings by providing a theoretical-explanatory and empirically-informed account of Canada’s post-war grand strategy, in which its domestic origins, strategic policies, and cultural predispositions are all carefully explored. It does so by applying the cultural-cybernetic model of behaviour, which combines strategic cultural factors that guide policy-makers on security matters with cybernetic policy processes, through which beliefs, inclinations, and policy choices are standardized and regularized as distinct doctrines across a range of foreign, defence, and security policies. It tests this model on two key cases of Canadian grand strategy in the post-war period: (1) Canada’s policy responses to American preferences on strategic (air and missile) defence over some six decades, and (2) its policy responses to US – and to a lesser extent British – strategic preferences on NATO defence strategy during the Cold War. The findings reveal that Canada’s strategic policies fluctuated between the two Standing Operational Doctrines in its policy repertoire: continental soft-bandwagoning and defensive weak-multilateralism. These two doctrines span the range of feasible policy options – the “goldilocks zone” – required to ensure that any trade-offs between security and sovereignty, as the central values being pursued in the cybernetic process, are minimized. It is for this reason that Canada’s strategic behaviour has a high degree of policy continuity, patterned consistency, and is best described as the goldilocks grand strategy.

My doctoral project investigates the impact of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative on transatlantic relations during the period 1983-86. The dissertation focuses on the three main European powers, namely Britain, France, and the Federal Republic of Germany, and examines their reaction to SDI both individually and comparatively. The study exploits SDI’s position at the intersection of nuclear strategy, political ideology, Cold War diplomacy, and industrial politics to offer a multifaceted, multi-national, and primary source-based analysis of US-European relations during the Reagan Presidency. The picture of the transatlantic relationship which emerges from the dissertation is a complex and nuanced one. On the one hand, the analysis argues that relations across the Atlantic during the Reagan era cannot be reduced to a scenario of accelerating ‘drift’ between the United States and Western Europe. Instead, on SDI as well as on other matters, moments of acute friction alternated with a constantly renewed search for dialogue, cooperation, and compromise on the part of the Europeans and also, if to a lesser degree, of the Americans. On the other hand, the ‘exceptionalist’ ideology and worldview underpinning SDI, the prevailing indifference in Washington to its implications for NATO, and most importantly the persistent anti-nuclear rhetoric and ambitions associated with the initiative revealed a distinct lack of sensitivity to European interest by the Reagan administration. As the dissertation shows, the anti-nuclear drive inherent in SDI, which both reflected and reinforced Reagan’s deep-seated interest in nuclear abolition, constituted the most disruptive aspect of the initiative from the viewpoint of European leaders. In these respects, the SDI controversy epitomises the unilateral tendencies and increasingly divergent priorities from those of the European allies which characterised much of the Reagan administration’s foreign policy – making the 1980s a decade of recurrent tensions in transatlantic relations.