Gotlieb's Canadian Foreign Policy In The 21st Century

Gotlieb see’s Canada’s greatest strength as it’s friendship with the global powerhouse down south, the United States. Also, our close ties with Europe, and our great diplomats and lawyers. Gotlieb saw our relationship with the U.S. as a privilege. In Gotlieb’s essay, “Canadian Foreign Policy in the 21st Century”, he believed that Canada’s ability to effect international events through its influence of the U.S. foreign policy is far more effective than any other course of action that we try. He also stated that another key asset that Canadians often overlook is our historical and cultural affinity with Europe. He saw Europe as a rising superpower and thought that few international initiatives would get very far without its support. He believed that without a strong military, Canada’s efforts at humanitarian interventions would just be seen as all show and no real progress. In Gotlieb’s second essay, “Canada’s Greatest Foreign Policy Challenge”, he spoke about how Canadians take their relationship the U.S. for granted, expecting them to be nice to use no matter what we do to them. He said, “the supreme Canadian challenge” was to manage relations not just with the government of the U.S., but with the highly fragmented governing system of the …show more content…
He does not take into account the multiculturalism of Canadians and a lot of the people who are from European descent don’t really identify with it. For example, in a 2006 census, over 10 million people in Canada said their ethnic origins was Canadian, which was about one third of the country at the time (statcan, 2006). In 2011, 6 million people a identified themselves as a visible minority, which was 19% of the total population, and of those people, 30% were born in Canada (statcan, 2011). Another point that Gotlieb did not see coming was the fall of the United States as the single hegemon in the world, the shift from a unipolar to a multipolar world , and the rise of