The End in Afghanistan

Yesterday, March 12, marked the formal end of Canada's military presence in Afghanistan after more than a decade. The last 100 soldiers lowered the flag and prepared to exit the country. Canada's role in Afghanistan will be studied for years. At the outset, Canada had little capacity to be engaged in military conflict on the other side of the world. That it did so anyway, and quite well, will be the subject of much study in the years ahead. A number of great books already exist, including Eugene Lang and Janice Gross Stein's The Unexpected War (2008), detailing how Canada became involved in the first place. It's still too early to evaluate many of the lessons from Afghanistan. Was it a victory? A defeat? A failure? Or a success? In too many ways, it was none of the above...

Fodder for the Fire (Keystone)

There were two news items regarding the Keystone XL pipeline project that struck me this week, both raising issues I've touched on in previous posts. Late last week, Saskatchewan Premier, Brad Wall argued that Canada needed to give the Obama Administration more "environmental elbow room" to approve the project. Speaking in Ottawa last Friday at the Manning Networking Conference, Wall suggested that Canada could help its cause on Keystone by getting serious about curbing greenhouse gas emissions. In doing so, Canada would undercut the criticism of its own climate change record swirling beneath the Keystone debate and allow President Obama to save face with his most ardent supporters even as he approves the line.

In light U.S. poll numbers released today, Wall's suggestion might actually do the trick.

Obama, Religion, and Trade

If you want to kill a dinner party, you could do no better than mention any of the three words in the title of this post. If you are following U.S. trade policy, these three words in the context of events over the past week would lead you to conclude that President Obama has had a crisis of faith when it comes to the merits of international trade.

At issue is the evident lack of enthusiasm from the White House in pursuit of so-called Trade Promotion Authority from Congress to continue working on two of his signature trade policy initiatives, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP)  and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Much has been written about TPA, formerly known as Fast-Track (See Link for a piece on this by yours truly). For most of the postwar period, some form of delegated trade policy authority from Congress to the Executive branch has been a major component of American foreign policy; TPA is one form of this delegation. Yet, for most of the past two decades, this basic delegation of authority has been either hard won and full of caveats or has been allowed to lapse entirely, depriving the U.S. President of a key set of foreign policy tools. The most recent lapse in TPA began when the last delegation of authority expired in 2007. Given President Obama's recent conversion to the merits of international trade, and progress on two major negotiations, advocates of trade liberalisation thought there would be an important push for a renewal of TPA in 2014, in spite of the looming mid-term election campaign. Evidently not.