The U.S. needs a few good allies. Does it still need Canada?

There's a brief, delicious little vignette at the beginning of military historian Tim Cook's latest book that neatly captures the essence of Canada's decades-long national security and defence relationship with the United States.

Speaking in Kingston, Ont. with Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King at his side, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that «the people of the United States would not stand idly by if domination of Canadian soil is threatened by any other Empire.»

King — who obviously didn't know what the president was going to say ahead of time — was apparently gobsmacked by the assurance, Cook wrote in The Good Allies: How Canada and the United States Fought Together to Defeat Fascism During the Second World War.

Roosevelt's promise, made on Aug. 8, 1938 in the face of rising fascism in Germany, Italy and Japan, has formed the political bedrock of Canada's national security ever since — much to the delight (and chagrin) of Canada's political establishment down the decades.

At the time, King apparently saw the remark for what it was — a historic declaration from a like-minded democracy. He also understood the unspoken aspect.

«It was also a threat of sorts; that the United States would trample Canadian sovereignty if it saw a foreign menace north of the border,» Cook wrote.

In 2024, that aspect of Roosevelt's remarks has lost much of its menace. It has been replaced with what former top Canadian national security officials often describe as a deepening sense of exasperation and frustration in Washington with the shiftless attitude in Ottawa that the pledge seems to have created.

Cook documents in his book, often in vivid detail, the genesis of the Canada-U.S. security relationship — lately dominated by