On Canadian Thanksgiving Monday, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney gave a major foreign policy address to the faculty and students of the Virginia Military Institute. He did not mention Canada once.

Yet the speech contained some messages that Canadians may find interesting -- and familiar.

The main...

Last night the first presidential candidates' debate of the 2012 election took place in Denver. It was the start of a new phase in the election campaign -- the final month, when a larger number of Americans, including likely and unlikely voters, begins to pay attention.

It was...

John Mellencamp's song "Small Town" is a catchy reminder of the way the world looks from the perspective of the little communities that dot the United States and Canada, too. It is worth humming under your breath as you read the news that residents of the...

Senator Chuck Schumer, New York Democrat and one of the leading figures in the Democratic majority, wants the U.S. government's Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (known as CFIUS) to intervene to block the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) -- a state-owned firm -- from...

Repatriating convicted terrorist Omar Khadr to Canada to serve the rest of his sentence is the right thing for the Obama administration to offer to do, and the Harper government has a right to say "thanks, but no thanks."

An international campaign to generate sympathy for Khadr as a "child...

Success has many fathers, the saying goes. If only there was a paternity test to sort out the claimants of credit for the Canadian economy.

Canadian author Stephen Marche is the latest to weigh in, with a short opinion piece published on Bloomberg.com. Marche argued two points: first,...

What's in a name? Now that the construction of a second bridge between Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario is moving forward, the question of what to call it is more pressing.

When it was first contemplated, it was referred to as the Detroit River International Crossing, or the DRIC. This...

It took me a few minutes to wipe the coffee off my computer screen this morning after I'd read an article entitled, "How Obama Lost Canada" in the online edition of Foreign Affairs, the Council on Foreign Relations journal. Canada? Lost? Really?

The authors are two...

The first big news out of the Los Cabos G-20 summit was unrelated to the G-20 itself. It was the U.S. announcement that Mexico has won a formal invitation to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership or TPP. On June 19, Canada won an invitation as well. Both...

Michigan is a land of stubborn dreamers. And it is home to loyal skeptics, who doubt it can be done but stand with you when you try and can still embrace you when you fail. Its dreamers must be stubborn to overcome the skeptics; its skeptics must be loyal to...

Canada is showing up in U.S. news media reports more than usual these days, and the stories suggest that a crime wave is underway. How can this be happening in sleepy, quiet Canada?

First it was the lurid reports of feet and limbs being mailed to political party offices in...

If Justin Bieber came by my office and gave me singing lessons and fashion advice, I still would not be able to replicate his teen idol success: I'm too old, and honestly, I don't have enough hair left to adopt his look. He and Jaden Smith can sing "Never Say...

The Camp David Group of Eight (G8) Summit was oddly clarifying. With Europe riven with divisions over the euro and the sclerosis of welfare states in aging societies, the United States wrapped up in increasingly parochial domestic politics, Japan adrift and Russia backsliding into authoritarianism, Canada stood alone...

President Obama and the leaders of the world's most successful alliance -- one that deterred nuclear war and kept the peace in Europe after centuries of conflict -- gather in Chicago this weekend to talk about the future.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, has seen more fighting since...

French voters dumped a controversial conservative president who imposed austerity (albeit a very modest dose) and elected a socialist to take his place last week. One year ago, many acknowledged the unpopularity of Nicolas Sarkozy, but few thought he was beatable. French Socialists were in disarray following the...

In a recent article for Commentary Magazine, international relations scholar and former Reagan administration official Henry Nau suggested two metaphoric approaches to U.S. foreign policy.

The first is the jigsaw puzzle, where players (governments) work together with the pieces to realize an outcome that all...

The reelection victory of Premier Alison Redford's Progressive Conservative Party over Danielle Smith's Wildrose Party in Alberta's provincial election will have implications as far away as Washington, D.C.

Alberta's oil sands have a high profile in the United States, and the Keystone XL pipeline project has become a political football...

Washington's cherry blossoms have come and gone -- a sure sign that now it is "Summit Season." Over the next few weeks, President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Stephen Harper will attend a series of summit meetings. As the two leaders meet and greet one another from one venue to...

U.S. President Barack Obama hosts Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon in Washington for a North American Leaders' summit today. The significance of the summit, which former Prime Minister Jean Chretien used to call "the three amigos," is largely in the fact that it is taking...

This time last year, President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Stephen Harper launched two U.S.-Canada initiatives, one to negotiate greater federal regulatory cooperation, and the other to negotiate border security improvements. One year later, how are they doing on the border?

In Seattle last week,...