Canada And Nato Essay, Research Paper
Book Report
In the book entitled Canada, NATO and The Bomb: The Western Alliance in Crisis by Tom Keating and Larry Pratt the main issue discussed was Canada s position in Europe, North America and their view on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It went into specific issues dealing with political tension within Canada and tension outside Canada with other countries. It went through the years of different political parties and how they dealt with the matters of NATO.
It states Canada s opinion dealing with matters such as the alliance, war, and decision making with other countries involved in NATO. The book came across Canada s decision making as though Canada went along with the decisions made by other countries. Canada, NATO, and The Bomb is not a book to inform it is a history book. It addressed issues that had happened previously and stated the type of involvement Canada had in it. In most cases, a book dealing with these sensitive issues, which involved other countries, would provide the pros and cons but in this case only the cons of NATO and the alliance were provided.
This book showed NATO as being an organization that is very unorganized. It came across as though the countries involved did not respect each other s thoughts and opinions. It dwells on the mistakes made by countries for example the United States, various other European countries. It made it seem as though NATO was in conflict within each other making the organization as a whole seem incapable of compromise and the defence of anything. At many points NATO wanted to vote the United States out of the organization but this obviously never happened. At one point it was a problem about the possibility of being dominated and ultimately overwhelmed by too close an association with the United States (pg.30) for Canada and their relationship.
The themes of the book were Canada and its position in NATO and NATO s and its position in the world. The
Canada or the Canadian Government in particular, was expressed as if they had no mind of their own. It seemed as though the government was pushed or bullied into joining NATO because they were afraid of what other countries, specifically United States and England, would think therefore making decisions to accommodate them. Canada never seemed to take blame for anything they always put the blame on someone else because they came across as being insignificant. Close to the end of the book Canada was rarely mentioned making it seem as if they had no importance.
The style of writing in this particular book was somewhat complex and would not be recommended to anyone not of the university level. The sentence structure was too long and drawn out. Because of the sentences being so long in many cases it was difficult to catch the point Keating and Pratt were trying to make. This book did not involve pictures or any other type of graphical images. Visualizations had to be done on the part of the reader.
The overall writing of the book was poorly done only because the authors did not go in a chronological order. They went back and forth between governments and years example 40 s to 60 s, 50 s to 70 s, King to Trudeau, Pearson back to King etc. This was found confusing because of little knowledge on Canada s position.
This is an overall repetitive, boring, and uninteresting book. The topics discusses may not have been glamorous could have done a better job at keeping the reader interested and wanting to read more.