[ZephyrLeanne]

I don't particularly know what's going on, but I do know that Japan and Korea are only friendly, trade-wise.

Politically... don't ask me.

On to more news.

Canadians, WATCH OUT.

Diplomats Noted Canadian Mistrust Toward U.S.

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Published: December 1, 2010


WASHINGTON — In early 2008, American diplomats stationed in Ottawa turned on their television sets and were aghast: there was an “onslaught” of Canadian shows depicting “nefarious American officials carrying out equally nefarious deeds in Canada,” from planning to bomb Quebec to stealing Canadian water supplies.

In a confidential diplomatic cable sent back to the State Department, the American Embassy warned of increasing mistrust of the United States by its northern neighbor, with which it shares some $500 billion in annual trade, the world’s longest unsecured border and a joint military mission in Afghanistan.


“The degree of comfort with which Canadian broadcast entities, including those financed by Canadian tax dollars, twist current events to feed longstanding negative images of the U.S. — and the extent to which the Canadian public seems willing to indulge in the feast — is noteworthy as an indication of the kind of insidious negative popular stereotyping we are increasingly up against in Canada,” the cable said.


A trove of diplomatic cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to a number of publications, disclose a perception by American diplomats that Canadians “always carry a chip on their shoulder” in part because of a feeling that their country “is condemned to always play ‘Robin’ to the U.S. ‘Batman.’ ”


But at the same time, some Canadian officials privately tried to make it clear to their American counterparts that they did not share their society’s persistent undercurrent of anti-Americanism.


In July 2008, Canada’s intelligence service director, James Judd, discussed a video showing a crying Omar Khadr, then a teenager and a Canadian detainee at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Mr. Judd “observed that the images would no doubt trigger ‘knee-jerk anti-Americanism’ and ‘paroxysms of moral outrage, a Canadian specialty.’ ”


A cable that briefed President George W. Bush before a visit to Ottawa in late 2004 shed further light on the asymmetrical relationship with Canada — a country, the embassy wrote, that was engaged in “soul-searching” about its “decline from ‘middle power’ status to that of an ‘active observer’ of global affairs, a trend which some Canadians believe should be reversed.”


It also noted that Canadian officials worried that they were being excluded from a club of English-speaking countries as a result of their refusal to take part in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The United States had created a channel for sharing intelligence related to Iraq operations with Britain and Australia, but Canada was not invited to join.


The Canadian government “has expressed concern at multiple levels

that their exclusion from a traditional ‘four-eyes’ construct is ‘punishment’ for Canada’s nonparticipation in Iraq and they fear that the Iraq-related channel may evolve into a more permanent ‘three-eyes’ only structure,” the cable said.


Four years later, after President Obama’s election, the embassy reported that Canadian officials had a different potential irritant: Mr. Obama was far more popular in Canada than they were.


The embassy also said Mr. Obama’s decision to make Ottawa his first foreign trip as president would “do much to diminish — temporarily, at least — Canada’s habitual inferiority complex vis-à-vis the U.S. and its chronic but accurate complaint that the U.S. pays far less attention to Canada than Canada does to us.”


Still, just a few months earlier, during a national election in Canada, the embassy had marveled that “despite the overwhelming importance of the U.S. to Canada for its economy and security,” parliamentary candidates were rarely mentioning anything about relations with their southern neighbor.


“Ultimately, the U.S. is like the proverbial 900-pound gorilla in the midst of the Canadian federal election: overwhelming but too potentially menacing to acknowledge,” the cable said.