Coping with a post‐cold war environment

This paper asks how successful the Liberal government has been in fulfilling the pre‐election foreign policy promises it made. The context of Canadian foreign policy since the end of the cold war, the Conservative government's foreign policy, and the Liberal's foreign policy promises and record are examined. The five specific promises include: new directions in Canada‐US relations; peacekeeping; foreign aid; multilateral for a; and open foreign policy‐making. Knight concludes that the extent to which the Canadian government is able to keep its foreign policy promises is directly linked to external and internal aspects of the changing international political environment. The differences between the Conservative and Liberal governments’ foreign policies were discovered to be very small. Once in government, the Liberal Party has discovered that foreign policy promises are much more easily made than kept.