This book analyses the deeply political context of how foreign policy is made in Canada. Taking a broad historical perspective, it provides the key foundations for the analysis of Canadian foreign policy. It argues that foreign policy is forged in the nexus of politics at three levels-the global, the domestic, and the governmental-and that to understand how and why Canadian foreign policy looks as it does, one must look at the interplay of all three.

The fourth edition of this widely-used book includes updates of the many changes that have occurred in Canadian foreign policy under Stephen Harper and the Conservatives, including the evanescence of the internationalism, the rise of a new foreign policy agenda increasingly shaped by domestic political imperatives, and the changing organization of Canada’s foreign policy bureaucracy.