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The United States has a rich history of intelligence in the conduct of foreign relations. Since the Revolutionary War, intelligence has been most relevant to U.S. foreign policy in two ways. Intelligence analysis helps to inform policy. Intelligence agencies also have carried out overt action—secret operations—to influence political, military, or economic conditions in foreign states. The American intelligence community has developed over a long period, and major changes to that community have often occurred because of contingent events rather than long-range planning. Throughout their history, American intelligence agencies have used intelligence gained from both human and technological sources to great effect. Often, U.S. intelligence agencies have been forced to rely on technological means of intelligence gathering for lack of human sources. Recent advances in cyberwarfare have made technology even more important to the American intelligence community. At the same time, the relationship between intelligence and national-security–related policymaking has often been dysfunctional. Indeed, though some American policymakers have used intelligence avidly, many others have used it haphazardly or not at all. Bureaucratic fights also have crippled the American intelligence community. Several high-profile intelligence failures tend to dominate the recent history of intelligence and U.S. foreign relations. Some of these failures were due to lack of intelligence or poor analytic tradecraft. Others came because policymakers failed to use the intelligence they had. In some cases, policymakers have also pressured intelligence officers to change their findings to better suit those policymakers’ goals. And presidents have often preferred to use covert action to carry out their preferred policies without paying attention to intelligence analysis. The result has been constant debate about the appropriate role of intelligence in U.S. foreign relations.

Canada has sometimes been called the United States’ attic: a useful feature, but one easily forgotten. Of all countries, it has historically resembled the United States the most closely, in terms of culture, geography, economy, society, politics, ideology and, especially, history. A shared culture—literary, social, legal, and political—is a crucial factor in Canadian-American relations. Geography is at least as important. It provides the United States with strategic insulation to the north and enhances geographic isolation to the east and west. North-south economic links are inevitable and very large. It has been a major recipient of American investment, and for most of the time since 1920 has been the United States’ principal trading partner. Prosperous and self-sufficient, it has seldom required American aid. There have been no overtly hostile official encounters since the end of the War of 1812, partly because many Americans tended to believe that Canadians would join the republic; when that did not occur, the United States accepted an independent but friendly Canada as a permanent, useful, and desirable neighbor—North America’s attic. The insulation the attic provided was a common belief in the rule of law, both domestic and international; liberal democracy; a federal constitution; liberal capitalism; and liberal international trade regimes. That said, the United States, with its large population, huge economy, and military power, insulates Canada from hostile external forces. An attack on Canada from outside the continent is hard to imagine without a simultaneous attack on the United States. Successive American and Canadian governments have reaffirmed the political status quo while favoring mutually beneficial economic and military linkages—bilateral and multilateral. Relations have traditionally been grounded in a negotiating style that is evidence-based, proceeding issue by issue. A sober diplomatic and political context sometimes frames irritations and exclamations, but even these have usually been defined and limited by familiarity. For example, there has always been anti-Americanism in Canada. Most often it consists of sentiments derived from the United States itself, channeled by cultural similarities. No American idea, good or bad, from liberalism to populism, fails to find an echo in Canada. How loud or how soft the echo makes the difference.

U.S.-French relations are long-standing, complex, and primarily cooperative in nature. Various crises have punctuated long periods of stability in the alliance, but after each conflict the Franco-American friendship emerged stronger than ever. Official U.S.-French relations began during the early stages of the American Revolution, when Louis XVI’s regime came to America’s aid by providing money, arms, and military advisers. French assistance, best symbolized by the Marquis de Lafayette, was essential in the revolution’s success. The subsequent French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise to power also benefitted the United States when Napoleon’s woes in Europe and the Caribbean forced him to sell the entire Louisiana territory to the United States, in 1803. Franco-American economic and cultural contacts increased throughout the 19th century, as trade between the two countries prospered and as Americans flocked to France to study art, architecture, music, and medicine. The French gift of the Statue of Liberty in the late 19th century solidified Franco-American bonds, which became even more secure during World War I. Indeed, during the war, the United States provided France with trade, loans, military assistance, and millions of soldiers, viewing such aid as repayment for French help during the American Revolution. World War II once again saw the United States fighting in France to liberate the country from Nazi control. The Cold War complicated the Franco-American relationship in new ways as American power waxed and French power waned. Washington and Paris clashed over military conflict in Vietnam, the Suez Crisis, and European security (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO, in particular) during the 1950s and 1960s. Ultimately, after French President Charles de Gaulle’s retirement, the Franco-American alliance stabilized by the mid-1970s and has flourished ever since, despite brief moments of crisis, such as the 2003 Second Gulf War in Iraq.