How does the United States view Canada? As a country too unimportant to deserve any defined policy, or one that is to be used simply to complement the U.S. mission in the world?

This book investigates the gap between Canadian perceptions of American policy toward Canada and actual US policy. Edelgard Mahant and Graeme Mount examine details of White House policy from 1945 to the 1980s to assess the extent to which the United States could be said to have had a Canada policy. They analyze Canada's role in American foreign policy during the crisis days of the Cold War, and they also discuss economic issues, such as natural resources, trade, and investment.

This book takes on and undermines widely held views of American policies toward Canada. It challenges the popular nationalist view that Canada has been treated as peripheral and dependent, but it also counters the opposing view that Washington has respected Canadian advice and benefitted from it. Instead, it argues that for the most part Canada has mattered little in Washington and that America’s Canada policy is largely an ad hoc affair.

Invisible and Inaudible in Washington offers penetrating new perspectives on American-Canadian relations – a topic about which many Canadians thought there was little more to say and about which many Americans have scarcely thought at all.