The estimable American military writer Max Boot, a guerrilla-war expert associated with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, wrote in Commentary magazine last month that Canada is a country that most Americans consider a “dull but slavishly friendly neighbor, sort of like a great St. Bernard.”

That’s true. The world knows Canada as a comparatively blameless country that has not been the author of atrocities on the scale even of other democracies such as the British at Amritsar, the French under the German occupation or in Algeria, or the outrages routinely committed in the United States against African-Americans even after what Abraham Lincoln called “the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil” (slavery).

In fairness to earlier Canadians, it was hard not to be overshadowed by the United States and the British Empire for the first century of Confederation. During the Second World War, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt inspired the whole world and led the great revival of democracy. President Roosevelt pledged the protection of Canada in a speech at Queen’s University in Kingston in 1938, and the United States has been Canada’s guarantor ever since.

Most nationalities are relatively colorless compared to the Americans, and not only because of the American genius for showmanship, which goes all the way back to the Declaration of Independence, and has certainly been amplified by its creation and domination of the motion-picture industry. And it is a very dramatic country in the natural flow of its history, born of revolution, preserved by a terrible civil war, with each new sociological group advancing its grievances in a climate of violence: the racial murders, lynchings, and riots; the assassinations of presidents, civil rights leaders, and even gay rights advocate Harvey Milk, and terrorist attacks culminating in the infamous assault of 9/11.

In all of the circumstances, Canadians are not to be too much reproached for a foreign policy that consisted of tugging at the trouser-leg of the Americans and the British, followed by low-cost, low-risk, low-return peacekeeping and a good deal of sanctimonious piffle about “soft power” (which only has any credibility when there is a hard-power alternative to hand). As a jurisdiction, Canada generally followed the Britain fairly mechanically until after the Second World War. And to people from overseas, English-speaking Canadians are almost indistinguishable from Americans from northern states. Canadians have the benefit of American life and society being almost entirely accessible; it is natural and inevitable that they should have to bear the downside of such indistinctiveness also.

And yet Max Boot’s few words (contained in a review of Eliot A. Cohen’s new book, “Conquered into Liberty: Two Centuries of Battles Along the Great Warpath that Made the American Way of War”) are quite offensive. Because a nationality is apparently similar to a large region of his own countrymen should not be a subject of disparagement. And an unsurpassed record as a loyal ally should not be the butt of pejorative acerbities. The insult is magnified by coming from Mr. Boot, who is a very courteous man, not at all the bumptious opinionated “Ugly American” of the news talk shows and elsewhere with which the world is painfully familiar; and by being a gratuitous throwaway in a review of a book about frontier skirmishing on the Canadian-American border from the 17th to 19th centuries.

What makes Canada dull to the Americans for whom Max Boot speaks is the comparative absence of violence, and the lack of the great American hype and star systems that elevate teeming annual crops of evanescent and vapid American celebrities into icons strutting and fretting their brief hour on a vast stage before 90% of them join the Pentagonal pantheon of American triviality. What makes Canada dull is precisely what makes America violent and garish — its least attractive, though not, unfortunately, its least prominent characteristics.

No objective Canadian would claim to be a member of the world’s most spontaneous, flamboyant, or demonstrative nationality (and that honour would not reside with the Americans either). But Canada is not so much a dull country as one that functions well and so avoids a great deal of American contentiousness, which is sometimes dramatic, but is more often merely tiresome and banal, and often tragic. It is not the least of Canada’s achievements to have reduced the number of political assassinations from the 19th to the 20th centuries, despite a tripling of the country’s average population, from two (George Brown and Darcy McGee), to one (Pierre Laporte).

The book Max Boot was reviewing (by journeyman strategist Elliot Cohen) extols the military talents of the peoples on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border, especially on the route of Lake Champlain and Fort Ticonderoga (or Carillon), south of Montreal. No invasion in either direction was ever successful. The French in Canada were defeated only when the British went up the St. Lawrence, and neither post-French Canada nor America, colonies or republic, has ever been successfully invaded by each other or anyone else. Despite the recourse to tail-wagging, canine domesticity as a simile, both Cohen and Boot affirm that Canadians, French and English, and their overseas kin, have defended this slavishly friendly country with implacable determination and success.

As likenesses from the animal kingdom go, we could do much worse than the St. Bernard, formidable and endearing as it is, especially when the bearer of a firey restorative brandy or armagnac on a cold winter day. But Max Boot’s whole foray into Orwellian zoological analogies is misconceived, and incites curiosity about what he thinks would be a comparable rightful likeness of the United States.

In the last 20 years, the United States has not been an exciting and stylish source of reassurance and refinement; not a soaring eagle of nuanced benignity from wing-tip to wing-tip. It has been a Yankee Doodle with torn clothes, unkempt hair, and a stubbly face, a large, clumsy and incoherent oaf of a country, half mendicant and half street-bully.

It is lamentable that Mackenzie King, for all his cunning (he was head of government for longer than Churchill and Roosevelt combined), did not have the galvanizing personality that would have rivaled them when speaking of the war and its great issues; and that he was not more in the spirit of Charles de Gaulle in demanding recognition of his country’s rightful place among the allied nations. (Churchill purported to be the host at the Quebec Conferences of 1943 and 1944, and there was discussion about whether even to invite King.)

It is regrettable that John Diefenbaker foreclosed Canada’s potential to have a front-line aero-space industry when he shut down the Avro Arrow fighter plane in 1959; that Pierre Trudeau scrapped Canada’s only aircraft carrier, after we had been one of only six countries in the world that had one for 25 years. It may be unfortunate that Brian Mulroney did not proceed with our proposed nuclear submarines, (though there were practical counter-arguments, not including America’s overbearing and self-serving remonstrations). And it is unfortunate that neither Trudeau nor Stephen Harper facilitated the acquisition of a substantial automobile manufacturer for the Canadian private sector when they had the opportunity.

But Canadian integration into the American economy is steadily declining as demand for natural resources from developing markets rises, and the Harper government is intelligently pursuing a durable position as a world-wide energy exporter. If America continues to bumble into unwinnable wars, wallow in its fiscal incontinence, and fail to interdict or deter the fall of nuclear weapons into unacceptable hands, foreign affairs will become dull for it indeed, and there will not be much slavish friendliness around.

I have made too much of the inelegant aside of a good military analyst and a very decent man, and Max Boot was flatteringly contrasting the qualities whose citation I have found annoying with Canada’s proficiency at self defense. The United States deserves to be treated cordially. But it should be disabused of the practice — which dates back 200 years to Jefferson’s assertion that taking Canada over was “a mere matter of marching,” and even to Washington’s promise 30 years before that, that Canada would be “conquered into liberty” — of taking Canada for granted. No one should be allowed to imagine that that it is even possible.

One more thing to add: Bob Hepburn of the Toronto Star has revived that newspaper’s call for the revocation of my status as an Officer of the Order of Canada. I will reply to them next week.

This column first appeared in the National Post of Canada. cbletters@gmail.com