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UNIVERSITY
OF FLORIDA
LIBRARIES
COLLEGE LIBRARY
BRITAIN AND THE U. S. A.
ERRATA:
Page 18 — The 1960 Wheat and Meat Production figures should be
printed:
Wheat Production (thousand metric tons)
UK U.S.A.
1960 3,040 36,750
Meat Production (thousand metric tons)
UK U.S.A.
1960 1,717 12,805
Page 40 — Fifth line should read:
Eventually it was nothing less than the old alliance argument which
Page 49 — Sixth line should read:
1. Build around the 5 nation . . . pact.
The Albert Shaw L,ectures on Diplomatic History
The liberality of Albert Shaw, Ph.D. 1884, has
made it possible for The Johns Hopkins University
to provide an annual course of lectures on diplomatic
history. This volume contains the lectures
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tage from Europe's Distress, 1783-
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1933. Charles Seymour. American Dip-
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Second printing 1942. S3. 00.
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1935. §2. 00.
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1937. Dexter Perkins. The Monroe
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1938. Arthur Preston W hi taker. The
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The Albert Shaw Lectures on Diplomatic History, 1961
BRITAIN AND
THE U.S.A.
Herbert Nicholas
St. Antony's College, Oxford University
THE JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS: BALTIMORE
1963
Published in Great Britain by
Chatto & Windus Ltd.
42 WiUiam IV Street
London W.C.2
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63-10195
© H. G. Nicholas 1963
Printed in Great Britain
IN MEMORIAM
R. J. C.
Digitized by tine Internet Archive
in 2011 witii funding from
LYRASIS IVIembers and Sloan Foundation
http://www.archive.org/details/britainusaOOnich
CONTENTS
Preface page 9
' 1 The Power Relationship 11
' 2 The Axioms of British Policy 22
3 The Wartime Alliance and After fe^-J 32
4 The Cold War AUiance 41
5 The Atom 58
6 The Far East 70
7 South-East Asia 90
8 The Middle East 104
1 9 Europe: Defence 122
^10 European Unification 140
! 11 The British Economy and the United States -U\%^-^i^^
!> 12 The Partnership /^ 166
Appendices
A. Principal Treaties and Agreements between
the British and United States Governments,
June, 1945, to December, 1960 181
B. Meetings of British Prime Ministers and
United States Presidents since World War 11 183
C. British Ambassadors to the United States and
American Ambassadors to the United PCing-
dom 184
Index 185
PREFACE
IT is a measure of the intimacy that exists between Britain and
the U.S.A. that it does not come naturally to write of British
foreign policy in a context where the United States is involved.
Yet that is what this book is about. It is not a study of Anglo-
American relations, nor yet of British public opinion in relation
to the U.S.A. ; it is an attempt to describe and analyse the dealings
of the British Government with the American Government as
they have been affected by the changes wrought by the war and
the post-war years. It is not a history, but it is written with a
conviction that &Y&ty post hoc is in some degree 2. propter hoc; con-
sequently some admixture of historical narrative has been judged
indispensable for the analysis. It is highly selective; to write com-
prehensively of its avowed subject is little less than to write a
study of British foreign policy in all its aspects, so many and con-
tinuous are the points of contact between the two Governments.
Rather than attempt the impossible, I have concentrated on certain
topics and areas that seem representative and important, but I
am very conscious that it is often a hairbreadth that divides the
succinct from the cursory.
Too many kindnesses lie behind the preparation and execution
of this book for me to thank all my teachers and benefactors,
conscious and unconscious, British and American, here. But I
must make mention of my debt to the Leverhulme Foundation
and St. Antony's College, Oxford, who inspired it, to the Rocke-
feller Foundation who encouraged it, and to the John Hopkins
University who gave it a most hospitable welcome in its earUer
dress as the Albert Shaw L,ectures in Diplomatic History for 1961.
I
THE POWER RELATIONSHIP
POLICY involves power. The fact that the Anglo-American
relationship involves a great deal besides does not alter this
primary consideration. Much that has changed in British
policy towards the United States between 1938 and I960 is a reflec-
tion of the changing power ratio of the two countries during that
period.
A country's strength can be expressed in many ways, and the
various components of national power rise or fall in significance
according to the purpose and direction in which they are applied.
Thus in a context where war is a possibility all other elements of
national strength — natural resources, economic potential, etc. — are
ultimately reducible to one, the capacity to wage war, and are very
properly eliminated from calculation, save where they can be effect-
ively mobilized for military purposes. However, in the relations of
states which have completely foresworn war between each other a
somewhat different assessment needs to be made of the elements in
tlie power complex. (Not wholly different, because such states in
relation to the rest of the world will still operate in a Hobbesian
environment and this fact will determine much even of their mutual
exchanges.) Where "brute" force is ruled out, other kinds of power
and influence swell proportionately. Then, almost as in the relation-
ships of social groups and classes within one law-abiding country,
assets which are wholly non-convertible into military uses will have
an importance and ultimately a power of their own — "mere" riches,
high living standards, even the levels of cultural accomplishment.
These are tricky elements to incorporate in any calculus and the
temptation to eliminate or demote them is correspondingly greater.
But since war is as little conceivable between the United Kingdom
and the United States as between any states in the world, any real-
istic assessment of their comparative strengths will have to take
some account even of these strictly civilian elements.
With this reminder, let us begin our comparison with the conven-
tional items. jThe disparity between the British islands and the
American sub-continent in area and natural resources is so great and
11
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
so familiar as not to require any statistical demonstration ^indeed,
having remained virtually unchanged throughout the period under
review, it may more properly be regarded as in the province of
geography than of history. The human element in the equation has,
however, undergone no small modification since 1938; though in
each country the population trend has been continuously upwards
the rates of growth in each have been strikingly discrepant :
Population
U.K. U.S.A.
1938 47,494,000 129,824,939
I960 52,383,000 179,323,00a
From these totals, the two countries at various times put the fol-
lowing numbers into the uniform of their armed services:
Service Manpower
U.K. U.S.A.
1938 428 thousand 323 thousand
(the last pre-war year)
1945 4,682 thousand 12,123*5 thousand
(the peak year of World War II)
I960 526 thousand- 2,502 thousand-
Service by Service
ARMY
U.K. U.S.A.
1938 226 thousand 185*5 thousand^
1945 2,931 „ 8,268
I960 264-3 „. 881
NAVY
U.K. U.S.A.
1938 119thousand 119+ 18 thousand Marines
1945 789 „ 3,380-1-475
I960 97-8 „ 628 + 177
1 Until 1947 the U.S. Air Force was part of the Army.
12
THE POWER RELATIONSHIP
AIR FORCE
U.K. U.S.A.
1938 83 thousand ^
1945 963 „ 2,282 thousand^
1960 163-5 „ 816
For Britain, as a sea-faring island, another set of figures has an
especial relevance here :
MERCHANT MARINE
U.K. U.S.A.
1938 I60,000seamen 51,000 seamen
17,780,000 gross tonnage 12,050,000 gross tonnage
1945 144,000 seamen 158,700 seamen
17,702,000 gross tonnage 38,500,000 gross tonnage
I960 I63,000seamen 49,153 seamen
21,131,000 gross tonnage 24,837,000 gross tonnage
It is not easy to provide figures for realistic comparisons of fight-
ing material and equipment owing to rapid technical changes in
national armaments, but a few items may be of some significance :
U.K.
U.S.A.
1938
1960
First-line aircraft 2,000 approx.
Strategic bombers 180 approx.
Destroyers
1,500 approx.
1,700 approx.
U.K.
U.S.A.
1938
I960
149 206
124 702
^ Until 1947 the U.S. Air Force was part of the Army.
13
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
Submarines
U.K. U.S.A.
1938
54
90
1960
48 (of which one, the
174 (of which 17 are
Dreadnought, is
nuclear-powered
nuclear-powered)
and 3 can fire
Polaris nuclear
missiles)
The budget figures of armed service expenditures undoubtedly
need to be read in the light of the higher American production costs
and the higher rates of American pay, for serviceman and civilian
alike. But even with generous allowance made for these discrep-
ancies, the figures are not out of line with the previous tables :
Armed Service Budgets^
U.K. U.S.A.
1938 £391 million £231 million
1 945 £4,184 million £2 2,496 million
1960 £l,6l6million £16,295 million .
Defence Budgets as Percentage of Gross National Product
U.K. U.S.A.
1%
43%
9%
The broad picture revealed by all the foregoing military statistics
is clear. For 1938 it is of a Britain whose armed strength, all round,
is at least equivalent to that of the United States, and in its im-
mediate applicability to most likely trouble-spots is almost certainly
greater. At the peak of their respective war efforts in 1945 Ameri-
can military power far outshone the British in all branches
though not by so much as population differences might suggest.
^ For purposes of comparison, in these and aU the tables which follow
I have converted dollars into pounds at the rates of $5.00 to £{ in
1938, to $4-00 to £\ in 1945 and |2-80 to £\ in 1960.
14
1938
15%
1945
50%
I960
7-2%
THE POWER RELATIONSHIP
But whereas for Britain this represented a total mobihzation of all
resources, human and natural, such as could not possibly be sus-
tained, unaided, for very long, the United States, even at the peak
of her war effort, still had unused resources and imperfectly mobil-
ized reserves; she was a giant who had not found it necessary to
exert all her strength. By I960, a "normal" cold war year in which
each country was seeking to preserve a balance between its peaceful
commitments at home, its peaceful commitments abroad and its ex-
penditure on its own and its allies' defence all over the world, there
was a formidable discrepancy in the military might which each of
the two powers mustered. (In every branch, by every criterion, the
gap between the United Kingdom and the United States had
widened vastly since 19387iAnd in fact the figures understate the
case. They take no account of the deadliest weapons of all, the
niicie_&r, and of the means of delivering them. For these no reliable
figures are avanabfe/But of course it is in this respect more than
any other that American power exceeds British.') And when one
adds to offensive potentiality the defensive advantages which space
alone can confer, it is apparent that the United States, in this sphere
alone, disposes of a strength not only vastly greater in degree but
virtually different in kind from that which Britain can command.
If one looks to the economy behind the armaments an interesting
contrast emerges. Traditionally (i.e. in the pre-atomic age) the most
reliable indices of the armaments potential of any economy were to
be found in its steel production and energy consumption. The fol-
lowing tables give the main figures for these :
Crude Steel Production
U.K. U.S.A.
1938 10,561,000 tons 28,805,000 tons
1960 24,695,000 tons - 90,067,000 tons
Coal Production
U.K. U.S.A.
1938 226,993,000 tons 352,360,500 tons
I960 193,604,000 tons- 384,892,900 tons
15
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
Petroleum Consumption^ (thousand metric tons)
U.K. U.S.A.
1938 8,831 128,560 (approx.)
1960 39,983 416,000 ( „ )
Electricity Generated (millions of kilowatt hours)
U.K. U.S.A.
1938 24,372 116,681
1860 118,848 845,005
For the United Kingdom virtually the whole of the figures for
petroleum and a sizeable proportion of the figures for electricity
must be read against the reminder that oil is an imported product,
requiring foreign exchange in peace and exposed to every hazard
in war. Britain's increased reliance on it is therefore an index of
diminished independence as well as of increased industrial (and
indeed agricultural) efficiency. The U.S.A. by contrast, though pre-
ferring to import much of its oil from cheaper sources of supply,
could in fact live off its domestic reserves for an indefinite period of
time.
In this connexion the high and increasing oil component in the
United Kingdom's total fuel consumption must be borne in mind
when considering this final set of consumption statistics :
Energy Consumption
(in millions of metric tons of coal equivalent)
U.K. U.S.A.
1937 202-45 759-3
I960 240-15 1,387-02
Taking these statistics as a whole, the most striking aspect of
them is the way in which the known and obvious discrepancies
between British and American strength, as of 1938, in all these
traditional components of a war potential have not in fact so greatly
widened by I960. The ratios of each item are roughly as follows :
steel coal petroleum electricity total
energy
1938 1 : 2.75 1 : 1.5 1 : 15 1 : 4.8 1 : 3.75
1960 1 : 3.5 1:2 1 : 14 1 : 6.5 1 : 5.75
^ U.K. figures are available only in terms of weight, U.S. figures
only in terms of volume. Only a rough conversion is therefore
possible.
16
THE POWER RELATIONSHIP
Making allowance for the much greater increase in the population
of the United States, it would be tempting to conclude that at least
in terms of war potential the British economy had kept pace with
its transatlantic rival.
But if this were so, what would one make of the following
figures ?
Gross National Product
U.K. U.S.A.
1938 £5,772 million £17,045 million
I960 £22,316-^ „ £179,727- „
For which the ratios are roughly
1938 1:4 I960 1:8
Even when all possible allowance is made for the pre-war over-
valuation of the pound and a possible overvaluation of the dollar,
the contrast remains too great to be explained away. Nor can we
say that the greater American product is made up of frills and
furbelows, while the smaller British one consists of more of the
hard stuff with which wars are waged. The observable tastes of the
Welfare State and the comparative expenditures of the two coun-
tries on armaments will not support such a thesis. The truth, in
terms of comparative British and American power, is far otherwise.
It is that the revolution since 1945 in the organization of mass
destruction has made the old criteria almost wholly obsolete.
Weight of steel now counts for less than the precision of transistors;
consumption of energy (at least in traditional forms) may be in
inverse proportion to total productivity. This makes more difficult
than ever the distinction in an economy between sword-making and
ploughshare manufacture; the electronics industry provides indis-
criminately the raw materials for conspicuous waste, civilian or
military style. The so-called "higher" American standard of living
does truly reflect not only a greater production of consumer goods
of an acceptable kind but also an economy with a greater military
potential. It is harder to measure the new ingredients in this poten-
tial than the old, if only because the tempo of technical innovation
is so prodigious. All the same, and although in a consumers' society
such as the United States much is spent which by any and every
standard is waste, there is no reason to doubt that the figures for
B 17
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
the Gross National Product are a broadly reliable index to com-
parative British and American war potentials. As such, they rein-
force the evidence of the purely military statistics, of a widening
gap in the positions, as world powers, of the United Kingdom and
the United States.
To this one should add, on the criterion mentioned at the begin-
ning of this chapter, a word of comparison in respect of the purely
pacific, non-convertible elements in the economy. The most obvious
of these is food and as a rough indication of this one may reason-
ably take the figures of wheat and meat production :
Wheat Production (thousand metric tons)
U.K. U.S.A.
1934-8 (average p.a.) 1,743 25,036
1960
Meat Production (thousand metric tons)
U.K. U.S.A.
1936-9 (average p.a.) 1,277 1935-9 (average p.a.) 7,340
I960
In a world in which the problem of hunger and the capacity to aid
the great populations of backward states loom so large the contrasts
here expressed are of considerable significance. British dependence
on imported food-stuffs and America's agricultural surplus (cap-
able, of course, of enormous expansion) have an even greater im-
portance for their relative roles in world politics in I960 than they
had in 1938.
To the discrepancies so far observed two qualifications need to
be appended. The first is that Britain has always enjoyed certain
advantages by comparison with the United States by reason of the
efficiencies of operation open to her small, highly integrated, com-
paratively well-disciplined and smooth-running society. She may be
less powerful, but what power she has she can more easily mobilize
and focus. This was markedly apparent during the last war when it
was possible in Britain to operate and win almost universal accept-
ance for a comprehensive plan for maximizing the national effort;
the U.S.A.'s size, heterogeneity and comparative inexperience in -
18
THE POWER RELATIONSHIP
volved her in much greater waste and duplication of effort. This
contrast has also been apparent to a lesser extent in some aspects of
post-war national life, e.g. the comparatively lower running costs
and higher efficiency of Whitehall. Yet too much must not be made
of an advantage marginal in any case and likely to prove of dimin-
ishing value with every year that passes. Not only does the integra-
tion of American life proceed apace, but against the diminishing
economies of intimacy have to be set the ever-mounting economies
of scale, while the certain gains of experience are likely to be more
and more offset, in a revolutionary world, by the benefits that
probably accrue to innovation and experiment.
The second qualification to be applied to the statistical com-
parisons is of quite another order. The figures as they stand com-
pletely fail to reflect a crucial fact about the United Kingdom past
or present, namely that she is not merely an island group moored
off the north-east coast of Europe but is also the centre of a world-
wide Empire and Commonwealth. Consequently what she could
mobilize in terms of men, money, natural resources and industrial
and agricultural potential would always be a good deal more than
would appear from these merely insular statistics. Perhaps to an
American observer in particular this consideration requires to be
mentioned, since the elements of unity in the Commonwealth rela-
tionship are concealed by the total absence of any Commonwealth
constitution and by the wide geographical scattering of all its com-
ponent members. Furthermore there is no country with whom the
members of the Commonwealth are more concerned to establish an
independent, bilateral relationship than with the U.S.A. Yet even
in the sphere of Anglo-American relations strictly defined they are
a factor to be included. Lord Franks has given a hint of the way in
which they impinged on his work as U.K. ambassador in Wash-
ington in the years 1948 to 1953 :
"Every fortnight except in the summer the eight ambassadors of
the Commonwealth met in our Embassy to exchange views and
consult informally together. We discussed everything, the move-
ment of affairs in the world, the latest phase of American policy
— and the opinions of our different countries about them. We
did not mince words. "^
1 O. Franks, Britain and the Tide of World Affairs (London, New York,
1955), p. 17.
19
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
What flows from such a relationship is clearly incapable of ex-
pression in statistical terms. Certainly there is an obvious sense in
which the Commonwealth relationship enhances Britain's own
power. With the Commonwealth go institutions like the Sterling
Area and preferential arrangements which might make the diifer-
ence between life and death for a trading nation, or facilities, like
the Woomera rocket-range or Christmas Island, indispensable to a
competitor in the post-war nuclear weapons race. But it is easier to
recognize the existence of such factors than to bring them into any
power equation. The relevant statistics of each country's power
index cannot simply be added to the United Kingdom total, as the
steel production of Illinois might be added to that of Pennsylvania;
whether or not the United Kingdom can enhance its own strength
in any situation which involves the U.S.A. depends upon a range of
unpredictables which varies from issue to issue and Commonwealth
member to Commonwealth member. Consequently to put these
factors into the accounting is hardly practicable; moreover, if they
are to be inserted, they must in fairness be accompanied by some
items which would go on the opposite side of the ledger. If the
Commonwealth brings strength, it also creates responsibilities.
There are outposts to be defended, backward territories clamouring
for capital, a huge communications network to be maintained.
There has to be a Colonial Development Corporation. There is a
Colombo Plan. Here again one is moving into the realm of incom-
mensurables. One can only say that the net result is the creation of
something considerably different from, and larger than, the mere
insular unit which is the British Isles. How different and how much
larger will depend upon time and circumstance and will vary too,
not only in itself but, what may be almost as important in this con-
text, according to the estimate Americans have of it. In 1938 the
American image of it was largely an imperial image already in
many respects out of date and tinged with more than a shade of
suspicion and hostility; by I960 the suspicion and hostilit)' had
waned, to be replaced generally by an appreciation of the Com-
monwealth's stabilizing influence in a shaky world, but with the
appreciation went more scepticism about the Commonwealth's con-
tinuing unity and less disposition to see the Commonwealth as
necessarily an addition to Britain's wealth and power.
For all these reasons the Commonwealth must remain an .v-factor
in these statistical comparisons. What it adds is important and even
20
THE POWER RELATIONSHIP
while we fail to measure it we should take care to remember that it
is there. But not only is its contribution uncertain in amount; it is
also variable in incidence. The Commonwealth is not a set of de-
pendencies to be commanded; it is a set of associations which may
or may not be invoked. Its members have their own relations with
the United States; they are at once in and out of the direct Anglo-
American relationship. For these reasons, though the Common-
wealth may affect, it is not going to upset, the balance of power
otherwise existing between London and Washington.
[JThus when due account is taken of the two qualifications men-
tioned, the main conclusions remain. They are that Britain is over-
shadowed, in respect of all the major power components of a
modern state, by the United States, and that despite the increase in
British economic strength since 1938 the gap between British
military and economic capacities and those of the United States has
widened continuously from then until now. Why this is not a matter
for alarm or despondency, but how nonetheless it has its own im-
portance for the relations of the two countries, is in part the subject-
matter of the pages that follow.!
21
2
THE AXIOMS OF BRITISH [POLICY
IT is not practicable to say exactly when it became an axiom of
British policy that war against the United States was out of the
question. It may have been, as some contend, a concomitant of
the abandonment of "splendid isolation" at the turn of the century;
it may go back to the decision to arbitrate the Alabama Claims and
to abide by the results of the arbitration. No doubt it took posses-
sion of the public and the bureaucratic minds by degrees and almost,
as it were, insensibly. It never took form as a promulgated
"Doctrine"; the most lasting amities are not promulgated, they are
lived, and their birth is as little a matter of record as their growth.
But whenever we may choose to regard this renunciation of war as
having become universally accepted in Britain, one characteristic of
the British-American relation has been that at all times, even when
the two Governments were official enemies, each country's course
has had champions in the other. The lines of disagreement have
always run within as much as between us. Or, to put it another way,
for some elements in each country at all times war with the other
has been anathema; the history of Anglo-American relations down
to World War I could almost be written in terms of the steady
spread of the idea that' no disagreement justified a war between
Britain and the United States. .
This, of course, is a reflection of the obvious fact that since both
countries are democracies their relations are ultimately determined
by their citizens and that in thinking about each other's country
Britons and Americans extend the idea of national interest to cover
a host of intangible elements of sentiment and affection. So much
do we do this that in Britain (and, I suspect, in the U.S.A. too) it
does not come naturally to us to use the term "foreign policy" in
an Anglo-American context. "Foreign policy" is something which
Britain has in relation to non-Engiish-speaking countries, in
Europe, Asia, Latin America, etc. What we have in relation to the
United States is something somehow different. It is more nearly
analogous to our relationship with the independent members of the
Commonwealth, particularly those of European stock. It is com-
22
THE AXIOMS OF BRITISH POLICY
posed, for various people in varying degrees, of the identity of race,
the shared inheritance, the common speech and, since 1918 and
again since 1945, the alhance in arms. The elements are familiar
and do not require recapitulation, but it is important to remember
that even in the sharpest clash of "national interests", as conven-
tional diplomacy understands the term, these multiple ties and
habitudes constitute a unique framework within which the diplomat
has to resolve the differences that reach him without resort to force.
This is the first, and iron, law of British policy towards the U.S.A.
The negative principle that war with the U.S.A. is unthinkable
has, of course, a positive corollary. Since 1775, however, this has
not lent itself to as crisp a formulation. The advocates of amity
with the U.S.A. have varied in number and enthusiasm and, above
all, in the type and degree of intimacy which they have urged.
Since the divorce so painfully made absolute at Yorktown, time and
circumstance have between them virtually obliterated both the
causes of the quarrel and the hard feelings it occasioned. But
opinion in Britain has never been agreed as to whether the ideal
relationship now to be aimed at is a re-marriage or a let-bygones-be-
bygones friendship. It only knows that a special relationship exists.
The level of the U.S.A. 's popularity in Britain has risen and sunk,
but public attitudes towards the U.S.A., whether approbatory or
hostile, have always been tinged with a set of expectations different
from those the public entertains in respect of any "foreign" country.
Whether the U.S.A. is thought to be acting well or ill, she is judged
by a set of standards, moral, Anglo-Saxon, and familial which have
more in common with those that would be applied to Canada,
Australia, or New Zealand than anything else. This has not neces-
sarily provided British Governments with helpful directives in the
framing of official policy where the U.S.A. is involved, since it is
notoriously difficult to translate family attitudes into formal state-
ments. But at least/isince World War I British governments have
given the highest priority to establishing and maintaining close
understanding with the U.S.A. jand this has been accepted by the
public as, ceteris paribus, a self-justifying explanation of any act of
policy. "Ceteris paribus" has worn different meanings according to
the critic's assessment of Britain's needs and strength, and her pre-
cise degree of dependence on the U.S.A. for the attainment of her
vital national objectives, but in this century no responsible element
23
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
in British opinion has ever denied the high value of close amity
with the U.S.A.
But while the level of co-operation fluctuated certain principles
about its style won common acceptance. The first was the desir-
ability, wherever possible, of avoiding formal, written agreements.
This was partly an expression of the easy intimacy that existed;
written alliances are made with strangers, friends have no need of
codified pledges. It was also a by-product of a tough folk memory,
particularly strong on the American side, which regarded all diplo-
matic agreements as the entangling wiles not merely of a foreign
power but of a positively illiberal ancien regime, wherever located.
The corollary of this was a tradition of frank speaking and an easy
exchange of confidences at most levels of government, the political
and the bureaucratic. Much depended, of course, on the person-
alities involved, the topics arising and the mood of the moment,
but there existed between London and Washington even in the
heyday of American inter-war isolationism a freer traffic of inform-
ation and consultation than regularly obtained with any other
extra-Commonwealth capital. This was accompanied, as was proper
to two free countries, by a continuous flow of unofficial comment
and consultation in public and in private on each other's affairs so
that in some sense there always existed an Anglo-American com-
munity of discourse which powerfully affected the behaviour of
each Government to the other and to the world outside.
There was a recognition, burnt into the British mind by the Sack-
ville-West incident if by nothing else, that the frank exchange of
opinion should stop short of any suggestion of interference in each
other's internal party conflicts. Yet it was a paradox of the relation-
ship that its working efficiency was indubitably affected by changes
of administration in each country, although the fiction had to be
preserved that this was none of either country's business. To a con-
siderable extent, of course, the common interest in co-operation
persisted through changing presidencies and premierships but it
was undeniable that it made a great deal of difference to the re-
lationship whether there were like-minded regimes in London and
Washington or not.
In 1938 like-mindedness was conspicuously absent. Though the
reforming impulse of the New Deal had to a large extent spent
itself in Washington this was in part at least because its place had
been taken by a lively concern for the future of democracy outside
24
THE AXIOMS OF BRITISH POLICY
the U.S.A. Although there were hesitancies and ambiguities about
Roosevelt's foreign policy its main disposition was clear enough, to
side with the free countries against the rising menace of the Axis
powers. In Britain, on the other hand, there persisted in office a
Conservative administration, nominally national, whose reforming
ambitions at home had always been extremely modest and whose
resistance to tyranny abroad had been spasmodic and inadequate.
Between the confident, progressive temper of a Roosevelt who
thought he had a "rendezvous with destiny" which he could shape
to his own purposes and the cautious conservative disposition of a
Chamberlain there was a gigantic gulf of comprehension. How
wide it was was catastrophically revealed in an incident in January,
1938.
This was the celebrated proposal which Roosevelt confidentially
adumbrated to Chamberlain to call an international conference in
Washington to discuss the underlying causes of world tension and
to work out possible bases for a settlement. In view of the hold that
isolationists had established over American opinion this presi-
dential initiative was a courageous move such as might have been
a prelude to the U.S.A. taking her share in the task of keeping the
peace. Almost any British prime minister at any time since Ver-
sailles would have welcomed it with open arms. To Chamberlain
however it appeared as a "bomb" which would explode amidst his
own neat plans for European appeasement; or, as he put it to
Roosevelt, there would be "a risk of his proposal cutting across
our efforts here".^ In face of this rebuff Roosevelt's initiative
withered on the vine, Chamberlain persisting in his attitude even
after Eden had made clear his opposition and Sumner Welles had
warned the British ambassador, Sir Ronald Lindsay, that "the
silence of the British Government (in regard to the plan) might
possibly be construed as an indication of apathy on the part of Great
Britain". 2
From some points of view the gap in the thinking of the two
Governments was not great. As the leading American historians of
the period put it, "it is plain that the President's project . . . was
intended to buttress the attempt of Britain to reach agreement with
Germany. Though involving no approval of British appeasement,
1 K. FeiUng, Neville Chamberlain (London, New York, 1946), p. 336.
2 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1938, Vol. I, p. 125.
25
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
it certainly implied acceptance of it".^ Thus the obstacle to co-
operation lay not in a clash of policies but in a clash of tempera-
ments and philosophies. Had Churchill or Eden been Prime Min-
ister, or had the latter's views as Foreign Secretary prevailed, a
positive response would have been sent with consequences which
are incalculable.
The incident well illustrates, however, the sort of diastole and
systole which characterized Anglo-American relations in the thirties.
The legacy of World War I was an ever more powerful America
swinging between isolationism and an acceptance of her world
commitments, and a weakened Britain which alternated between
seeking allies and contracting out of her obligations. Had American
policy continued on a Wilsonian course Britain's task would have
been easy; standing firm in face of Axis threats, Britain would have
made the task of the Wilsonians and their successors a great deal
simpler. As it was, British appeasers could always contend, as
Chamberlain contended, that "it is always best and safest to count
on nothing from the Americans but words'';^ at the same time
every surrender by British appeasers strengthened the hand of
American isolationists in their illogical but potent contention that
the United States must not become involved in European disputes
in which all the values they cared for were being surrendered with-
out a struggle. In such a situation British diplomacy could make
little or no use of the existing habits of consultation and co-opera-
tion with the U.S.A., because it was not prepared to make the
initial affirmation of purpose around which sympathetic Americans
might rally. No doubt a formidable set of isolationist barriers had
by 1938 been erected in the U.S.A. — the Johnson Act, the Neutral-
ity Acts, and the sort of mentality which shuddered at Roosevelt's
"Quarantine" speech in 1937 — but the known sympathies of the
President and his advisers should have served in 1938 as they did
in 1940 to give British policy a fixed point to steer by. The failure
to evolve an effective Anglo-American response to the dictators had
its roots in history, in the disappointment over the League, the dis-
agreement over War Debts, the failures of economic co-operation,
the rival alibis for the Manchurian fiasco. But it also reflected the
^ W. L. Langer and S. E. Gleason, The Challenge to Isolation (New
York, London, 1952), p. 25.
2 Felling, op. cit., p. 325.
26
THE AXIOMS OF BRITISH POLICY
low tone of British democracy in the thirties, the basically negative
and timorous style of British public policy in all its aspects which
found it had less in common with the bracing affirmations of the
New Deal than with the decadence of the French Third Republic.
If one asks, therefore, what was the place held by the United
States in the British Government's world view in 1938 the answer
must be that while in principle the importance of American co-
operation was recognized, in practice British policy was being
directed as if, as a world power, the U.S.A. did not exist. In Europe
the problem was to find a way of getting along with the Axis
powers, on the assumption that their demands could be met without
war and a general settlement reached without bringing either the
U.S.A. or the U.S.S.R. into the picture. (Though of course if the
U.S.A. could be induced to support British policy its endorsement
was welcome — cf. Chamberlain's attempt in January, 1938, to get
the U.S.A. to take identical action in recognizing Italy's conquest
of Ethiopia. But when, as in this case, the U.S.A. would not con-
form, and indeed was sharply critical, the United Kingdom went
ahead without her.) Outside Europe there was only one theatre in
which British policy needed to take serious account of the United
States: that was the Far East. Here indeed, as the Brussels Confer-
ence of 1937 showed, there was a broad identity of views, a general
British willingness to accept an American initiative and a marked
reluctance to go a step beyond the United States. As Eden put it,
according to Cordell Hull, "Britain would neither attempt to take
the lead . . . nor push the United States out in front, but . . . would
base her policy on American policy".^ Since the U.S.A. was deter-
mined not to assume any commitments which would arouse isola-
tionist suspicion, no joint action was taken. The most that the
United States would ever agree to was action "concurrently" and
"on parallel lines" — phrases that recur again and again in this con-
text. In a crisis even this could not be guaranteed. Thus when in
December, 1937, the United States gunboat Panay was sunk by
Japanese planes near Nanking the United States protest was de-
livered independently, with no attempt to concert with Britain
whose gunboat, the Ladybird, had also been damaged in the same
attack.
Perhaps the paradoxical character of Anglo-American relations
at this time is best expressed in the messages which passed between
1 Cordell Hull, Memoirs, Vol. I (New York, 1948), p. 553.
27
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
Chamberlain and Roosevelt in 1937 about a possible visit by the
Prime Minister to the United States. The proposal appears to have
originated with Roosevelt in July that Chamberlain should visit
Washington "as soon as conditions appear to warrant your doing
so" to discuss Anglo-American "co-operation in the promotion of
economic stability and peace in the world". Chamberlain appears to
have accepted in principle, but to have stressed the importance of
"proper preparation" and "timing".^ A follow-up letter came from
Roosevelt asking for further suggestions as to useful preparator)'
steps. Then six weeks seem to have elapsed while Chamberlain,
partly on holiday and partly at home, ruminated his rejoinder;
when he finally replied on 28 September it was in supremely nega-
tive terms: "I am afraid I cannot suggest any way in which the
meeting between us could be expedited, though I greatly regret this
both on personal and official grounds." Most extraordinary, how-
ever, was the reasoning which preceded this conclusion — that while
in Europe there was an easing of tension, in the Far East the situa-
tion "justified our worst fears" and that he saw "little prospect at
the present time of being able to improve it by action on the part of
the Western Powers".^ In other words, whether things were im-
proving, as in Europe, or deteriorating, as in the Far East, the con-
clusion was the same — that the concerting of policy with the U.S.A.
was not a serious objective of British statesmanship.
Thus amity with the United States was not so much ignored as
taken for granted. In a world view which involved a kind of British
isolationism where mainland Europe was concerned and a cultiva-
tion of her extra-European and imperial gardens, American acqui-
escence in such a policy was tacitly assumed. Thus Mr. Joseph
Kennedy (the United States ambassador) reported to Washington
a conversation which he held with Lord Halifax on 12 October,
1938: "First of all, Halifax does not believe that Hitler wants to
have a war with Great Britain and he does not think there is any
sense in Great Britain having a war with Hitler unless there is
direct interference with England's Dominions [j"/V}. The future of
England, as he sees it, is to strengthen herself in the air . . . Then
after that to let Hitler go ahead and do what he likes in Central
Europe . . . Therefore he sees the future of England lies in her
maintaining her relations in the Mediterranean, keeping friendly
1 Foreign Relations of the United States 1937, Vol. I, p. 113.
2 Ibid., pp. 136-7.
28
THE AXIOMS OF BRITISH POLICY
with Portugal, he hopes Spain, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Palestine . . .
plus England's connexions in the Red Sea, fostering the Dominion
connections, and staying very friendly with the United States, and
then, as far as everything else is concerned. Hitler can do the best
he can for himself."^
Fortunately this attitude did not obtain at all levels in the Gov-
ernment. Not only did Eden, as his resignation in 1938 evinced,
hold a different opinion about the imperative necessity of working
with the United States, but Whitehall at the official levels kept
fairly steadily in mind the importance of consultation and, wherever
possible, co-operation with their American opposite numbers.
Otherwise the prospect of effective co-operation when the hour and
the will were propitious would have been slight indeed.
Rooted as it was in the conviction that appeasement would bring
peace, the government's policy of comparative indifference to co-
operation with the U.S.A. underwent a marked change after
Munich when appeasement was found to be a sham and war began
to appear inescapable. If there was to be a war in Europe it was
apparent even to Chamberlain that American aid would be needed
to win it. Then when, on 4 January, 1939, Roosevelt frankly warned
that "there are many methods short of war, but stronger and more
effective than mere words, of bringing home to aggressor Govern-
ments the aggregate sentiments of our people". Chamberlain told
Kennedy that he welcomed the pronouncement as having brought
about Hitler's "quieting down".^ When, so far from having quieted
down, Hitler proceeded to seize what was left of Czechoslovakia,
and Chamberlain was led to make the sudden announcement of
Britain's pledge to Poland, his stimulus for so acting, if we may
believe Kennedy, derived equally from popular British protests
against appeasement, demand for an effective peace front and fear
of American criticisms. At about the same time, 21 March, Halifax
suggested to Kennedy that if the United States Atlantic fleet could
be moved back to San Diego it would lighten the pressure of
Pacific policing upon the British, who were unable to spare vessels
from the Mediterranean to go to Singapore. The President com-
plied and the move was not lost on the Japanese.
In June this positive soliciting of American co-operation was
1 Op. cit., 1938, Vol. I, pp. 85-86.
2 Langer and Gleason, op. cit., p. 59.
29
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
symbolized in the visit to Washington of the King and Queen (the
idea had originally been hatched in 1937). More practically, it found
expression in the announcement in April of the appointment as
British ambassador of Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian. This brought to
the embassy in August what it had not had for some years, a public
figure in his own right who had a deep conviction of the primacy
of Anglo-American understanding and a capacity for conveying
this beyond mere diplomatic circles to the American press and
public outside. When, by the summer, war in Europe was, to almost
every clear-sighted eye, inescapable, Britain responded quickly to
the President's suggestion that in order to enable the U.S.A. in
time of war to mount a neutrality patrol 300 miles out to sea the
American navy and aircraft should be allowed to use the harbour
facilities of Trinidad, Santa Lucia and Bermuda. In all this there
was a tacit pro-ally cast to the "neutrality" involved. The object of
the patrol was to be the collection of information on belligerent
activities, particularly submarine activities, within the patrol zone
and no one needed to be told whose submarines would be exposed
to detection and which side would benefit from receipt of such
information. Unfortunately, of course, there were limits to the ex-
tent to which the mantle of neutrality could be stretched in the
allies' favour and the Roosevelt administration's attempt to get the
Neutrality Act revised to permit the allies to obtain arms on a "cash
and carry" basis was frustrated by a group of Congressmen who
knew better than the President that there would be no war in
Europe that summer. All the same this did not prevent the State
and War Departments, as well as the White House, giving every
encouragement even before September, 1939, to the proposal for
establishing an official British Purchasing Agency in the United
States.
The outbreak of war accelerated the drive for American aid and
co-operation rather than introducing any new element into British
policy towards the U.S.A. Before decisive shifts in the scale or
degree of intimacy could occur two things were needed, the sub-
stitution for Chamberlain of a British leader who could really com-
mand the confidence and respect of the American President and his
administration, and a break-through in the long and, as it seemed
from London, painfully slow battle against the forces of American
isolationism. As it turned out, the two developments occurred
virtually simultaneously, precipitated by the success of the German
30
THE AXIOMS OF BRITISH POLICY
offensive in the spring of 1940. The German triumph in Norway,
in bringing Churchill to power gave the shaping of British policy
to a man who had always held co-operation with the U.S.A. to be a
precondition of victory in war or success in peace. The sudden
awareness created by Dunkirk of what a British defeat might mean
for the U.S.A. enabled Roosevelt to effect the destroyer-bases deal,
and initiate lend-lease and the policy of "all aid short of war"
which were the foundations of the Anglo-American wartime
alliance.
31
I
3
THE WARTIME ALLIANCE AND AFTER
N a notable passage in his Second World War Churchill de-
scribes his reaction to the news of Pearl Harbor :
"So we had won after all! Yes, after Dunkirk; after the fall of
France; after the horrible episode of Oran; after the threat of in-
vasion, when, apart from the Air and the Navy, we were an
almost unarmed people; after the deadly struggle of the U-boat
war — the Battle of the Atlantic, gained by a hand's breath; after
seventeen months of lonely fighting and nineteen months of my
responsibility in dire stress, we had won the war. England would
live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the
Empire would live. How long the war would last or in what
fashion it would end, no man could tell, nor did I at this moment
care. Once again in our long island history we should emerge,
however mauled or mutilated, safe and victorious. We should
not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end. We
might not even have to die as individuals. Hitler's fate was
sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they
would be ground to powder. All the rest was merely the proper
application of overwhelming force . . . Many disasters, im-
measurable cost and tribulation lay ahead, but there was no doubt
about the end."^
/"pThe assurance of American aid embodied in Lend-Lease had
perhaps been a guarantee that in this worst of her wars Britain
would not be defeated, but only America's actual entry into the
fight on Britain's side provided the assurance that Britain would
actually winXThe awareness, after the fall of France, that victory
depended on the U.S.A. sank deep into the consciousness of every
Briton and lay behind every major decision that the Government
took from that time onwardsj To secure the closest possible co-
1 The Second World War, Vol. Ill (London, 1959) pp. 539-40, (New
York, 1960) pp. 606-7.
32
THE WARTIME ALLIANCE AND AFTER
operation of the U.S.A. in our war effort became, next to the defeat
of Hitler itself, the main objective of British policy.J
/The realization of this objective was enormously facilitated by
^i the profound mutual respect and strong personal attachment that
marked the relations of the two national leaders, Churchill and
Rooseyelty' but it did not have to rely upon the personalities at the
top. ^ profound identity of thinking about the nature of the
Ustruggle and about the ultimate issues involved underlay the policies
Z'' of both Governments at most levels and was itself a reflection of
common elements in the habits and beliefs of the two nations'jThis
made possible a wartime alliance which was a real merging of two
national wills, two fighting forces and two economiesr)The partner-
ship in arm.s worked not through an agreed division of labour so
much as through a sharing of burdens and a genuirie merging of
..national identities of which S.H.A.E.F. (Su.preme Headquarters
■^Allied Expeditionary Force) was the supreme exemplification. The
^ joint military eff^ort was underpinned by a wholly unprecedented
pooling of national resources. This is the phenomenon to which
Churchill referred when he spoke of "our affairs . . . becoming
rather mixed up".|Lt was exemplified in the development of Lend-
Lease into Mutual Aid, it was enshrined in the institution of the
Combined Boards, and given perhaps its most explicit expression
in the terms of reference of the Combined Production and Re-
sources Board: 'The Board shall combine the production pro-
grammes of the United States and the United Kingdom into a
single integrated programme, adjusted to the strategic requirements
of the war."^ And of course this pooling concept extended into the
realm of techniques and ideas, of which radar, atomic energy,
military a^d political intelligence are only the most obvious
examples, s^'
The pooling involved in the joint war effort was always a little
more real for Britain than for the U.S.A. There were always Ameri-
can leaders who would tolerate no British interference in their
theatres, like Admiral King in the Pacific; British generalissimi
might be difficult, like Montgomery, but they could never ignore
their yoke-fellows. The American economy, rich and sprawling,
never came under the same degree of effective Government direc-
tion and control that the British knew from 1940 onwards; conse-
quently there was never an equivalent degree of conversion from
1 Documents on A.mertcan Foreign delations, 1941-2, p. 250.
c 53
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
peacetime to wartime requirements. More than this, the U.S.A.,
who in many fields of services and production supplied Britain's
needs as well as her own, had a freedom which Britain lacked to
decide which of the elements of her contribution should go into the
common pool.
Nevertheless not only did the system genuinely work, to a sur-
prising degree; it was also in Britain's obvious interest, as the
weaker and poorer partner, both to preserve the system and, even
where it cracked, to maintain belief in it. In Britain it sank deep
roots into the national consciousness where it intertwined itself in-
extricably with the concept of "fair shares" on which increasingly
the morale of the British home front came to depend. It made
smooth a partnership with a rich and remote ally which had, in the
abstract, all the elements that make for fratricidal strife. Personified
in Eisenhower, it was immensely popular at all levels, civilian and
military. The alliance, so conceived, interpenetrated the national
life at every point; it was civil servants learning that "restricted"
was the American for "confidential"; it was Grosvenor Square
turning into Eisenhower Platz; it was G.I.s in the village pub; it
was SPAM. Like the war itself, it was all-pervasive. Its detailed
history does not require telling here; it was indeed in large part the
history in its later stages of the war itself.
In proportion as the war was total, so the transition to peace, as
far as Britain was concerned, was gradual. Too gradual perhaps,
but circumstances and a strong demand for social justice combined
to make it so. A nation whose life, in all its aspects, had been
dedicated to waging war could no more revert at once to peacetime
normality than a man whose legs have been tied can walk the
moment his cords have been cut. And just as the war persisted in
British thinking, so did expectations and habits bred of the alliance.
, ,y^ To preserve the essence of the alliance in the post-war world had
^ become a major British war aim^ As the hoped-for intimacy with
the U.S.S.R. failed to materialize, as indeed it became obvious that
Stalin wanted a European settlement radically different from that
which British obligations and interests dictated, so the desire to
retain American strength and support in Europe came to dominate
British thinking,fBy 1945 it was abundantly true, as the leading
historian of the alliance put it, that "Churchill's greatest fear was
that the United States would abandon Europe after the war, leaving
Great Britain to face Soviet Russia alone with nothing more than
34
THE WARTIME ALLIANCE AND AFTER
her own resources and whatever Continental allies could be
created"/ To avert such a catastrophe Britain cheerfully waived
several of her preferences in the planning of a world organization p '^
and accepted at all important points the American design, as well
as an American site for the United Nations once it had been created?]
But the fear of a revived American isolationism did not end with
the assurance of United States membership in the United Nations.
The premature death of Roosevelt, his legacy of trust in Stalin's
good intentions, the alarming indifference of the American military
to the political implications of their actions in Central Europe, for
example over the determination of the east-west boundary lines in
Germany and Austria — all this kept British anxieties alive, iTo
retain the U.S.A. as a close partner with Britain seemed the only
way to avert the perils which post-war Europe seemed to present. 1
In the U.S.A., unfortunately, very different thinking prevailed
about the transition from war to peace and its implications for the
alliance. The overwhelming majority of Americans, whether isola-
tionists or not, were agreed on making a clear-cut distinction
between war and peace. War was killing, or being killed by, Ger-
mans and Japanese. When the fighting was over the war ceased, the
troops came back home and the other abnormalities associated with
war came to an end too. Mr. Truman was only speaking the truth
about his fellow-countrymen when he claimed that "no people in
history have been known to disengage themselves so quickly from
the ways of war".^ This divergence of attitudes and expectations
had immediate implications for the alliance. A week after V-J
Day Mr. Truman announced the ending of Lend-Lease; by the end
of the war, as a logical corollary of the bonfire of American domes-
tic controls, the whole structure of Anglo-American economic
"pooling" was in ruins; the Combined Food Board alone was left
going until December, 19462The military disintegration was a little
less explicit, but no less real. The Combined Chiefs of Staff were
not indeed formally wound up; they ceased nonetheless to exist,
except for dealing with Trieste and a few other residual side-issues.
For a moment it seemed to the British as if all the firm realities
of the bilateral alliance were being washed away in a flood of
wishful multilateralism. For the intimate political consultations of
1 W. H. McNeill, America, Britain and R/tssia, 1941-1946 (London,
NewYork, 1953), p. 411.
2 H. S. Truman, Memoirs, I (New York, London, 1955), p. 506.
35
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
F.D.R. and the "Former Naval Person" would be substituted the
publicized deadlocks of the Foreign Ministers' Conference; the
solid shield of the Anglo-American forces would be replaced by
the never-to-be-actualized police functions of the United Nations
Security Council; instead of the orderly apparatus of economic
pooling and planning there would be a free for all tempered only
by the aspirations of an international trade convention and the
charity of U.N.R.R.A. To make matters worse, not only did the
Americans appear to think that these would be eflfective substitutes
for the alliance; many of them, inside the administration as well as
without, had come to regard the alliance as a positive obstacle to
the novus ordo saeclarum. To think in terms of an Anglo-American
alliance was, in the view of a good many, to think in anti-Soviet
terms, to be impairing the harmony of American-Soviet relations,
on which the real hopes of future peace depended, in order to pre-
serve a fighting partnership whose justification was now ended.
Was there not even some support for this view to be constructed
out of the fragmentary political testament of the late Franklin
Roosevelt himself? Thus when the institutions of the new order
failed to function as hoped there was even a certain disposition to
try and remedy this by an ostentatious disavowal of the old alliance.
The battles in the infant United Nations in early 1946 over Iran,
Indonesia, Greece, Lebanon and Syria were mainly fought out by
Bevin and Molotov with Byrnes often playing the role of mediator
and pacifier. Even after President Truman himself had become
tired, as he put it, of "babying the Soviets" it was left to his English
visitor, Winston Churchill, in his Fulton speech to sound the call
for the west to unite and face the full measure of the Soviet threat.
Moreover, though the speech received private encouragement and
applause from the highest circles in the United States, public official
endorsement was still thought inadvisable.
Some of the British alarm of 1945 turned out to be exaggerated.
The ending of Lend-Lease turned out in fact to be somewhat less
abrupt than Mr. Truman's staccato announcement made it appear.
The pipe-line provided time in which to negotiate the economic aid
from North America which was embodied in the Anglo-American
and the Anglo-Canadian Loan Agreements of December, 1945.
Securing this aid was an imperative for Britain hardly less pressing
than the maintenance of American co-operation in the political and
diplomatic spheres. The war left Britain impoverished and at many
36
THE WARTIME ALLIANCE AND AFTER
points crippled. The sheer physical destruction she had sustained
was considerable — ^£1,500 million on shore in property losses and
£700 million at sea in the sinking of one-third of her merchant
fleet. Of her overseas investments £1,118 million had been
liquidated, while her gold and dollar reserves had dropped from
£864 million in 1938 to £453 million in 1945. Meanwhile her ex-
ternal liabilities in the form of debts mainly in the sterling area had
risen from £760 million to £3,355 million/In all one could esti- \, o"-
mate that about one-quarter (£7,300 million) of Britain's pre-war
national wealth had been lost in the war.) At the same time her
export trade was down to thirty per cent of its 1938 volume in a
world in which the cost of imports had risen by fifty per cent. (Only ^ ^ \^
America could physically provide the goods and raw materials
necessary to keep life going and rebuild the battered industries;
only America could provide the economic wherewithal.)
Yet here again the tenacious grip of wartime experience and war-
time ways of thinking put the British at odds with an America
which wanted to treat the war as a closed book, indeed a closed
ledger. This was not just the view of the man in the street; it was
if anything even more the blinkers in which nearly six years of war
had fastened the best minds in Whitehall. It was that restless
innovator and fertile genius Lord Keynes who wished above all to
rest the British proposals for economic aid on the argument of what
Britain had suffered in the common cause and what the principle
of equality of sacrifice would dictate in a final reckoning. "Since,"
as he said, "our transitory financial difficulties are largely due to the
role we played in the war, and to the costs we incurred before the
United States entered the war, we here in London feel . . . that it
might not be asking too much of our American friends that they
should agree to see us through the transition by financial aid which
approximated to a grant. "^ In relation to the wartime concept of
"pooling" such an approach could be justified. One major reason
for Britain's plight in 1945, was that, though a trading nation, she
had, as part of the mutually agreed production plan, switched her
export industries to munitions work and also scrupulously abstained
from using any Lend-Lease materials for manufacturing export
goods.-It could be shown, insofar indeed as figures can ever demon-
strate such propositions, that, man for man, the British had suffered
more in the common struggle than the Americans;, it could be
1 H. L. Deb. Vol. 138, col. 779-780, 10 December, 1945.
37
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
argued that much was due in respect of the period before Pearl
Harbor when Britain "stood alone".
In line with this kind of reasoning the Treasury prepared a
White Paper setting out what Britain had done and suffered in the
common cause and for three days in the Washington negotiations
Keynes expounded the case for an outright grant based upon it.
But what seemed obvious and fair in London wore a different
appearance in Washington. As Keynes himself put it on his return,
justifying the financial agreements before a sceptical House of
Lords: "But what a gulf separates us from the climate of Washing-
ton; and what a depth of misunderstanding there will be as to what
governs relations between even the friendliest and most like-minded
nations if we imagine that so free and easy an arrangement could
commend itself to the complex politics of Congress or to the im-
measurably remote public opinion of the United States. Neverthe-
less, it was on these lines that we opened our case. For three days
the heads of the American delegation heard me expound the
material. . . . Nevertheless, it was not very long before the British
delegation discovered that a primary emphasis on past services and
past sacrifices would not be fruitful. The American Congress and
the American people have never accepted any literal principle of
equal sacrifice, financial or otherwise, between all the allied partici-
pants. . . . We soon discovered, therefore, that it was not our past
performance or our present weakness but our future prospects of
recovery and our intention to face the world boldly that we had to
demonstrate. fOur American friends were interested not in our
wounds, though incurred in the common cause, but in our con-
valescence.'}^
The reassuring implications of the final twist of Keynes's closing
epigram were not fully borne out by the financial settlements which
were eventually concluded. Even Keynes could not disguise his
disappointment at the final form of the Agreements and it was less
his advocacy than inexorable necessity — ^Britain simply had to have
the dollars — that induced Parliament to ratify them after a division
in which 169 M.P.s abstained from voting, Churchill amongst
them. It was not merely that the Agreements were felt to be un-
generous (this, after all, was an issue on which the British judg-
ment might reasonably be thought to be suspect); what most worried
their critics was their multilateralism. Here, in the convertibility
1 Op. cit. col. 780-782.
38
THE WARTIME ALLIANCE AND AFTER
clauses, in the links between the loan and the acceptance of the
Bretton Woods institutions, in the whole concept of Britain's
problem being just that of negotiating a quick transition to full
multilateralism — in all this there was a very explicit substitution of
the new, untried world of international institutions for the familiar
and trusted wartime alliance. The economists had gone even farther
than the diplomats and the politicians in moving Anglo-American
relations from their old moorings. There were many who argued,
Keynes amongst them, that in this open sea lay Britain's truest
safety, that /Britain's destiny as a trading nation was ultimately ,
bound up with the maintenance of an international system of trade ^ '
and convertibility, f They were the counterparts of the positive
champions of the United Nations who saw the organization as the
natural expression of the interest in peace and international order
which Britain and the United States had in common. But just as the
dry powder school wished to maintain within the United Nations
framework the working mechanism of the diplomatic and military
Atlantic alliance, so even amongst the economic liberals there was
a gloomy conviction that the new international economic institu-
tions could not sustain the weight that the Anglo-American
Financial Agreements imposed on them. They were right; it was
not the Bank and the Fund which took over the unfinished business
of the American loan, but Marshall Aid. At the same time, by a
curious paradox, the Financial Agreements did, as it turned out,
provide the most striking demonstration that the realities of the
Anglo-American alliance had in fact survived.
The passage of the Agreements through the British Parliament
was not, of course, sufficient to bring them into operation. To be-
come effective they had to be approved by the body which alone
could authorize the expenditure, the American Congress. And in
fact their passage through that body was, for different reasons, no
less painful and a great deal more prolonged than it had been in
Britain. For months throughout the spring and early summer of
1946 while Britain, the proud mendicant, half hoped, half feared
that Congress would reject them, the debate dragged on, generating
its inevitable accompaniment of mutual resentment and ill-feeling.
The arguments of its supporters in the executive branch about the
brave new world of multilateralism and free convertibility were
poorly received in a chamber whose composition gives the maxi-
mum scope to every advocate of economic nationalism — so poorly
39
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
indeed that it looked as if its prospects would founder. Fortunately,
as the months dragged on, economic nationalism was overborne,
not by the new liberalism, but by lively fears of what Russia was
doing to the Western world on the diplomatic and political fronts,
cruciality of the vote Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House,
carried the day. Recognizing the strength of the opposition and the
cruciality of the vote Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House,
left the chair to make a rare personal intervention. His argument
was simple and, as it proved, decisive: I'l do not want Western
Europe, England, and all the rest pushed toward an ideology that. ^^9
I despise. I fear that if we do not co-operate with this great natural D *"
ally of ours that is what will happen ... If we are not allied with
the British democracy I fear someone will be and God pity us when
we have no ally across the Atlantic Ocean and God pity them too."^
92 Congressional Rscord 9040, (12 July, 1946.)
40
4
THE COLD WAR ALLIANCE
IT could be said at the end of 1946 that the Anglo-American
alliance was in an ambiguous condition. On the one hand its
formal structure had disintegrated with the end of the war; on
the other hand a good deal of its spirit persisted, exemplified in a
resolute British endeavour to keep the U.S. engage and in an
American recognition that Britain constituted, for practical pur-
poses, her most reliable friend. What degree of American commit-
ment could be secured and what mutual obligations the friendship
would entail were, however, still uncertain. The resolution of
these uncertainties was the work of the years 1947, 1948 and 1949.
It is not necessary to re-tell the whole story of the adoption of
the Truman Doctrine, the shaping of the Marshall Plan and the
evolution of N.A.T.O. But some features of the story are necessary
to a full understanding of the relationship which Britain built up
with the U.S. in these years. When in late February, 1947, Britain
formally notified the U.S.A. that she could no longer continue to
be the reservoir of financial-military support for Greece and Turkey
it is doubtful if the full implications of the act were as clearly
grasped in Whitehall as in Washington. Superficially it was a matter
of $250 million which Britain, in the hard-pressed winter of 1947,
could no longer afford. The decision to place the last straw in
America's lap seems to have come, like so many fateful British
decisions, from the Treasury. The news of the decision initially
created relatively little stir in Britain. Indeed it was not until 5
March that news of the British abdication was at all prominently
displayed to British readers, and then only in the form of a dispatch
from Washington. It was 17 March before a statement was made
in the House of Commons. It excited comparatively little comment.
What in retrospect may appear a milestone in Anglo-American
relations was generally viewed at the time as only a minor adjust-
ment in the load of British post-war commitments. That it would
result in a 'Truman Doctrine" seems to have been totally unex-
pected in Britain. Possibly this was because it was only relatively,
not absolutely, that it represented a lightening of that load. Only a
41
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
little more than three months earlier, on 6 November, 1946, Mr.
Attlee had announced that the rate of demobilization in the services
would be slowed down, so that the number of men under arms at
the year's end would be 1,427,000 instead of the 1,200,000 origin-
ally planned. And on the same day that Mr. Truman spoke to
Congress the British Government published the draft of their bill
to perpetuate conscription on the basis of an eighteen-month period
of service.
What was happening, of course, was that the Russians were
raising the pressure on the British defence line just at a time when
all economic considerations demanded a cutting of our cloth. Nine-
teen forty-six had ended with deadlock over Germany and 1947
began with the mockery of "free elections" in Poland. No foreign
minister could advise his colleagues that the nation could relax its
guard, but in view of the rate at which the American loan was
disappearing and the imbalance of payments worsening there had
to be a reduction of overseas military expenditure. (Critics pointed
out that the £300 million spent on maintaining our overseas re-
sponsibilities, mostly in Germany and the Middle East, exactly
equalled the gap in the balance of payments.) The solution was
not so much to reduce as to shift the burden; to spend, if it must be,
more at home, but to unload some of the overseas tasks on to the
U.S.A. By one of history's pretty ironies the first burden to be
transferred to Uncle Sam's shoulders was the one which, two or
three years earlier, John Bull had been most severely censured for
assuming — Greece, where Churchill's anti-Communist intervention
had won sharp "anti-imperialist" rebukes in the U.S.A. in 1944
and 1945.
One cannot say with confidence how far the Government at this
moment was working on the assumption that the alliance a trois
with the U.S.S.R. was dead and that an outright, explicit Anglo-
American front should take its place. As late as 22 December,
1946, Ernest Bevin had depicted Britain as "midway" between the
U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., "not tying herself to anyone" and, when
Stalin alleged that this meant Britain was welshing on the Anglo-
Soviet Treaty, Bevin agreed to "reaffirm" the Treaty a month later.
But though Bevin undoubtedly did not wish to close the door on a
European settlement with the U.S.S.R., his public statements have
to be read in the light of his anxiety, as a Labour Foreign Secretary,
over maintaining unity in a party with a vociferous left wing.
42
THE COLD WAR ALLLIANCE
There is no reason to doubt that for all practical purposes the
British Government had given up hope of any better relationship
with the U.S.S.R. than one of peaceful containment and that since
the war's end there had never been any faltering in their desire to
have the closest possible relationship with the U.S.A. At the same
time it would seem that British official circles were surprised and a
little taken aback at the challenging tone of Mr. Truman's message;
there is reason to suppose that no one expected the burden which
was so quietly dropped to be picked up quite so resoundingly.
Despite the drama of 12 March, 1947, what actually happened
was very much less than a substitution of Pax Americana for Pax
Britannka. There was no neat and swift switch-over from British to
United States responsibility. Far from it. In the first place the
United States was by no means in a position to assume such a role.
After Mr. Truman's speech there ensued over two months of Con-
gressional debate. Not until 22 May did Mr. Truman sign the
Greco-Turkish Aid Bill and when it became law it merely pledged
cash for military and economic aid, while providing for missions,
military and naval, of an advisory character. There was no provision
for the dispatch of troops. When the Greek situation reached a
crisis in June and July, 1947, under pressure from the Yugoslavs,
Bulgarians and Albanians, the line had to be held without any
United States forces. Indeed the first shiploads of United States
military material did not arrive until 14 August. Meanwhile Britain
was under steady pressure from the United States administration
not to withdraw her forces, first of all on the grounds of the antici-
pated delay in passing the Greco-Turkish Aid Bill, and subse-
quently in view of the persistently critical situation in Greece.
However, the dollar drain accelerated alarmingly in the summer,
leading Britain to make renewed announcements of the withdrawal
of her forces, announcements which in turn provoked a critical
reaction in Washington. Forrestal's diary entry for 4 August indi-
cates how one such communication was received :
"Lunch today with Marshall, Harriman, Snyder. Marshall ex-
pressed his deep concern with the implications that might be
drawn from the withdrawal of British troops from Greece and
Italy. He has wired Bevin in strong language, protesting against
the British action in presenting the United States with such de-
cisions as the one of last February advising us that we would
43
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
have to accept the responsibility for Greece and this most recent
one of complete withdrawal from southern Europe. He asked
Douglas to inquire of Bevin whether this indicates a fundamental
change in British policy. Bevin replied to this in the negative."^
In response to pressure such as this, but with great reluctance,
Britain left 5,000 men in Greece until well into 1948 and 3,000 or
so from then on. The last British troops did not leave Greece until
the beginning of 1950.
The fact was that, quite apart from the political difficulty of
sending United States troops to Greece, there were hardly the
troops available to send. With the expiry of the Selective Service
Act on 31 March, 1947, Congress allowed the last relics of military
conscription to disappear, not to reappear until in June of the fol-
lowing year, 1948, a fresh Selective Service Act was passed.
Meanwhile, however, the reduction of United Kingdom com-
mitments went on. Although in November, 1946, the Government
announced their intention to continue conscription from 1 January,
1949 (when it was due to expire), in April, 1947, they responded
swiftly to pressure from their back-benchers and cut the proposed
duration from eighteen months to twelve months. On 30 July,
1947, a speed-up in demobilization was ordered and on 30 August,
1947, as part of dollar crisis economies, Attlee announced a further
cut which would bring the army down to 1,007,000 by 31 March,
1948. This was further cut in December, 1947, to 937,000 by the
same date, while defence estimates published the following Febru-
ary, 1948, envisaged a further reduction of 220,000 within the
next year, and a cut of two-ninths in the defence budget, equivalent
to £200 million. The retreat from omnicompetence was on.
Undoubtedly the need to trim commitments also had a good deal
to do at about the same time with the decision to wind up the costly
and thankless Palestine mandate. The United States' repeated re-
fusals (last in November, 1946), to accept any joint responsibility
there led to the British Government's decision to hand the problem
over to the United Nations. When the United Nations voted for
partition in November, 1947, the United States supported it but
would not assist in enforcing it. The United Kingdom took the
same position, announcing it would withdraw its troops by 1
1 The Forrestal Diaries (London, 1952), pp. 292-3; (New York, 1951),
pp. 301-2.
44
THE COLD WAR ALLLIANCE
August, 1948. In fact, the first withdrawals occurred on 16 Novem-
ber, 1947; in January, 1948, the Government announced that
Britain would terminate its mandate on 15 May, 1948. On 19
March, the United States suddenly announced abandonment of
support for partition, in favour of United Nations trusteeship.
When the question was raised inside the U.S. administration, how
far the United States would or could implement this, it turned out
that there simply were not any troops available. Forrestal reports a
depressing meeting on 4 April with the Joint Chiefs of Staff which
ended on an almost pathetic note: "It was suggested that the British
might undertake to hold the fort alone pending the augmentation
of our forces, following the adoption of Selective Service."^ But
the United Kingdom was not to be turned aside from its course.
The mandate ended, the Jewish Agency proclaimed a Jewish State,
eleven minutes later, on 15 May, Mr. Truman accorded it Ameri-
can recognition, and on 30 June, 1948, the last United Kingdom
troops left.
From all of which it can be seen that if Anglo-American rela-
tions had simply consisted of the United Kingdom passing the
sceptre of world responsibility into United States hands the process
would have been attended with a good deal of bitterness and re-
crimination, and, what is more, the sceptre might well in fact have
fallen in the passing. Fortunately this was not what happened.
Instead a new basis of United Kingdom-United States collabora-
tion was found in a European, or to be more accurate, North
Atlantic and Mediterranean, context.
In retrospect the crucial developments of 1947-8 emerge as
logical steps in the evolution of an anti-Russian alliance. And as
such indeed they were conceived — all of them by some people, and
some of them by all people, but not every one by everybody. Even
the Truman Doctrine, though immediately provoked by blatant
Communist (even if not overtly Soviet) hostilities against Greece
and by Soviet pressure against Turkey, was not approved by the
United States Senate until Senator Vandenberg had inserted his
proviso that the aid should cease whenever the General Assembly
or the Security Council should decide that action taken by the
United Nations rendered United States aid unnecessary or undesir-
able— and that, in a Security Council vote on such an issue, the
United States should waive her veto. In both Britain and the U.S.A.
1 Ibid (London), pp. 292-3; (New York) pp. 301-2.
45
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
there was a body of opinion, not necessarily made up of fellow
travellers, which felt uneasy at the too openly anti-Russian tone of
the Doctrine and wished to stress its essentially defensive implica-
tions. That is not to say that anyone in the Government or any but
a few far Leftists disapproved of the policy; they were merely
worried lest it should go too far too roughly. In line with this fear
there was a good deal of elaboration of a distinction of which more
was to be heard later, between a British policy allegedly aimed at
curbing Russian imperialism and an American one which saw the
enemy as Communism per se.
In this context the Marshall Plan, aired at Harvard on 5 June,
three months after the Truman Doctrine had been promulgated on
12 March, was especially attractive to the United Kingdom. In the
first place it was an American initiative and invitation. In the
second place it was aid that took an economic, not a military form.
"Reconstruction" was its theme. And in the third place it was not
overtly anti-Russian: "Any Government that is willing to assist in
the task of recovery will find full co-operation ... on the part of the
United States Government."^ The economic emphasis was par-
ticularly attractive to Ernest Bevin and though it is very doubtful
whether he ever believed the Soviets would join in (except perhaps
to wreck it)^ their inclusion in the invitation undoubtedly helped to
solidify Labour support for the plan.
In fact, of course, the Marshall proposals brought not peace but
a sword. Invited to confer at Paris, Molotov insisted on individual
approaches to the United States and no joint European effort. He
warned France and Britain against an action which "could lead to
no good". Bevin replied: "My country has faced grave consequences
and threats before, and it is not the sort of prospect which will
deter us from doing what we consider to be our duty." Thus,
ironically, what was a pacific and economic offer come to be a
touchstone according to which countries were identified with the
American or the Russian camp. Marshall Aid became, under this
Russian pressure, a first but quite decisive step towards the unifica-
iMr. Marshall at Harvard. U.S. Dept. of State Bulletiti, Vol. 16,
p. 1159.
2 Though he did say in a speech in London on 13 June that it
would "throw a bridge to link East and West".
46
THE COLD WAR ALLLIANCE
tion of Western Europe under British leadership as a pro- American
bloc.'^
This role of British leadership in a European approach to the
United States was emphasized when the sixteen nations conference
met at Paris on 1 2 July by Bevin being in the chair and later by Sir
Oliver Franks becoming chairman of the Committee of European
Economic Co-operation (C.E.E.C.) which met and produced an
outline European recovery programme by 22 September,^
While the future of the Marshall programme was thus back in
the lap of the United States, and more specifically of the American
Congress, the Russians were making clear to the world the hostile
interpretation they put on it. While Communist Parties in Western
Europe were trying to overthrow pro-Marshall Governments the
Cominform was formed (announcement on 5 October) and the
Foreign Ministers' autumn meeting in London, like all its prede-
cessors, stalled under Soviet intransigence. In the middle of Decem-
ber the United States gave interim aid to France, Italy and Austria
and by a new agreement with the United Kingdom relieved her of
all dollar expenditure in Germany, as well as assuming seventy-five
per cent of the cost of both zones.
Thus the division between East and West was becoming more
and more explicit. But it was also becoming apparent that if
Western Europe was to survive its collective defence would have to
be organized. How far British initiative in this was dove-tailed with
American thinking at the very earliest stages we do not know. But
by 13 January, 1948, Bevin was airing his intentions to the United
States in terms which Mr. Truman describes as follows :
"Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, had informed Secre-
tary of State Marshall as early as 13 January, 1948, that England
was planning to approach France and the so-called Benelux
countries (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg) with a proposal
for a series of bilateral defence agreements. The pattern he had
1 Incidentally the decision to incorporate Western Germany in
C.E.E.C.'s plans confirmed the de facto position of Germany.
2 Without any overt United States participation, though Clayton,
Douglas and Caffery were in the wings to say what Congress would not
stand — e.g. to scale down the total from $29 biUion over four years
to $22-4 (cut by the Harriman Committee to |17 billion) and add
pledges to balance budgets.
47
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
in mind was that of the Dunkirk Treaty, a post-war agreement
by which Great Britain and France had agreed to come to each
other's defence in case of renewed German aggression.
General Marshall brought Bevin's message to me. I thought it
was a good beginning — a step in the right direction. If the
countries of Western Europe were ready to organize for their
joint defence, that would be an important contribution to the
peace of the world.
Bevin in his message had asked what our attitude would be
toward this new alliance. I authorized Marshall to inform the
British Foreign Secretary that we agreed with them on the urgent
need for concerted measures by the nations of Western Europe.
As in the case of the European Recovery Programme, we wel-
comed European initiative and would give their undertaking our
whole-hearted sympathy; the United States would do anything it
properly could to assist the European nations to bring this or a
similar project to fulfilment.
With this backing from the United States, Bevin approached
the French and the Benelux countries."^
On 22 January Bevin expounded his plan to the House of Com-
mons: "I believe the time is ripe for a consolidation of Western
Europe." He talked about "Western Union" and said, vaguely, it
"must primarily be a fusion derived from the basic freedoms and
ethical principles for which we all stand ... It is more of a brother-
hood and less of a system." What emerged, in the form of the
Brussels Treaty signed on 17 March, 1948, was a good deal less
than any union. Although the preamble talked about strengthening
"the economic, social and cultural ties" of the signatories, the heart
of the Treaty was in the pledge to afford "all military and other
aid and assistance in their power" to any one of them which might
be attacked. It was essentially military; the signatories were the
United Kingdom, France, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg.
Even before the Treaty was signed there was an ominous develop-
ment. On 24 February the Communist coup occurred in Prague.
On 26 February Britain, the United States and France launched a
joint protest against the U.S.S.R. — a step without precedent. On
5 March General Clay, United States military governor in Ger-
1 Truman, op. cit.. Vol. II (New York, 1956), p. 243; (London.
1956), p. 257.
48
THE COLD WAR ALLLIANCE
many, warned Washington that tension had reached a point at
which war might "come with dramatic suddenness". A few days
later (12 March) Bevin made what appears to be the first explicit
suggestion of a North Atlantic Pact. Forrestal reports Marshall as
having told him that "Bevin makes three proposals :
1. Build around the 51nation , . . pact.
2. A plan for Atlantic security.
3. A Mediterranean system of security.
Bevin suggests a meeting in Washington between British and
American representatives early next week".^ The Brussels Pact, in
other words, had in fact already been recognized to be insufficient,
in face of a "clear and present danger". Immediately, all the United
States could offer was Mr. Truman's call to Congress on 17 March
for Universal Military Training and Selective Service and his refer-
ence to the Brussels Treaty as "deserving our full support". On 23
April Bevin argued further for his Atlantic Treaty with United
States membership on the grounds that only so could the Russians
be deterred from war and only so could the French agree to a
rebuilding of Germany. "He expressed the opinion that it would
be very difficult for the British, or other free nations, to stand up to
new acts of aggression unless there was a definitely worked-out
arrangement, which included the United States, for collective resist-
ance against aggression."^
There was here some juggling for position. Europe (including
not least Great Britain) was very anxious not to launch an Atlantic
Pact which the U.S.S.R. would regard as hostile before they had
the firm promise of 100 per cent United States support; the United
States was very anxious (partly for Congressional reasons) to use
the E.R.P. analogy — Europe "to display energy and competence in
the perfection of their own plans . . . before we give them any
indication of the scope or degree of our support".^ The argument
and the manoeuvring went on throughout the summer, Forrestal
recording as late as 1 2 November :
1 Tbe Forrestal Diaries (New York, 1951), pp. 301-2; (London,
1952), pp. 372.
2 Truman, op. cit., Vol. II (New York), p. 245 ; (London), pp. 258-9,
3 The Forrestal Diaries (New York), p. 434; (London), p. 409,.
D 49
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
"On the question of an Atlantic Pact, 'the British [Chiefs of
Staff] made it very clear that they considered it essential that the
United States should sign a pact to support the Western European
powers in the event of 'hostilities'. They were asked what the
effect would be if the United States failed to sign a pact but
made substantial military shipments; they were unanimous in
replying that this would be better than nothing but still 'totally
inadequate'."^
As far as the United Kingdom was concerned two points lay
behind all this :
1. Britain's desire as a European power to get the United States
as far into a European commitment as possible, because of her
conviction that American support was essential for European
defence.
2. Her determination as an insular power with wide extra-
European responsibilities not to accept any greater commitment
on the continent of Europe than the United States would.
How far, in pursuit of the first aim, the United Kingdom would go,
was strikingly demonstrated in June-July, 1948, at the height of
the Berlin crisis, when the British were sounded out on whether
they would accept two squadrons of B-29s stationed in England
and the Foreign Office's reaction, "somewhat to the surprise of the
Americans", was "prompt and in the affirmative".^ There was noth-
ing in the British response that should have surprised anyone.
Already in the earlier part of 1947 the Royal Air Force and the
U.S. Strategic Air Command had agreed on a long-range flight
training programme; not surprisingly therefore, agreement on the
stationing of the B-29s had already been reached at the operational
level before the diplomats and politicians endorsed it. The decision
to accept the atomic bombers, crucial though it was, was in fact in
direct line with the kind of responsibilities Britain had already
assumed and the kind of relationship with the United States which
she had all along been seeking.
Though presented publicly as a temporary arrangement, it is
doubtful whether anyone really so regarded it or, if they did, that
they imagined that this subtracted from the significance of the
1 Ibid. (New York), p. 525; (London), p. 490.
2 Ibid. (New York), pp. 454-5; (London), pp. 427-8.
50
THE COLD WAR ALLLIANCE
decision. In August, 1948, another thirty B-29s joined the initial
sixty and by the end of the year the number of American air force
personnel in Britain had risen to 6,000. When Sir Stafford Cripps,
as Chancellor of the Exchequer, visited Washington in October he
told Forrestal that "Britain must be regarded as the main base for
the deployment of American power and the chief offensive against
Russia must be by air".^ Thus, in advance of agreement on the
North Atlantic Treaty, Britain had committed herself to an alliance
in arms with the United States and had built her defence strategy
around the American atomic deterrent wielded from bases on
British soil. Moreover, this was done without any formal treaty
agreement; it was an "arrangement", an "understanding" between
the political and service chiefs on each side.
The bilateral relationship thus established in air defence was
not suitable for application, simply and directly, to the economic
problems of Britain and Europe. Yet one may trace elements of the
same way of thinking in Britain's attitude to the evolution of the
institutions of the Marshall Plan. Thus in the European Recovery
Programme (E.R.P.) Britain had thrown her weight in favour of
each recipient country negotiating a bilateral treaty with Washing-
ton, rather than fusing their negotiating personalities into one and
concluding a single multilateral treaty with the United States. On
this she got her way. Similarly when the French "Europeanists"
had pressed for a strong international secretariat under a powerful
chairman for the Organization for European Economic Co-opera-
tion (O.E.E.C.) which would develop a vigorous personality of its
own and, as such, negotiate directly with member Governments —
the kind of structure which had served the European Coal Com-
munity— Britain opposed it. Instead she advocated the establish-
ment of sixteen national delegations at Paris, served by a small
secretariat in a subordinate role — a kind of continuous international
conference. Substantially this was what emerged and, fortuitously
in fact, but consequentially as it appeared, the eminent British
chairman of the C.E.E.C, Sir Oliver Franks, was not made avail-
able to its successor organization, O.E.E.C, but instead was dis-
patched to Washington as British Ambassador. That no slight to
the new organization was intended ought to have been apparent
by the selection of Sir Edmund Hall-Patch to be Chairman of the
Executive Committee, who made a signal contribution to the sense
1 Ibid. (New York), p. 491; (London), p. 460.
51
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
of European loyalty that became O.E.E.C.'s hall-mark. To the
Americans, however, it is doubtful if it appeared that way, espec-
ially since Mr. Truman had released his own Secretary of Com-
merce, Mr. Harriman, to be the American opposite number in
Paris. Finally, in line with these restrictions on supra-nationalism
and this determination to keep open direct lines of communication
with Washington — indeed to give priority to them — was the British
desire to see the crucial question of the allocation of funds handled
in Washington and not in Paris. Here Britain's main critics were
the Americans themselves, who, pressing for European unification,
suddenly insisted on the Europeans doing their own shareout, at
least to the extent of making their own recommendations for the
division of aid. In fact the task proved too much for so large a
membership and a Committee of "Four Wise Men"^ were given
the task of making recommendations which the council sub-
stantially accepted. In fact also O.E.E.C. recommendations were
only recommendations. The Economic Cooperation Administra-
tion, E.C.A. in Washington always retained the legal power to
determine the size of aid allotments and when the aid total was
cut at the end of the first two years E.C.A. assumed the major
responsibility for fixing the allocation.
As the structure of N.A.T.O. developed, British attitudes to-
wards it could be seen to parallel closely previous attitudes to the
Marshall Plan. There was the same aversion to anything suggestive
of a supra-national secretariat, though a comparable willingness to
second an eminent English public servant, in this case Lord Ismay,
and to allow him to develop an "international personality". In the
matter of the allocation of American aid there was indeed little
question of choice between the bilateral and the multilateral ap-
proach. When merely economic aid stopped and the new Mutual
Defence Assistance Programme, part economic but mainly military,
took its place, the United States naturally preferred to decide itself
who should have how much. To Britain, reasonably confident of
her ability to demonstrate that she was a good risk and no mere
crutch-lover, this arrangement was preferable to any round-table
haggling. (N.A.T.O. haggling, as in the Annual Review and over
the costs of the infrastructure, proved to be arduous indeed.)
Similarly, in strategic planning, the structure of N.A.T.O., with its
location of the Standing Group in Washington, was highly accept-
^ From Italy, France, Belgium and the United Kingdom.
52
THE COLD WAR ALLLIANCE
able/ Save for the addition of France, was this not the old Com-
bined Chiefs of Staff Committee of World War II, which also had
met in Washington? The resemblance of S.H.A.P.E. to S.H.A.E.F.
was even more obvious, while the selection of General Eisenhower
as Supreme Commander put the organization of European defence
into trusted and familiar hands.
Most important of all perhaps, the essential power structure of
N.A.T.O. was (indeed still is) that of an alliance in which two
members, the United States and Britain, disposed of a strength
different not merely in degree but also in kind from that which the
rest could command, namely the nuclear deterrent. The British
share in this antedated her development of an independent deter-
rent of her own (if indeed the V-bomber force can properly be so
described); it derived essentially from the facilities which as "the
unsinkable aircraft carrier" she afforded to U.S. Strategic Air Com-
mand (S.A.C.) at a time when other bases were, in varying degrees,
impracticable because they were either liable to be overrun by
Soviet ground forces or were only leaseable from politically un-
stable ground landlords. But all along S.A.C. has remained outside
N.A.T.O., an arm exclusively and directly under U.S. control.
There was thus a paradox at the heart of N.A.T.O. (and still is),
that as an alliance it never controlled forces adequate for the de-
fence of its members; owing to the persistent failure in the build-up
of its ground troops, it depended always upon the two air forces
which it did not control, S.A.C. and Bomber Command. That this
was an element of weakness, and that it occasioned jealousies and
anxieties amongst the members is almost certainly true, but from
the British point of view this feature of N.A.T.O. was not the least
of its recommendations. A N.A.T.O. which sought to oppose the
Soviet millions by an equivalent build-up of ground forces would
have drained Britain dry of man-power and left her nothing with
which to deal with the "limited" and "brush-fire" wars which
might come her way as a worldwide power. It would also have put
Britain very much on a par with all the continental European mem-
bers, with so much of a voice (and no more) as the numbers of her
armed forces would have entitled her to. The balance maintained
1 The Standing Group's prestige declined from 1953 onwards, when
the Chairman of the United States Chiefs of Staff ceased to be the
day-to-day American representative on the Group; in his place came
another senior officer.
53
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
between the conventional forces of N.A.T.O. and the nuclear de-
terrent was essentially what enabled Britain to continue operating
in her dual capacity as a European and an Atlantic power. More-
over, it enabled her to build and maintain the Anglo-American
alliance within a structure of Western European collective security,
thus by-passing many, if not all, the problems that an exclusively
bilateral arrangement would have created, both in Europe and in
America. Finally it put her on a par with the United States in
respect of an issue on which she was peculiarly sensitive- — her
degree of insularity or commitment. She was able to hold to her
contention that as an island power with worldwide obligations she
was as good a European as that quasi-island power with worldwide
commitments, the United States, and that she would go into Europe
as far as America would go (even if that involved greater risks for
her than for America, as a more vulnerable and contiguous country)
but that she was not under any obligation to go farther.
The testing time for "thus far and no farther" came very soon
after the N.A.T.O. structure had been built. When the Korean
War made vivid the menace of Communism on the march and at
the same time diverted much American strength towards the
Pacific, the inadequacy of N.A.T.O. s forces became glaringly
apparent. The demand for the creation of a German army to help
in the manning of the European ramparts grew proportionally. It
did not indeed grow at an equal pace in Britain and America.
Britain, to some extent, had her hand forced by American pressure.
Left to herself, she would certainly have preferred to wait rather
than demand from a defeated enemy a contribution to an anti-
Russian defence force. Britain was more reluctant than the U.S.A.
to believe that Germany's "re-education" in democracy and non-
aggression was complete at the end of a five-year course. She was
also more willing to credit the Soviet argument that once West
Germany was re-armed the reunification of Germany would be out
of the question. These differences apart, no one disputed that the
revival of a German instrument of war would be only tolerable to
her old enemies and victims if it were integrated in a larger whole
which it could never hope to dominate. Thus arose the idea of a
European army, to which indeed even so robust a British patriot as
Winston Churchill gave his endorsement at the Council of Europe
in August, 1950. What perhaps his auditors failed to notice was
his proviso that such a force should act "in full co-operation witli
54
THE COLD WAR ALLLIANCE
the United States and Canada". Even so, it was a misleading index
of Britain's own intentions. The Americans, announcing that they
would send more troops to Europe (Mr. Truman on 5 September,
1950), began also to step up their pressure for German rearmament.
The French, hating the idea of a German national army, hastily
devised the Pleven Plan (national contingents integrated at the
level of the smallest possible unit under a European Defence Min-
ister, responsible to the European Assembly with a European
budget and Defence Council). But when it came to working out
details in the first half of 1951, the United Kingdom made it clear
that it would not join the European Army and to the meeting held
at Paris to discuss the Plan in February, 1951, Britain sent only an
observer. However, when it became apparent later in the year that
a direct German contribution to N.A.T.O. would not be acceptable
and that the European Defence Community (E.D.C.) was the only
alternative, the United Kingdom joined with the United States and
France in giving it support. Herbert Morrison, as Foreign Secretary,
said we desired to establish "the closest possible association" with
it "at all stages of its development". The statement was, however,
more indicative of the ambivalence of British pronouncements than
of any change of policy.
If, when Mr. Churchill took over from Mr. Attlee in October,
1951, the Europeans expected the great proponent of a European
Army to lead the United Kingdom into E.D.C, they were quickly
disillusioned. Despite keen and constant American pressure the
response of the British Government was cool. Sir David Maxwell-
Fyfe was sent to Strasbourg to say that Britain would "consider"
the best way of "associating" herself with a European army — a far
cry from integrating her forces in one. In other words the British
Government was for a European army — but from outside; Britain
was to be a well-wisher, not a participant. We have Sir Anthony
Eden's word for it^ that this policy enjoyed, from November, 1951,
onwards, official American support (though he admits even "well-
informed" Americans still blamed us for not going in). He does
not say what considerations led to this change in the American
attitude but to the extent to which it took place it was certainly
welcome in Britain. As the E.D.C. negotiations proceeded it became
more and more apparent that the British relationship with any such
defence community would not be any more intimate than the
1 A. Eden, F//// O'u/e (London, Boston, 1960), pp. 32-36.
55
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
American, In pursuance of this policy it was a joint and identical
assurance that Britain and the U.S.A. gave on the morrow of the
signing of the E.D.C. Treaty that
"If any action from whatever quarter threatens the integrity or
unity of the Community, the two Governments will regard this
as a threat to their own security. They will act in accordance with
Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty."
In fact, of course, this assurance was not enough to secure the rati-
fication of the E.D.C. Treaty. For nearly two years the E.D.C.
debate dragged on inconclusively in France. In face of this, Ameri-
can impatience and irritation mounted. In October, 1953, Dulles as
U.S. Secretary of State threatened France with his "agonizing reap-
praisal" and the threat that Congress might not continue to support
N.A.T.O. Aimed primarily at France it also had its implications for
Britain. This was the time when Dulles informed Eden that
"If things went wrong the United States might swing over to a
policy of western hemispheric defence, with emphasis on the
Far East. . . . Mr. Dulles pointed out that the consequences of a
swing of American policy towards hemispheric defence were of
obvious concern to Great Britain. He hoped therefore that they
might find an occasion to underline the warnings which he had
issued in his statement and make some appeal to France."^
In August, 1954, nonetheless, the French Assembly rejected E.D.C.
The situation thus precipitated was far more critical than any
that had existed before E.D.C. had been thought of. To resolve this
crise de con fiance, even though in the strict sense it was none of her
making, and to make possible the only other conceivable solution,
the admission of Germany into N.A.T.O., Britain gave a pledge
"to maintain on the mainland of Europe . . . the effective strength
of the United Kingdom forces now assigned to S.A.C.E.U.R., four
divisions and the Tactical Air Force, or whatever S.A.C.E.U.R. re-
gards as equivalent fighting capacity" and not to withdraw them
against the wishes of a majority of the Brussels Powers. For the
United States Dulles also gave an undertaking but it was in a less
explicit form — the United States "to maintain in Europe . , . such
units ... as may be necessary and appropriate to contribute its fair
1 Ibid., pp. 57-58.
56
THE COLD WAR ALLLIANCE
share of the forces needed . . . etc." In retrospect the discrepancy
between the two commitments may not appear unduly significant;
if so, it is because the British Government has not allowed the Paris
Agreements to set a precedent in creating such discrepancies — in-
deed, as the British Defence White Paper of 1957 soon showed, it
has not interpreted the Agreements themselves as constituting quite
as rigid a commitment as at first appeared.
57
5
THE ATOM
WITH the establishment of N.AT.O. and the creation of
the working partnership in the nuclear deterrent there
came into being again an informal Anglo-American
alliance which, mutatis mutandis, incorporated most of the essential
features of the wartime relationship. There was, however, one area
of activity which was conspicuously excluded from the Anglo-
American partnership. Anything to do with the great discovery
with which the war ended, the management of the annihilating
energies of the atom, remained a jealously guarded national secret.
The story, fragmentary and at many points obscure, thanks to the
technical complexity of the subject matter and the enveloping
curtain of official secrecy, begins with the outbreak of the war itself.
Anglo-American co-operation in the field of government-spon-
sored scientific research may be said to date from the dispatch to
America of Sir Henry Tizard's mission in August, 1940. In Tizard's
own words the policy behind his mission was simply "to tell them
what they want to know".^ The Americans were deeply impressed
by such openness and reciprocated with an equal generosity. By the
beginning of 1941 the British Government had committed itself to
an explicit policy of disclosing all scientific and technical secrets to
the Americans, withholding only those which might involve the
security of imminent operations or where the developments being
explored were still immature. This applied, by no means least, to
British researches on what was then known as the U-bomb;- in
October, 1941, while the U.S.A. was still at peace, Roosevelt sug-
gested to Churchill that work on this project should be conducted
jointly. The suggestion was not adopted in that form, but from the
autumn of 1941 to the autumn of 1942 frequent visits and constant
exchanges of papers established a virtual pooling of British and
American findings. By June, 1942, it seemed to have become pos-
sible— and if possible then indeed imperative — to proceed from
^ H. Duncan Hall and C. C. Wrigley, Studies of Overseas Supply, pp.
361, 368.
2 Its code name until November, 1941, was Maud, and after that date
Tube Alloys.
58
THE ATOM
research to production and in a striking passage in his Second
World War Sir Winston Churchill describes how he and President
Roosevelt, sitting in "intense heat" in a "tiny little room" at Hyde
Park agreed to abandon work in Britain, and, in the interests of
economy and security, concentrate research and production in the
United States.
"I strongly urged that we should at once pool all our informa-
tion, work together on equal terms, and share the results, if any,
equally between us. The question then arose as to where the
research plant was to be set up. We were already aware of the
enormous expense that must be incurred, with all the consequent
grave diversion of resources and brain-power from other forms
of war-effort. Considering that Great Britain was under close
bombing attack and constant enemy air reconnaissance, it seemed
impossible to erect in the island the vast and conspicuous factories
that were needed. We conceived ourselves at least as far advanced
as our Ally, and there was of course the alternative of Canada,
who had a vital contribution herself to make through the supplies
of uranium she had actively gathered. It was a hard decision to
spend several hundred million pounds sterling, not so much of
money as of competing forms of precious war energy, upon a
project the success of which no scientist on either side of the
Atlantic could guarantee. Nevertheless, if the Americans had
not been willing to undertake the venture we should certainly
have gone forward on our own power in Canada, or, if the
Canadian Government demurred, in some other part of the
Empire. I was, however, very glad when the President said he
thought the United States would have to do it. We therefore took
this decision jointly, and settled a basis of agreement."^
However, of this momentous agreement no written record was
made and by the time subordinates came to translate the generalities
of their masters into specific directives, the American programme
had entered a new phase. In August, 1942, when the project was
ripe for transfer from laboratory to factory, the U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers assumed control of what their code called the "Man-
hattan District" and in so doing brought in with them a military
concept of security. The signature in September of the Anglo-
Russian agreement for the exchange of weapons seems to have been
1 ChurchiU, The Second World War, Vol. IV, (London) pp. 341-2,
(New York) pp. 380-1.
59
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
another inhibiting factor for the American administration.^ Soon a
new doctrine evolved in American scientific-military thinking, that
no information should be exchanged even with their closest allies
beyond what would directly benefit the war effort. As, in the in-
terests of security, work on the bomb became increasingly compart-
mentalized, so the number and importance of the compartments to
which the British were given access declined. By the end of 1942
there was a virtual cessation of all flow of information to the
British.
In January, 1943, Churchill protested about this to Roosevelt at
the Casablanca Conference. Receiving hearty assurances but no
action from the President, Churchill pressed his case with Harry
Hopkins, warning him that if the Ameiicans were not more forth-
coming Britain would be compelled to go ahead separately.^ In May
at Washington Churchill secured Roosevelt's agreement "that the
exchange of information on tube alloys should be resumed, and
that the enterprise should be considered a joint one", and at their
Quebec meeting in August, 1943, a specific document incorporating
these principles was drawn up.^
Under the Quebec Agreement a Combined Policy Committee was
established consisting of three Americans, two British and one
Canadian member to oversee the project and provide a channel
through which information could be exchanged. The clauses which
dealt with the exchange of information were, as Lord Attlee later
remarked, "loosely worded"; the first spoke of "complete inter-
change of information and ideas on all sections of the project",
another stipulated that "in the field of design, construction and
operation of large-scale plants" interchange would be regulated by
"such ad hoc arrangements as may, in each section of the field,
appear to be necessary or desirable if the project is to be brought to
fruition at the earliest moment. Such ad hoc arrangements shall be
subject to the approval of the Policy Committee".
^ R. G. Hewlett and O. E. Anderson, History of the U.S. Atomic
'Energy Commission, Vol. I, pp. 267-8.
2 R. Sherwood, Koosevelt and Hopkins, pp. 700-1.
3 Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. IV, (London) p. 723, (New
York) p. 809, telegram to Sir John Anderson, and Vol. V, (London) p.
83, (New York) p. 93 telegram to Deputy Prime Minister and War
Cabinet.
60
THE ATOM
Of a rather different order were four politico-economic clauses
of the agreement; these were mutual undertakings "that we will
never use this agency against each other", "that we will not use it
against third parties without each other's consent" and "that we
will not communicate any information ... to third parties except
by mutual consent"; finally, in order to quiet the American sus-
picions that the British were primarily interested in securing infor-
mation which would give them a commercial advantage after the
war, the following clause was added: "In view of the heavy burden
of production falling upon the United States as a result of a wise
division of war effort, the British Government recognize that any
post-war advantages of an industrial or commercial character shall
be dealt with as between the United States and Great Britain on
terms to be specified by the President of the United States to the
Prime Minister of Great Britain, The Prime Minister expressly
disclaims any interest in these industrial and commercial aspects
beyond what may be considered by the President of the United
States to be fair and just and in harmony with the economic welfare
of the world. "^
The Quebec Agreement was secret, so secret that in Britain even
the War Cabinet was not informed of its provisions. Mr. Attlee
learnt them for the first time only when he took over as Premier in
1945; so, presumably, did Mr. Truman in the same way. According
to Senator McMahon, neither he nor any of his Congressional col-
leagues knew of them until 1947. In retrospect this appears a grave
error. Dr. Conant, who had a major role in drafting the Agreement
and was a founder member of the Combined Policy Committee,
gave it as his opinion in 1952 that
"if at least a committee of the Senate of the United States had
been apprised of the United States-British war-time negotiations
when they took place, the Bill that set up the Atomic Energy
Commission of the United States might have taken a different
form and Anglo-American relations after a rough passage might
be better now. As a very humble observer from a distance of
what occurred at high levels in 1943, I thought then and I still
think that a treaty should have been drawn between the three
nations involved, a treaty dealing with everything even distinctly
related to atomic energy. I for one certainly regret the existence
of barriers to full Anglo-American co-operation in all aspects of
1 Command Paper 9123, 6 April, 1954.
61
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
applied nuclear physics, yet the events of the last few years have
made the removal of these barriers difficult, to say the least, "^
The Quebec Agreement, even during the war, did not work
without some creaking. General Groves, head of the Manhattan
Project, never believed in interchange and, on his own proud ad-
mission, worked against it.- Nevertheless the Agreement served as
the basis for British participation in the later stages of the work on
the bomb and in general co-operation was good. Moreover, in June,
1944, the Combined Policy Committee was supplemented by a
Combined Development Trust. This, financed jointly by Britain
and the United States, was established to buy up and control all
available supplies of uranium and thorium ores.
By September, 1944, the time was ripe for thinking about the
possible post-war implications of atomic energy. Visiting Roosevelt
then, after the second Quebec Conference, Churchill agreed with
him on an aide-7nemoire which looked beyond the terms of the
Quebec Agreement; this document stated that "full collaboration
between the United States and the British Government in develop-
ing Tube Alloys for military and commercial purposes should con-
tinue after the defeat of Japan unless terminated by joint agree-
ment".^ More confidential even than the Quebec Agreement, the
aide-me?noire was not even disclosed by Roosevelt at the time to
his closest "Tube Alloys" adviser, Henry Stimson, and the only
American copy of it was lost in an irrelevant file for years. Though
its intent was clear, its exact legal status became debatable once
Roosevelt's death and Churchill's resignation removed its two
signatories from power.
When the bomb came alive in all its horrifying actuality at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki two considerations were uppermost in the
thinking of Mr. Attlee's Government. The first was the need, if
possible, to establish some efi^ective international control of the new
scientific monster. The second was the need to consolidate and
extend the existing arrangements for Anglo-American partnership
in the atomic field. In the eyes of the British Government the two
objectives were not thought to be incompatible. The Americans, or
1 J. B. Conant, Anglo-American Kelations in the Atomic Age, p. 33.
2 U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, In the Matter of J. Robert
Oppenheimer (Washington 1954), pp. 174-5, 177.
3 Hewlett and Anderson, op. cit., p. 327 and pp. 457-8.
62
THE ATOM
many of them at any rate, were not so sure. Three schools could be
discerned; the out-and-out internationalists; the Anglo-Ameri-
canists; and those who believed that the "secrets" of the bomb
could and should be kept by the United States. In the mind of Mr.
Truman, new to his fearful responsibilities, elements of all three
attitudes seem to have co-existed. Mr. Attlee's desire for an early
meeting to hammer out a joint approach to the problems of the
bomb derived urgency in October, 1945, from the President's re-
marks at a press conference that the United States would not share
the "know-how" of the bomb's manufacture with its allies. The
meeting, at which Mackenzie King also participated, for Canada,
took place in Washington in November.
No detailed report of the meeting has been published, but from
the fullest account available'^ it would appear that the main item of
the agenda was the international control of atomic energy and that
it was not until late in the meetings that the future of Anglo-
American co-operation was considered; it was then entrusted by the
principals to their subordinates, working wearily against time.
What came out was the "Agreed Declaration" of 16 November
which advocated international action to control atomic energy and
to outlaw weapons of mass destruction, with effective safeguards
through inspection. To this was appended a memorandum that read
as follows :
"1. We desire that there should be full and effective co-operation
in the field of atomic energy between the United States, the
United Kingdom and Canada.
2. We agree that the Combined Policy Committee and the Com-
bined Development Trust should be continued in a suitable
form.
3. We request the Combined Policy Committee to consider and
recommend to us appropriate arrangements for this purpose."
Lord Attlee says he and Sir John Anderson came away from the
talks thinking they had obtained "a satisfactory agreement for
future co-operation in the field of atomic energy". No reference
was made in the communique to the Quebec Agreement, least of all
to the politico-economic clauses. This was one of the matters on
which the Combined Policy Committee was to make recommenda-
tions.
1 Hewlett and Anderson, op. cit., p. 455-81.
63
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
When the Combined 'Policy Committee got down to this task it
found that at the operative level a crucial gap existed between
British and American thinking. The British asked for the imple-
mentation of the "full and effective co-operation" of the Truman-
Attlee-King memorandum. On the American side, however, a
paradoxical alliance emerged of the nationalists and the interna-
tionalists, General Groves insisting that any such exchange of in-
formation with the United Kingdom would compromise the
attempts to set up international control of the bomb through the
United Nations. As a result nearly six months went by without any
progress at all. To make matters worse, the American administra-
tion was lending its support in Congress to the McMahon Bill
which proposed a number of sweeping restrictions on the disclosure
or exchange of information in the atomic energy field, reflecting
the pervasive Congressional conviction that the U.S.A. had the
"secret" of the atom bomb and that she ought to preserve this in her
exclusive possession even from her closest allies.
In face of this Mr. Attlee "informed the United States ambas-
sador in London, Mr. Harriman, that if the McMahon Bill was
passed Britain would be forced to build her own plants for atomic
energy production for both military and civil purposes. At the
same time he instructed Lord Halifax in Washington to request
detailed information on the construction and operation of atomic
energy plants in the United States at the next meeting of the Com-
bined Policy Committee in order that Britain should have the neces-
sary data to complete the work. The request was put at a meeting on
15 April. It met with a blank refusal".^
There then ensued a sharply worded exchange of notes between
the two leaders, an outline of which may be read in Mr. Truman's
Memoirs and Lord Attlee's recorded reminiscences, A Prwie
Minister Remembers. For Britain, of course, there were two aspects
to the problem, both of which appeared equally important in the
context of conditions in 1946. Not only was there the obvious desire
to share in the super-weapon, but also, with British coal production
lagging and oil constituting a large element in our import bill, the
atom as a source of fuel and power had a special appeal, all the
greater since somewhat optimistic estimates prevailed about the
cheapness of atomic power. In pressing their case the United King-
dom relied mainly on the "complete interchange" clause of the
1 Francis Williams, A Prime Minister Remembers (1961), p. 110.
64
THE ATOM
Quebec Agreement plus the moral argument of the United King-
dom's contribution to the wartime project; the United States in
rebuttal contended that Quebec was never meant to cover plant
construction and also that while a plan for the international control
of atomic energy was before the United Nations any exclusive
exchange between the United Kingdom and the United States
would be improper.
The Attlee-Truman exchanges were still in progress on 1 August,
1946, when the McMahon Bill became law. No reply was ever
received in Britain to Mr. Attlee's last and fullest exposition of the
British claims and no doubt any reply from the American adminis-
tration would have had only academic interest since, with the enact-
ment of the Bill, an immediate ban was placed on all conveyance of
information. Already in January, 1946, the Government had
announced the establishment of an organization in the Ministry of
Supply which would "be responsible for the production of fissile
material" and would develop the atomic energy programme "as
circumstances may require", i.e. to make both atomic power and
atomic bombs. ^ The imposition of the American ban meant that
there could be no more hope of division of labour or sharing of
expense in the development programme. The Government had now
only the choice of turning back or accelerating and expanding the
work it had begun. It chose the latter. As soon as Parliament re-
assembled in October the House of Commons gave a second read-
ing to the Atomic Energy Bill which gave the Ministry of Supply a
monopoly in the atomic energy field, with full powers of develop-
ment and control.
In 1947, in late spring or early summer, certain key Republican
Senators, notably Senator Hickenlooper, chairman of the Atomic
Energy Commission, and Senator Vandenberg, chairman of the
Foreign Relations Committee, learnt of the political clauses of the
Quebec agreement and immediately pressed for their elimination.
They also objected to the fact that the original uranium agreements,
made in 1944, by which all uranium that the three countries could
obtain (including the Congo supplies) was turned over to the
United States, had been modified in July, 1946, to provide for an
approximate equal division between the United Kingdom and the
United States. Vandenberg said he thought the Hyde Park and
Quebec arrangements "astounding" and "unthinkable" and said
1 H. C. Deb., 5th series, Vol. 418, col. 682-3.
E 65
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
that "failure to revamp the agreements would have a disastrous
effect on Congressional consideration of the Marshall Plan ... a
satisfactory conclusion must be reached before final action on the
Marshall Plan programme". '^ As a result, on 8 January, 1948,
agreement was reached — (the so called modus vivendi)
(a) to remove restrictions on the use of the bomb (though it is
generally accepted that Mr. Truman gave a personal pledge that
the United States would continue to work in the spirit of
Quebec);
{b) to give the United States more ore; e.g. all the Congo
uranium produced in 1948-9 to go to the United States and the
United States to be given additional allocations from the British
owned stockpile if these were needed to maintain the minimum
American programme;
(c) in return, the United States to disclose to the United King-
dom nuclear data in nine "areas of information having to do
with health and safety and certain other things", within the
limits of the McMahon Act, military information specifically
excluded.
The modus vivendi was to run only to December, 1949, and Mr.
Truman, in considering its renewal, proposed in July, 1949, to
Congressional leaders, especially Hickenlooper and Vandenberg,
what would in effect have been something of a revival of the war-
time intimacy. (The limited evidence suggests that the British were
insisting that a full partnership was required by the world situa-
tion.) Mr. Truman, reviving the argument of Britain's wartime
contribution to the bomb, proposed: "a full partnership, subject to
the terms of the Atomic Energy Act"; all available uranium to be
brought to the United States for processing and storage; British
and Canadian scientists to come to the United States to work with
their American colleagues; "to overcome any complaints the British
might have that they were being excluded from the atomic weapons
field, we could arrange to have a number of our un-assembled
bombs placed in the British Isles". ^
^ The Papers of Senator Vandenberg (Boston, 1952; London, 1953),
p. 361.
2 Truman, op. cit.. Vol. II (New York), pp. 303-4; (London), pp.
320-1.
66
THE ATOM
There is, so far as I know, no published evidence as to whether
or not these proposals had the support of the British Government.
They represented, in effect, a re-creation of the wartime project,
including the siting of the whole operation in the United States.
Anxious as Britain was to receive access to all information, it is
possible that she would not have been eager, in 1949, to buy it at
such a price; moreover, the wartime precedent was a good deal less
happy in the atomic field than in others. In any event the proposal
came to nothing. Senator Vandenberg opposed it, as his biographer
states, on the remarkable grounds that "the United States had . . .
continuously extended its aid to Britain and without any over-
whelming co-operation in return", that the Atlantic Pact implied
defence specialization, and that the United States was particularly
equipped to carry the prime responsibility in the nuclear field.
Senator Hickenlooper also objected on the ground of "his distrust
of British security".^ In August, 1949, the American monopoly — -
or, one should more truly say, their imagined monopoly — of A-
bomb secrets was in fact brought to an end — but by another rival
than her ally. In September it was established beyond doubt that
the Russians, a month earlier, had exploded an atomic "device".
At the end of 1949 the modus vivendi did run out and even the
limited exchange possible under it ceased to operate. In the new
year the British Government seems to have submitted new pro-
posals, but on 4 February Dr. Klaus Fuchs was prosecuted in
Britain for offences against the Official Secrets Act. In the next
month Senator McCarthy made public his allegation about Com-
munists in the State Department. On 1 March it was announced
that talks which had been taking place in Washington about co-
operation in the atomic field would be discontinued pending a re-
view by the three countries concerned of all aspects of their security
arrangements. Thus the arrangements in the modus vivendi came
formally to an end. Contacts indeed continued on an informal basis,
but there was no increase in the exchange of information on the
existing restricted level.
This frozen posture persisted throughout the remainder of the
Attlee and Truman regimes. The resolute American refusal to
admit her partner in World War II and now her closest ally in
N.A.T.O. to any share in the secrets, military or industrial, of the
invention to which British effort had so signally contributed was
^ Vandenberg, op. cit., p. 364.
67
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
undoubtedly the biggest flaw, from the British point of view, in the
Anglo-American partnership during these years. The peculiarly
charged quality of the subject, coupled with its technical obscurity,
damped down public discussion of it to a deceptively low level.
The desire to move the American Congress and administration by
an open appeal to what were felt to be their moral obligations,
strove unsuccessfully with the dominant disposition to go easy on
public protests so long as there was a reasonable prospect that
private representations, particularly at the executive level, might
modify statutory vetoes. But the pent-up frustration thus en-
gendered occasionally found outlet in explosions of ill-temper in
Parliament in which political leaders, unable to give frank ex-
pression to their irritation with their allies, vented their feelings
upon the opposite front-bench. The deep sense of mortification and
injustice which rankled on this subject can be detected in the inter-
mittent and often oblique exchanges during this period between
Churchill and Attlee and their respective lieutenants. At the always
silent level of official Whitehall not even these bubbles of exaspera-
tion rose to the surface, but it was perhaps in Whitehall more than
anywhere else that this breakdown of a looked-for co-operation
became a souring element in a relationship otherwise harmonious
and mutually esteemed.
There is every indication that Mr. Churchill confidently looked
for a change on this front as a result of his return to power and his
Washington visit of January, 1952. Since 1948 the British case, in
his view, had been powerfully reinforced by the acceptance of East
Anglia of those S.A.C. bomber bases which, being as it were the
spring boards of American atomic might, exposed Britain to a
peculiar hazard of atomic attack. But this, though it might be a
valid debating-point, was not a bargaining counter, since no one
save British isolationists or fellow-travellers really wished to see the
Americans expelled from these bases and British atomic bombs and
bombers replace American ones. In fact Mr. Churchill was no more
effective in his pleas for a resumption of sharing than Attlee had
been. He obtained the limited, and indeed debatable, advantage of
getting in writing the hitherto informal agreement that tlie atom
bomb should not be loosed from American bases in East Anglia
without British consent. But on the information front, he obtained
nothing. Finally on 3 October, 1952, the United Kingdom ex-
ploded her own atom bomb on the Montebello Islands. How much
68
THE ATOM
it cost, how much more it cost as a result of Britain having to "go
it alone" — no meaningful answers to these questions have ever
been published, Mr. Churchill, on various occasions, spoke of
"many scores of millions of pounds" and of "well over £100
million". Such estimates certainly do not err on the side of over-
statement, but no official figures have ever been released.
The eventual acquisition by Britain, through her own efforts, of
the "secret" of the atom bomb was, of course, by the strange logic
which governed American policy on this subject, the most powerful
argument for the readmission of Britain to the atomic partnership.
But about the same time other factors began to operate to produce
a certain modification of American policy. The Eisenhower Admin-
istration which took over in 1953 enjoyed a somewhat greater
prestige amongst secrecy-minded Congressmen than its prede-
cessor; this coincided with the need to make some response to the
worldwide shock produced by hydrogen bomb explosion at Eniwe-
tok and a growing realization of the need to apprise America's
allies of the military implications of atomic weapons. The decision
in September, 1952, to send atomic artillery to American forces in
Europe was an important factor in this. And in October, 1953,
further successful British atomic test explosions were conducted.
Even so it was not until February, 1954, that the President asked
Congress to amend the McMahon Act to permit the exchange of
information on the tactical uses of atomic energy. At the end of
August the President signed amending legislation which pretty
well gave him what he asked. It was still less than the British
wanted; weapons secrets were still excluded. British expenditure on
making her own bombs still ran at a level which the Manchester
Guardian estimated at more than £100 million a year, and when
the British exploded a hydrogen bomb of their own on Christmas
Island in 1957 it was still a British made weapon. Still the log-jam
had been broken; by degrees further agreements extended the area
of co-operation. Most important perhaps of all, the interpretations
given to the agreements by officials concerned were genuinely liberal
in spirit. The worst of the discriminatory sting was drawn; from
the British point of view a notable aberration of alliance policy was
on the way to being rectified.
69
6
THE FAR EAST
THE basic identity of policy and strategy which the United
Kingdom developed with the U.S.A. in Europe was not
reproduced in the Far East. In the ordinary pattern of British
and American thinking about Anglo-American relations the Far
East occupied only a marginal place; this somewhat obscured from
public notice the full nature and extent of the disagreements which
marked their policies in this area. These could be traced back at
least as far as the American pressure in the 1920's which brought
to an end the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. This was followed by the
ragged controversy between Sir John Simon and Mr. Henry Stimson
over how to deal with the Japanese aggression in Manchuria in
1931. As war in Europe approached, something akin to a surrender
of British interests in the Far East developed, with the U.S.A.
making what pace there was in the race against Japan for local
control. But once the conflict in Europe was joined, the Pacific in
British eyes became an ocean of menace for a different reason —
the fear that concern for American interests there would draw
American aid (and after Pearl Harbour, men and arms) away from
Europe to Asia. 'Tacific Firstism" was the great British bogey of
World War II; in British eyes American leaders were marked up or
down in proportion as they resisted or succumbed to this heresy.
Inevitably, in a war which began with a Japanese attack on Hawaii
and which involved a constant threat to the U.S.A. 's Pacific flank,
there was ample scope, even within a surprisingly ready American
acceptance of an 'Atlantic First" strategy, for a considerable crop
of jealousies and squabbles about policies in the Far East. The
rapid collapse of Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaya in 1941-2
brought American criticisms of "decadent colonialism".^ In British
eyes Roosevelt's resolute adherence to the pretence that Chiang
Kai-shek represented a great power constituted an extraordinary
aberration of judgment. But even Americans like Stilwell who did
not share this illusion found other grounds for a vinegarish animos-
^ Cf. as a later by-product of this, Roosevelt's private proposal to
Stalin at Yalta that Hong Kong should be given back to the Chinese.
70
THE FAR EAST
ity to the British "presence" in this theatre and his rivalry with
Wingate became in British eyes a crime which Hollywood com-
pounded by its demonstration that in fact it was Erroll Flynn who
had recaptured Burma. Finally the determination of Admiral King
not only, as was natural, to engross for his theatre all the men and
material he could divert from anywhere else, but also to resist all
control by the Combined Chiefs of Staff and to reject out of hand
the British offer in September, 1944, to assist in the central Pacific
operations — all this was something which the British found in
striking contrast to the basic harmony which prevailed with the
U.S.A. in all the other theatres of war.
The explanation of these divergencies was to be found in
geography and history. To Britain, the Far East, though of genuine
and long-standing interest was, so to say, the last station on the
imperial line. Britain had come into Asia by way of India and the
Indian Ocean, with Singapore the "gate" to the "Far" East which
lay beyond. The area was thus found to have the lowest priority in
the British scheme of things; it was, literally, the opposite side of
the world, and a side moreover where (unlike the Antipodes) there
were no settlements of British blood to beckon across the inter-
vening immensities. For the United States, though ancestry and
habit bound her to Europe, the Far East was only a logical extension
of that "westward movement" which she had long felt to be her
"manifest destiny". The moment she had established herself on the
Pacific coast, she had a direct concern for the policing of that ocean
and a direct interest in what power dominated even its further
shores. Indeed, with the acquisition of Alaska, Hawaii and the
Philippines, she became closer to Asia than to Europe.
Out of the facts of geography grew considerations of strategy.
The Pacific only comes alive strategically to the United Kingdom
when a threat looks like developing there to her communications
with Australia and New Zealand. But to Americans it is a Pacific
power which comes nearest to their own shores; Asiatic Russia is
closer than anywhere in Europe; the Monroe Doctrine, after all,
was in part a response to the Tsar's claim to the Pacific litoral as far
south as the 51st parallel. The development of modern navies and
air forces stimulated the American desire to push her protective
bases as far forward as possible, until, with the defeat of Japan in
1945, her strategic frontier ran as far East as a line through the
71
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
Aleutians, Japan and the Philippines. Here was the Pacific counter-
part to the N.A.T.O. line from Norway to Turkey, the paling
within which any adequate containment of Communist power
should take place.^
The geographical and strategical priorities were reinforced by
powerful sentimental ones. The sort of politico-cultural investment
which the British felt themselves to have in India, the Americans
felt themselves to have in China and, of course, in the Philippines,
the legacy in each case of administrators, teachers and missionaries.
For the British, the circumstances in which a Labour Government
granted independence to India gave Labour almost more than the
Conservatives a kind of proprietary sympathy for the newly
emergent India of Nehru and guaranteed that a sense of mutual
concern would survive the liquidation of British rule. For the
Americans the circumstances in which the Kuomintang, enjoying
American support, was overthrown in China by a rising tide of
Communism made it possible to believe that any Chinese hostility
to the U.S.A. was ephemeral or at any rate manufactured. In Japan,
of course, the easy assumption by MacArthur of the powers of the
Shogunate and the ready acquiescence by the Japanese in the regime
of their conquerors invested the American occupation with an air of
Platonic "guardianship" which was naturally pleasing to any coun-
try with a sense of mission. Small wonder that the American disposi-
tion to be exclusive in this role was a powerful one. Though a Far
Eastern Commission of eleven nations taking part in the war in the
Pacific had been set up in Washington in 1945 and though there
was an Allied Council in Tokio with a representative each for the
U.S.A., the British Commonwealth, the U.S.S.R. and China, neither
body seriously encroached on the American monopoly of admin-
istration in post-war Japan.
Thus, though there were certain discrepancies between the British
and the American assessments of how a defeated Japan ought to be
run, the very exclusiveness of the MacArthur principate prevented
this becoming an area of friction. The real disagreement developed
over China. Here American policy assumed an almost febrile char-
acter which reflected the internal arguments and disputes that had
gone into its making and which undoubtedly greatly complicated for
1 For an incisive analysis of this see G. F. Hudson, WiJl Britain and
America Split in Asia? in "Foreign Affairs", June, 1953.
72
THE FAR EAST
Britain the task of co-ordinating policies with America in the Far
East. In 1949 when the Chinese Communists completed their
victory by expelling the Kuomintang from mainland China a
furious controversy over what was significantly called the "loss" of
China broke out both in the American administration and through-
out the country. Into the argument about the respective merits of
the two Chinese groupings was injected a bitter party feeling de-
rived from the rivalries of the Republicans with a Democratic party
which had excluded them from office for almost twenty years.
Nothing remotely approaching the bipartisan policy towards Europe
existed in respect of the Far East. But although the differences in
the debate were real and from the British point of view important,
even the Democrats (or most of them) began their argument from
a point which was, so to say, a good deal to the right of the British
view. Even where the belief in the Kuomintang's virtue had been
shattered beyond repair, even where the fact of Communist ascend-
ancy was accepted and outside intervention excluded, there was no
abatement in the conviction that the Communist regime was the
enemy.
In Britain, on the other hand, for various reasons, a far more
indulgent view prevailed. In the absence of any paternalistic fond-
ness for Chiang Kai-shek, the venalities and inadequacies of the
Kuomintang had been earlier perceived and more brutally enunc-
iated. This had encouraged an earlier credence for the Chinese
Communist claims that they were only a movement of national
purification. The image developed of the "People's Republic" as
an austere, high-minded, egalitarian society of undernourished
peasants whose Marxism was a mere tool for overthrowing age-old
superstitions and who only asked to be left alone to build a new
China in peace. This pleasing mirage undoubtedly exercised a
powerful influence over elements in the post-war Labour Govern-
ment.
The first open disagreement between London and Washington
came over the issue of recognition. Mr. Acheson, as Secretary of
State, proposed three tests which the new regime in China would
have to pass before the U.S.A. would recognize it. It must be in
effective control of the country, it must recognize and carry out its
international obligations, it must rule with the acquiescence of the
ruled. The moral criteria involved in the second and third of these
73
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
principles were, of course, such as the government of Mao Tse-
tung was ill-equipped to satisfy. The British, here as in general
elsewhere, adhered to a morally neutral theory of recognition, that
it should be an acknowledgement of fact, not a mark of approba-
tion. But the Acheson test, however open to criticism as importing
unassimilable elements into the relations of peaceful states, was in
the direct line of earlier, moralistic policies in this same area; it was,
after all, in relation to the Japanese conquests in Manchukuo that
the Hoover- Stimson doctrine of non-recognition of territories
acquired by force had been enunciated. Moreover it was a doctrine
which in 1932 the League of Nations Assembly emphatically en-
dorsed at the instance of Sir John Simon. There was, therefore,
material here for a fairly charged dispute between the two countries.
We know little about the preliminary discussions between the
United Kingdom and the United States on this subject, except that
they produced no agreement. The British decision to accord recogni-
tion was prompted, it seems fairly clear, by three principal con-
siderations. British commercial interests in China were considerable;
in 1950 their value was estimated at £110 million, much greater
than those of the United States. In Hong Kong we had another
very valuable outpost of trade and investment, highly vulnerable,
should China ever decide to move in on it. (On 12 August, 1949,
Mr. Acheson had denied that there was any American commitment
to defend Hong Kong.) Whatever views one held of the intentions
of the Chinese Communist regime there was some reason to suppose
that some of its hostility might be drawn by a de jure recognition
of a rule which de facto was certainly absolute, and in some British
circles this went so far as to encourage the hope that Mao Tse-tung
might be weaned from his dependence on Moscow and become the
Tito of the Far East. The error of this hypothesis may now be
plain to see but one reason in Britain for embracing it was that it
was firmly held in India where Nehru was pressing for early
recognition. Undoubtedly the desire to keep in step with the
Asiatic parts of the Commonwealth was a powerful factor in
accelerating British recognition. Thus Indian recognition was
accorded on 30 December, Pakistan's on 4 January, Ceylon's on
6 January and Britain's on the same day. Within a week, the
U.S.S.R. raised in the United Nations the question of the Peking
Government's right to China's seat. This brought the disaccord
74
THE FAR EAST
between Britain and the U.S.A. even more embarrassingly into the
open; Britain's first reaction was to abstain from voting,^
It may be — though one certainly cannot be sure — that the U.S.A.
might have come around to recognition of Communist China had
no aggravating circumstance developed. But Senator McCarthy and
the Korean War between them made any change in the American
administration's position impossible and the issue remained an
irritant that grew more aggravating with time.
However, none of this affected Britain's attitude to Mr. Truman's
initial action over Korea in June, 1950, which Britain warmly ap-
plauded and, of course, actively supported. Indeed, though the
British role in Korea was a modest one, it far exceeded that of any
other American ally, save Turkey. By the end of 1950, the Turks
excepted, the only foreign units fighting by the Americans' side in
Korea were from the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth.
From the first the war was seen in Britain as a necessary United
Nations war, the product of deliberate aggression which, if un-
checked, would infect any area in the world where Communism
was pressing against the status quo. But it also became early ap-
parent that the Korean conflict and the Chinese dispute were not
going to remain uninfected each by the other. When on 27 June,
1950, Mr. Truman ordered the United States Seventh Fleet to
neutralize Formosa it became apparent that, whatever the pros and
cons of the action, it supplied a link between Chiang's struggle and
Syngman Rhee's and meant an indefinite endorsement by the U.S.A.
of the Formosa regime. Moreover, from the first moment, when
General MacArthur was appointed as both the United States and
the United Nations Commander-in-Chief in Korea, it could be fore-
seen that the waging of this United Nations war would create many
problems.
However, as long as success attended allied arms, and the only
enemy appeared to be the North Koreans, this hardly mattered. It
was when the going got tougher and Chinese contingents began to
appear, with all that they implied about extending the war, that
the disagreements and prejudices over how to handle Mao and
Chiang began to manifest themselves in this new context of an
^ China's intervention in the Korean War brought a certain harmony
into British and American attitudes in the United Nations; in June
1951 the United Kingdom supported a United States resolution to
defer indefinitely the question of Chinese representation.
75
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
unequal Anglo-American partnership in arms. When, after the
catastrophe on the Yalu River, Mr. Truman at a press conference
on 30 November, 1950, appeared to be saying that the United
States might order MacArthur to use the A-bomb at his discretion,
a deep concern flared up not only in London but also in other West
European capitals. MacArthur's discretion was not a quality the
British found it easy to believe in. In the House of Commons a
debate ensued which the American ambassador, Mr. Gilford,
thought to be "the most serious, anxious and responsible debate on
foreign affairs conducted . . . since the Labour Party came to power
in 1945".^ Mr. Attlee, after conferring with the French, flew im-
mediately to Washington for a conference to which circumstances
certainly lent an appearance of panic hardly appropriate for a con-
cert of allies.
That Mr. Truman was in fact proposing to authorize the use of
the bomb seems in retrospect unlikely. What comes out very clearly
from the reports of the meeting which he and Mr. Attlee have
provided^ is that divergence of emphasis, more than plain con-
trariety of policy, marked the British and American positions. This
was, of course, the consequence of those historical and geographical
differences mentioned earlier. The great British anxieties reflected
Britain's situation and connexions. The British anxiety was that
large forces would get drawn into an Asiatic war and so leave
Europe open to Russian invasions; this was a clear reflection of
Britain's role as a European off-shore island. Her second was that
either by use of the bomb or otherwise the war would develop ex-
clusively the appearance of a war between "Europeans" and
Asiatics; this undoubtedly reflected strong representations which
Britain had received from the Asiatic members of the Common-
wealth.
It was not to be expected that Mr. Attlee would secure from Mr.
Truman any modification of the United States attitude towards the
recognition of Peking and the seating of her representatives at the
United Nations. What he did get was agreement on the importance
of avoiding a general war in the East and on the continuing priority,
in American planning, of Europe. His advocacy of negotiations in
Korea, with its implication of a withdrawal to the 38th parallel, did
1 Truman, op. cit.. Vol. II (New York), p. 392; (London), p. 420.
2 Ibid., Vol. II (New York), pp. 394-413; (London), pp. 418-38 and
Francis Williams, op. cit., 236-240.
76
THE FAR EAST
not win direct acceptance; it was an easier policy for a British Prime
Minister to urge from Whitehall than for a Democratic United
States President to impose on Congress, on MacArthur and — it may
be added — on the North Koreans and their allies. Indeed there is
no particular reason to suppose that MacArthur' s dismissal four
months later and the U.S.S.R.'s proposal of truce talks six weeks
after that owed anything to British representations, acceptable as
both events were in British eyes.
In retrospect it is not surprising that the later stages of the
Korean War, so protracted, so indeterminate, should have imposed
peculiar strains upon the alliance. No one had imagined that the
war would prove so long and so costly. (Plenty of pessimists, of
course, had predicted that it would develop into World War III;
no one had anticipated that while still staying within its Korean
confines it would prove such a running sore and nervous drain.)
The longer the war continued the less clear became its objectives;
the United Nations element seemed to recede and its place was
largely taken by a vague concept of the war as an anti-Communist
crusade. While some British opinion accepted this and almost all
British opinion recognized that in some sense this was true, hardly
anyone found this an adequate basis for continuing the war. For a
policy of "containing" communism there was general support; for a
"crusade" against it — especially one launched in the Far East —
there was almost none. Indeed the American experience at this
time with such self-appointed anti-Communist crusaders as Senator
McCarthy was producing a tremendous backwash of suspicion and
antipathy in Britain, heightened of course by the known "Asiala-
tionist" tendencies of such rabble-rousers.
The Korean conflict in fact brought out very clearly one of the
problems which is attendant upon partnership in arms between two
powers of unequal strength. In a sense (the sense which was almost
always most vividly present to British minds) Britain had as much
at stake in Korea as the U.S.A.: if anything went wrong with the
calculations and a limited war was turned into a global one, Britain's
chances of survival in any recognizable form were less even than
those of the United States. Yet Britain's contribution to the common
cause was almost negligible beside the Americans'. Exactly com-
parable figures are not easy to come by but the scale of the two war
efforts is pretty well represented by the fact that in 1951 while the
77
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
U.S.A. had between 160,000 and 200,000 troops in Korea, the
British had only 12,000.^ As for casualties, the comparative figures,
up to 19 August, 1953, the date of the armistice, were:
U.S.A. United Kingdom Other Commonwealth
Dead 22,731 Dead or missing Dead or missing
believed dead 958 believed dead 521
Wounded 105,961 2,556 1,190
(also United States missing 13,585, which helps to explain that by
1954 the total United States official figures of dead had risen to
33,629).
There were many good reasons why the British and the Com-
monwealth contribution should have been so modest; there were
over 20,000 British troops actively engaged by themselves on a not
wholly dissimilar war in Malaya and of course the whole Korean
incident increased the tension in Europe and called for a general
manning of the ramparts there. Nor indeed at any time did any
responsible American soldier or official complain of Britain not
pulling her weight. This, however, did not alter the fact that with
so small a contribution Britain could not hope to have any real voice
in any of the on-the-spot decisions. She had to accept a local leader-
ship which was a hundred per cent American and rely on the slow,
remote and inadequate processes of diplomatic representation to
ensure that the local commanders would not authorize moves whose
ultimate implications might be global.
From this point of view the United Nations auspices under which
the war was formally fought were a doubtful blessing. Even if
there had been no MacArthur there would have been a problem of
co-ordination, 2 arising from a clash between the form and substance
of the war. In form it was a United Nations war to which all mem-
bers should have contributed and for which the United Nations
should have been, if not the directing, at any rate the co-ordinating
agency. In fact it was the Americans who supplied nine-tenths of
1 Owing to the American practice of rotating tours of duty the
Korean war made an even greater impact on American opinion at
home than the numbers in Korea at any one time would suggest. The
fact is the risk of Korea was real for every American household with
a male of military age.
2 As indeed there was when MacArthur had been succeeded by
Ridgway.
78
THE FAR EAST
the troops and did nine-tenths of the fighting (apart, of course,
from the South Koreans themselves) and MacArthur as the U.S./
U.N. Supreme Commander reported to the United Nations only
through the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Though weekly conferences
were held by the U.N. "Committee of Sixteen", consisting of
member governments who supplied forces for the Korean opera-
tion, all the military decisions were made outside the United
Nations and in secret, as their nature dictated. The only formal
framework for co-ordination was thus an unreal one, yet it served
as an excuse to prevent anything more realistic being constructed.
Most of the time there was only a very intermittent diplomatico-
military liaison. The inadequacies of all Anglo-American military
liaison in a Pacific setting were fortunately in part offset by the
generally good relations which existed at the diplomatic level. Sir
Anthony Eden recounts an example in his Memoirs, illustrating the
ready responsiveness of Mr. Acheson :
"On one occasion I showed him a telegram from Mr, Selwyn
Lloyd, the Minister of State, giving an account of feeling in the
House of Commons with regard to Korea. After reading the
telegram, Mr. Acheson said: 'In fact, you would like us to make
fewer mistakes, and to keep you better informed when we do
make them.' He went on to welcome the visit of Lord Alexander,
then Minister of Defence, with Mr. Lloyd to Korea. 'I under-
stand,' he said, 'the anxieties which the British public must be
feeling, and I hope that this will do something to dispel them.' "^
Nothing could better oil the wheels of an alliance than this ready
sympathy, and nothing could serve as a substitute were it lacking,
yet the Anglo-American experience during the Korean War leaves
one with a strong impression that such personal and ad hoc re-
ceptiveness was not enough. The advantages of the direct, informal
approach, of working through a trusty friend at court, do not
appear to have been a substitute for the kind of regular, committee
type of consultation which predominated at all levels in World
War IL The difficulties of establishing such a system in relation to
Korea were obviously great; perhaps, having regard to the disparity
of the forces involved and the peculiar personal and national
tensions and strains attendant on the whole enterprise, they were
1 Eden, op. cit., p. 21.
79
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
insuperable. The fact remains that their absence was not adequately
made up in any other way.^ Thus even as late as June, 1952, there
could be a major flurry over the American action in bombing
targets on the Yalu River, without informing Britain in advance,
though there was an agreement to consult before any attack was
made. The explanation was that what to the British appeared a
development fraught with grave implications, to the Americans
appeared a merely tactical measure, not covered by the agreement.
The incident did indeed stimulate a new experiment in allied co-
operation. On 28 July, 1952, the appointment was announced of
Major-General S. N. Shoosmith of the British army to be Deputy
Chief of Staff at General Clark's (the U.N./U.S. Commander-in-
Chief's) Headquarters. His function was not to be a secret channel
of information with London but, as a knowledgeable British repre-
sentative, to be on the spot to advise General Clark about the
probable British reactions to some proposed course of action.
However, there were disagreements between Britain and the
U.S.A. on Far Eastern issues which persisted despite all consulta-
tion. In this category the long train of differences which flowed
from the initial dispute over recognizing Red China was of con-
spicuous importance. The same concern for Hong Kong and trade
which had been a factor in stimulating British recognition con-
tinued to operate throughout the Korean War to a degree which
the Americans thought deplorable. (It was the old difference
between a nation which must trade in order to live and one which
lives in order, inter alia, to trade.) The total volume of British trade
with China was small, but to Hong Kong it was vital; without it
the colony could not survive and to forbid it might provoke China
to move in and take over. Britain, like a good shopkeeper, was also
concerned with keeping her connexion. Red China might be a poor
customer, might even chivvy British firms and businessmen un-
mercifully; even so, it was better to hold on and maintain the con-
nection than to let it go to competitors whom she would never
^ Cf. Mr. Shinwell, former Minister of Defence, complaining re-
miniscently on 25 June, 1952, that the Labour government "were
never satisfied with the consultation and co-operation that had been
going on. We always pressed for more consultation but for some
reason or other the United States administration resisted the pressure
and we never received the satisfaction we desired." H.C. Deb., 5th
Series, Vol. 502, col. 2356.
80
THE FAR EAST
afterwards succeed in ousting. Consequently, though at the out-
break of the Korean War the Government prohibited the export of
many strategic materials to China, it was not prepared to go as far
as the U.S.A. and ban everything (just as the U.S.A. did not try to
ban all Japanese trade with the Chinese mainland). However, as
Chinese participation in the war became more blatant, American
pressure on Britain mounted and indeed even in Britain there was
a sense of shock when it was revealed that 77,624 tons of rubber
had gone from Malaya and Singapore to China in 1950 and that in
the first quarter of 1951 alone this had risen to 46,500 tons. In
May a strict limit of 2,500 tons a month was initially imposed and
later, in view of the stocks China might be supposed to have
accumulated, a total ban on rubber exports was imposed for the rest
of the war.
There was nothing here which had been kept secret from the
U.S.A. Indeed every fortnight the Hong Kong Government sup-
plied the American authorities with a detailed list of commodities
exported to China.^ But in the inflamed condition of American
opinion the superficial impression of Britain as a reluctant ally
trading with the enemy proved very nearly ineffaceable, and greatly
complicated the task of obtaining an American hearing for the
British case on the many Far Eastern issues over which there was
disagreement. It is doubtful whether the British case for continuing
trade with China ever got across to Americans. Paradoxically it was
harder to get a hearing for it after the cessation of general Korean
fighting than before. The new Republican administration seemed
alarmingly responsive to the pressures of McCarthyite congressional
opinion, which now was demanding a blockade of the China coast.
Such a blockade was doubly distasteful to Britain; not only would
it affect trade; worse still, it would provoke incidents which might
easily result in open confiict with China. To avert such a develop-
ment and appease the American demand, the United Kingdom
introduced in March, 1953, a strict licensing system for vessels
journeying to Chinese ports. As appeasement this hardly worked;
within a few months it was followed by a set of restrictive moves
by the United States Government against foreign shipping designed
apparently to make any trading with China unprofitable, however
^ This was the list from which General MacArthur read out to the
Senate Committee the alarming catalogue of critical items, omitting
only to indicate that in each case the quantities supplied were niL
F 81
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
non-strategic the materials. Even after the armistice was signed on
27 June, 1953, there was little improvement. Sir Winston Churchill
told Parliament on 1 7 December that trade with China was among
the topics he discussed with the President in their meeting at Ber-
muda but evidently no progress was made. In the absence of a peace
settlement the United Nations embargo on strategic exports re-
mained in force, and the 480 items which the United Kingdom
bound itself not to export to China were almost twice as many as
those on the embargo list for the U.S.S.R. and its satellites in
Europe.
Meanwhile in Japan Britain and the U.S.A. worked on a rather
different problem, the making of a peace treaty, and the status and
powers which an ex-enemy country should enjoy under it. The
U.S.A., mentor of a "westernized" Japan, felt a certain pride of
sponsorship in presenting this Far Eastern Eliza Doolittle for ad-
mission to democratic society. No such sentiments sweetened the
natural sourness of Australian and New Zealand feelings towards
a former bitter combatant and Britain, though somewhat less anti-
pathetic herself, had to take note of the sentiments of those Com-
monwealth members whom she had not been able to protect in
1942 and who had lived so much closer to the Japanese menace
than she had herself. For her own part, her major concern, once
again, was with trade; what were the implications for British in-
dustry of a sovereign Japan, able to indulge in unregulated, under-
cutting competition ?
The Truman administration had entrusted the negotiations over
the treaty to that eminent representative of the opposition party,
John Foster Dulles. Mr. Dulles pursued his consultations not only
with the relevant allied embassies in Washington but also in a series
of visits to allied capitals. But consultation itself raised a familiar
problem. What about China? Mr. Dulles sent a copy of the draft
treaty to the tenants of Formosa; the British Government proposed
that it should be submitted to the Communist Government in
Peking. Once Britain had recognized Peking this was a logical
enough corollary to the argument that all the anti-Japanese allies of
World War II should be consulted. Britain was supported in her
position by India and the other states which had also granted
recognition — including, of course, the U.S.S.R. Nothing, however,
could better illustrate the sterile controversy into which the recogni-
tion dispute plunged the allies, since it was perfectly evident that
82
THE FAR EAST
on this issue nothing but obstruction could possibly come from
Peking. Moreover, there was, of course, a good deal more at stake
than "mere" recognition. Amongst the rights which Japan was re-
nouncing under the treaty were her claims to Formosa and the
Pescadores. Who was she renouncing them to? To Chiang Kai-
shek or to Mao Tse-tung? The Americans, as might be expected,
were adamant in their refusal to let the Peking Government have
anything to do with the treaty and for two months a brisk con-
troversy ran its course. At first the British seem seriously to have
considered delaying the treaty until the question of the two Chinas
should have been settled, but sensibly they concluded that delay
would be a worse alternative. But the near deadlock which had
developed on the China question could only be resolved by a
negative compromise; it was agreed that neither of the Chinas
should be invited to the Peace Conference or asked to comment
upon the treaty. The result cost both Britain and the U.S.A. some
support from their friends; the Indians and Burmese, supporters of
Peking, declined to be parties to the treaty; the Formosan Govern-
ment presented an indignant protest and the Generalissimo com-
plained to Mr, Dewey of the U.S.A.'s "total abandonment" of her
wartime ally.
The consequential bad blood did not end there. The compromise
which Mr. Herbert Morrison, as British Foreign Secretary, had
arranged with Mr. Dulles meant, of course, that it would be left to
Japan herself to decide, after the treaty was signed, what relations
with which China she would adopt. In line with this, at the San
Francisco Peace Conference in September, at which the treaty was
signed, Mr. Dulles explicitly ruled out the exertion of "a com-
pulsion in this matter which would create resentment in Japan and
. . . activate and aggravate Allied division". For Britain more was
at stake than the mere desire to get backing for her recognition
policy. There was also an important commercial interest involved.
In one region of Britain the Japanese Treaty had been received with
nothing but dislike and apprehension. Lancashire saw the full re-
sumption by Japan of her sovereignty as a sign that her old com-
petitor in the cotton markets of the world would start price-cutting,
copyright infringement, false labelling and "unfair" labour
practices again. But since no effective controls could possibly be
written into the treaty it became all important whether Japan would
again find an outlet, as before the war, in the mainland of China
83
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
or whether, excluded from there, she would be fighting Britain for
markets throughout the rest of the East. Obviously her decision
about which government to recognize would have a crucial bearing
on this.
It is not enough, however, for treaties to be drafted and signed;
they have also to be ratified. Under the American constitution this
can become a convenient opportunity for the Senate to introduce
modifications, express or implied, to the agreements which her own
and other executives have approved. That something of this kind
might occur over the Japanese treaty was already being rumoured
by the autumn of 1951, provoking from Mr. Kenneth Younger
who, as Labour Minister of State, had been associated with the
treaty-making, a reminder and a warning :
"I sincerely trust that no such situation will arise. I am quite sure
that it would not be the wish of any of those engaged on behalf
of the United States in negotiating this Treaty, and I know it
would be regarded, not only by them, but certainly by the repre-
sentatives of many of the nations who signed the Treaty, as a
clear departure from the understanding upon which this question
was left on one side by the signatories at San Francisco."^
To supplement this, in Mr. Eden's words, we made "our views
absolutely plain to the United States Government on a considerable
number of occasions".^ Nonetheless, in December, 1951, while
ratification was still pending in the U.S.A. Mr. Dulles and two
members of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations visited
Tokio and there did their "best to make known to the Japanese
Government and the Japanese people" "the wish of the United
States Government"^ that Japan should recognize the Formosa
Government. As a result Mr. Yoshida, the Prime Minister, gave an
undertaking that his Government would as soon as possible con-
clude a treaty which would recognize the Nationalist regime in
Formosa as the government of China. There was a splutter of
impotent indignation in Britain over what was universally regarded
as a piece of sharp practice and Mr. Eden's sour comment to the
1 HC Deb., 5th series. Vol. 494, col. 895-6, 26 November, 1951.
2 Ibid., Vol. 495, col. 166, 30 January, 1952.
^ Statement by Senator Sparkman, Congressional Kecord, 16
January, 1952. (Vol. 98, p. 219)
84
THE FAR EAST
House of Commons on the episode was that ""fortunately there are
not many such topics between us and the United States Govern-
ment".^
Another by-product of the Japanese Treaty was the A.N.Z.U.S.
Pact which had important consequences for the balance of power,
as between Britain and the United States, in the Pacific. If Japan
was to be restored to her sovereign status, she must be given the
right to re-arm. How then were Australia and New Zealand to be
protected against the menace of a revival of aggressive Japanese
militarism? Their lively fears on this score were pressed through-
out all the treaty negotiations and at the request of Australia and
New Zealand the U.S.A. simultaneously explored arrangements for
a Pacific security pact. By April, 1951, matters were far enough
advanced for Mr. Truman to announce broad lines of agreement
and on 1 September a three-power treaty was signed at San Fran-
cisco.
In British eyes the A.N.Z.U.S. pact, as it became known, was
open to two objections. It isolated the defence of the South-West
Pacific from the defence needs of the whole area, particularly
Malaya and Singapore, and it pointedly excluded Britain from
membership. Though kept informed by Australia and New Zealand
throughout the negotiations, Britain had not been invited to par-
ticipate in them. For the first time in history member states of the
Commonwealth^ had entered into defence arrangements with
another power from which the mother country was excluded; this,
despite the fact that Britain's Commonwealth commitments would
of course immediately involve her on their side if they were
attacked. The fact that their chosen protector was the U.S.A. re-
duced, but by no means obliterated, the mortification involved. The
Conservative opposition attacked the Labour Government for not
having represented Britain's claims to A.N.Z.U.S. membership
strongly enough, but when his turn came to assume the reins of
government Mr. Churchill could not do any better than his prede-
cessor. When the Pacific Council set up by the A.N.Z.U.S. Pact
was due to hold its first meeting in Hawaii in August, 1952,
Britain made a request to be allowed to send an observer; even this
was refused at the insistence, it was generally believed, of the
1 HC Deb., 5th series. Vol. 495, col. 166.
^ Apart from Canada, whose contiguity to the United States was
always judged to put her in a special position.
85
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
United States. The reason given was that to admit Britain would
entail admitting France, the Philippines and other powers with
Pacific interests, even perhaps Japan. In British ears this hardly
sounded convincing, in view of Britain's special relations with
Australia and New Zealand and the fact that she maintained a navy
in the area and controlled its western approaches through her base
at Singapore. In American eyes, however, this last argument worked
the other way round since they were anxious not to have to extend
the pact to involve any commitment to the defence of Singapore,
much less Malaya.
All this might or might not be true. What was painfully certain
was that it reflected a decline in United Kingdom potency in the
Pacific area. Indeed it was precisely this decline which was the
basic reason for A.N.Z.U.S. coming into being at all. Nor was it
an entirely new phenomenon. It went back to the situation in the
late 30's when the United Kingdom had, in efi^ect, abdicated as a
Pacific policeman in favour of the U.S.A., reluctant as America
was to assume that role. War intensified this. When France fell,
Britain had to warn Australia and New Zealand that if Japan came
into the war no British fleet could be sent to the Far East and they
would have to rely on the United States. When Japan did come in,
this was what did happen, and the fact that Singapore was British
did not prevent its collapse. It was the United States which filled
the defence vacuum and the move of General MacArthur from the
Philippines to Australia in 1942 was symbolic. The presence of
American sailors, soldiers and marines in Australia literally brought
home the fact of American preponderance. The return of peace did
not change any of these power relationships; it merely glossed them
over for a while until the restoration of Japanese sovereignty forced
them to the surface once again. In a sense it was only another logical
consequence of the growing-up of the Commonwealth, the attain-
ment by Australia and New Zealand of that direct relationship
with the U.S.A. which Canada had so long enjoyed. In that sense
it was true, as Mr. Menzies said, that the treaty was "only a local
manifestation of closer British- American relations".^ But the firm
exclusion of Britain from that relationship had no real parallel in
the Canadian case; it was in no sense contributory to the purposes
of the pact; it was, in fact, an institutionalized expression in peace
of the Pacific exclusiveness which the U.S.A. had practised in war.
1 Annual Register, 1952, p. 81.
86
THE FAR EAST
The disagreements between Britain and the U.S.A. over Far
Eastern questions did not much diminish as the fifties wore on.
There was, however, a slow but noticeable diminution in the heat
of their altercations. There were good reasons for this. McCarthyism
and its ally, the China Lobby, lost ground in the United States.
Opinion there, at all levels, learnt a new patience from the final
frustrations of the Korean War. Awareness spread of the imperfec-
tions of America's staunchest, but also most embarrassing, allies,
Chiang Kai-shek and Syngman Rhee. Japan's gradual rediscovery
of her own personality brought with it (as in the anti- American
demonstrations which led President Eisenhower to cancel his Tokio
visit in I960) some sobering re-assessments of America's mission in
the Far East. On the British side the obstinate refusal of the Com-
munist Government of China to respond with civility to British
recognition, the irrefutable demonstrations of its aggressiveness,
towards Tibet and towards India — quite apart from Korea and
Laos — left fewer illusions about the amenability of Peking to fair
words and soft treatment.
When President Eisenhower took over from Mr. Truman the
initial disposition in Britain was to fear that a new "forward"
policy would be launched against the Chinese Communists, in
response to all the "China Lobby" elements in the Republican
Party, The decision in February, 1953, to use the Seventh Fleet as
a "one-way shield" (i.e. to revoke its orders to restrain a Nationalist
attack on the Communist mainland) lent colour to this view and
excited proportionate alarm in Britain. This was indeed a trying
time for the alliance in the Far East, when an inherently tricky
situation seemed often to be aggravated by the sabre-rattling of
American military spokesmen and the application of the principles
of "brinkmanship" by Mr. John Foster Dulles. A fuller treatment
of that technique is reserved for the following chapter, but what-
ever may be thought about its employment in general and the
strains it imposed upon America's European allies in particular,
one result certainly was to impose a kind of Pax Americana upon
the Far East during President Eisenhower's first term and for a
while after. There was no war; Communist Chinese aggression
against Korea, Japan, Formosa and other island areas was, if
seriously intended, not carried out.
The price, in terms of British nerves, was at times certainly high.
When after the first shelling of Quemoy and Matsu the United
87
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
States in 1954 negotiated the mutual defence treaty with Formosa
it seemed a risky hostage that she was giving to fortune. And even
though it was followed by a Nationalist undertaking not to attack
the mainland without American approval, the President at the
same time secured from Congress authority to protect not only
Formosa but also the "related positions" — i.e. if he chose so to
regard them, the off-shore islands. The elements of ambiguity
which Mr. Dulles claimed to constitute the strength of this policy
were, in British eyes, its most serious weakness. Yet, looking back,
one has to admit that in some sense, as a temporary measure, it
worked. Tension fell; in April, 1955, Chou En-lai proposed
bilateral talks. A certain detente ensued; begun at Geneva in
August, the talks dragged on inconclusively until 1958. The trouble
was that they settled nothing and "tension", with its concomitant
of Chinese shelling of the islands, began again, to persist intermit-
tently down to the present day. The prospect is not a reassuring
one. As China's strength grows, and the Seventh Fleet remains in
situ and American commitments to Formosa are unchanged, the
inherent dangers of the situation are likely to increase.
Directly, of course, none of this has involved Britain as an active
partner to the United States. Her interest has been more negative
than positive — to prevent the outbreak of a war which would do
her no good and might easily prove catastrophic. Consequently her
most overt concern has always been to reduce tension in the area
and diminish the risk of an unplanned explosion. Yet it would be
less than honest to ignore a subordinate but very tangible interest
which she has always had in the preservation of Formosan inde-
pendence. Hong Kong too is an off-shore island. It has existed
under British rule, on Chinese sufferance, because no doubt it has
been to mutual advantage that such a status should continue. Yet
how long, one must ask, if American power were withdrawn and
if Formosa fell into Communist hands, would Hong Kong remain
a British possession and a bastion of capitalist enterprise upon Com-
munist shores? To that extent whether she likes it or not Britain
too has her investment in the Far East status quo.
To say Hong Kong is, of course, to say "trade with China" and
on this issue the divergent points of view described earlier also
persisted throughout the fifties. At length indeed, in the calmer
conditions of President Eisenhower's second term and the Mac-
millan-Eisenhower post-Suez rapprochement, some agreement was
88
THE FAR EAST
contrived. But it was an agreement to differ. The long-pressed
British claim that China should be put on all fours with the U.S.S.R.
in respect of the goods which she could buy from the West still
made no converts in Washington. But at least it proved possible in
June, 1957, to obtain indulgence for a British decision to abolish the
"Chinese differential" and adopt the same embargo list for China
and the U.S.S.R. The results were not, in fact, striking but they
were a step towards normalization of relations between China and
theWest.i
Normalization indeed remained the goal of British policy, how-
ever hard it might be to attain. For the U.S.A., as long as the
Republicans remained in power, even Eisenhower Republicans, it
was unthinkable. But time, the United Nations and the pragmatism
of Mr. Kennedy might, if combined, effect some gradual change.
The steady erosion of support for America's policy of preventing
Peking from occupying the Chinese seat at the U.N. led in 1961 to
some fresh thinking in Washington. Britain, after a long period of
abstention, now went on record as publicly affirming her long-held
conviction that the government she recognized in China should be
the government she would recognize in the U.N. The United
States Government did not change its public professions, nor yet its
private preferences, but in conceding, however reluctantly, that
the General Assembly might consider the question of Chinese repre-
sentation it was beginning the painful process of realigning desire
and reality.
1 Cf. Mr. Maudling speaking to the press in Washington on 14 June,
1960, as reported by Reuter: "Britain's trade with Communist China
was small but useful, and was limited by China's inability to pay.
Britain believed in maintaining restrictions on exports of strategic
goods, but on the whole the flow of trade between countries tends
to break down barriers and to make it a little easier to achieve success-
ful human relations."
89
7
SOUTH-EAST ASIA
IN South-East Asia many of the factors which operated in Far
East poHtics turned up again, to determine, and often to com-
plicate, relations between Britain and the United States. Prior-
ities, however, were somewhat different. Here was a region largely
permeated, historically, by British rule, influence or trade. It
bordered, for the most part, on waters such as the Indian Ocean
and the Straits of Sumatra still dominated, strategically, by the
British navy. These same waters (and the air above them) still con-
stituted a vital communications area for the Commonwealth, both
for the immediately contiguous members such as Pakistan, India,
Ceylon and Malaya and for the more remote territories of Austra-
lasia. For the U.S.A. these same factors of history and geography
worked to remove the area from the centre of American interest.
It owed little to American enterprise, had meant little for American
strategy,^ and exercised little or no sway over American sentiment.
But one complicating factor was common to both South-East
Asia and to the Far East, the pressing threat of Communism, incor-
porated largely in the mass of mainland China, whose great bulk
bordered the whole area on its eastern and northern flanks and
whose agents infiltrated it at a thousand points. In the military
resistance to this pressure Britain and France, in Malaya and in
Indo-China, filled much the same role as the U.S.A. filled in North
Korea, though with subtly different attitudes and expectations. In
the ideological defence, the main British reliance was on the Com-
monwealth tie and the blend of local nationalisms and western
democracy and administration. Economically, the area looked for
aid first to the Commonwealth but also, since that of itself did not
begin to be adequate, to the U.S.A. as well.
Save in Malaya, the general philosophy animating British atti-
^ At least until the "domino" theory was elaborated in Eisenhower's
first presidency by which Indo-China was likened to the first of a row
of standing dominoes whose fall would bring down in succession
Burma, Thailand, Malaya, Indonesia, the Philippines, Formosa and
Japan.
90
SOUTH-EAST ASIA
tudes to Communism in the area was one of containment. If the
Malayan struggle against the guerrillas had about it an element of
the crusade, this was partly because Communism here directly
menaced a major British economic (and quasi-strategic) interest,
the rubber crop and the tin mines, but just as much because it could
fairly easily be identified with alien exploitation of the territory
and turned back by an intensive effort which relied on local sup-
port. Here an all-out drive against the Communist guerillas bore
little or no aspect of "West" against "East" or "colonialists" against
native "liberators"; moreover, it could be fully self-contained,
carrying virtually no risk of involvement with the great reservoir of
Communist power, China herself. In Malaya it was the Communists
who were over-extended, not their extirpators. Elsewhere, however,
different conditions prevailed. No such secure base, either in
geography or in local psychology or economics, existed for a com-
parable drive by the French in Indo-China; here the dice were
loaded against a colonial occupying power, even in the phase of
abdication and transfer of authority. The drain which the unequal
struggle imposed on France was formidable. The Indo-China war
not only prevented her making her proporationate contribution to
N.A.T.O.; it ate at the vitals of the Fourth Republic itself, en-
feebling its will and bringing the institutions into contempt.
In retrospect it seems fairly obvious that there was a basic identity
of British and American objectives in this area; both powers wanted
to contain Communism without extending the conflict to a point
which involved an open war with China. However in the attempt
to evolve a joint diplomacy which would realize these objectives
they were doubtfully successful. This was partly their own fault,
partly that of the French, who were divided in their purposes and
leadership, wishing at one time for a massive Anglo-American
military intervention and at another for a negotiated settlement
which would enable them to contract out of the whole impossible
business. This division in French attitudes corresponded in a con-
siderable degree to the schizophrenia which the Chinese issue had
created in American opinion, between the desire to settle scores
with the Communists once and for all and the wish to end the
Korean war and bring the boys back home. Splits in a national
psyche, when they are as profound as this, almost always reveal
themselves in the make-up of the individual national leaders as
91
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
well; they were certainly reflected in 1950—4 in the public pro-
nouncements of American leaders on the Indo-China problem (as
on the Korean issue). At the same time it now seems reasonably
certain that neither Mr. Eisenhower nor even Mr. Dulles (nor their
predecessors, Mr. Truman and Mr. Acheson) had any intention of
taking any action in Indo-China such as would involve the U.S.A.
in an open war with China. Since this was at all times the aim of
British diplomacy how did it come about that we so often and so
painfully appeared to be at cross purposes in this part of the world?
The answers to this question have an importance which transcends
the local and historical situation in Indo-China in the early 1950's.
Some of the tactical divergencies between London and Wash-
ington could be explained by the different assessments of the local
situation reaching the policy-makers from the men on the spot. In
areas as confused as Indo-China it was easy for discrepant rumours
and rationalizations to arise, and hard to ground any intelligence
report in an unassailable basis of fact. From a welter of conflicting
estimates each side could and almost inevitably did select those
which best corresponded to its own preferred course of action.
Even when, as often happened, the British and the Americans
pooled their intelligence, this consequence was not averted.
The prepared policies then owed more, in the last resort, to the
officials at home than to the men on the spot. As such they reflected,
inevitably, the whole complex of national interests and attitudes
towards the area such as were touched on at the opening of this
chapter. The paradox was that seemingly Britain, with more at
stake in South-East Asia than the U.S.A., was yet the more reluctant
to countenance any deeper local involvement. When on 29 Decem-
ber, 1953, Mr. Dulles announced that in the event of an invasion
of Indo-China, the American reaction "would not necessarily be
confined to the particular theatre chosen by the Communists for
their operations" and when on 12 January, 1954, he warned that
Chinese intervention would have "grave consequences which might
not be confined to Indo-China", both pronouncements aroused
grave concern in the United Kingdom — far graver than in the
U.S.A. When they were followed up in April, 1954, by American
proposals of a joint allied warning to the Chinese against continued
interference in Indo-China, the British contention was that the
threat would be ineffective by itself, and if made real by military
action would involve the allies in an outright Chinese war. When
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Mr. Dulles and Admiral Radford urged Anglo-American interven-
tion to save Dien-Bien-Phu, or to rally morale after its collapse,
Sir Winston Churchill's comment, according to Sir Anthony Eden,
was that "what we were being asked to do was to assist in mislead-
ing Congress into approving a military operation, which would in
itself be ineffective, and might well bring the world to the verge
of a major war"/ On the basis of this reasoning the United King-
dom declined any participation in such a venture.
Behind this disharmony lay a good deal of sheer diplomatic
ineptness, intensified by the tendency of the American Government
to speak with more than one voice. But when all this has been
ironed away there remain, as can now be clearly seen, certain basic
reasons for the failure of the two allies to evolve an agreed Indo-
China policy in 1954, Since the Americans were making most of
the running, these reasons can best be observed initially in a study
of their proposed policies.
The technique of "brinkmanship" which they embodied and
which came to be associated with the diplomacy of Mr. Dulles was
in essence no more than an attempt to use against the Communists
the technique which the Communists often used against the West,
namely to threaten vague but ominous armed retaliation in an en-
deavour to deter or dissuade the other side from some contemplated
course of action. It is a technique as old as diplomacy itself but the
diplomat who would employ it successfully must be able to rely
upon unanimity within the government for which he speaks, perfect
liaison with his allies and complete mutual trust between himself
and his allied colleagues. Unfortunately the government in which
Mr. Dulles served was habitually given to thinking its diverse
thoughts aloud in public, the machinery of liaison between it and
its allies was intermittent and unreliable in its day-to-day workings,
and Mr. Dulles himself had not established a relationship of mutual
confidence with his fellow Foreign Secretaries in the allied camp.
Moreover, as the spokesman for a democracy which had foresworn
the employment of war as an instrument of national policy, Mr.
Dulles was at a continuous disadvantage in using the "brinkman-
ship" ploy in a manner which would be both convincing to the
enemy and acceptable to his publics at home and abroad. If, with
all these drawbacks, this device continued to be a feature of his
diplomacy, particularly vts-a-vis Communist China, the reasons
1 Eden, op. cit., p. 105.
93
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
must be sought in a set of considerations which were peculiarly
American.
The American administration was under continuous and heavy
pressure at home from Congressmen, Senators and others whose
epousal of a crusading policy in Asia was unrestrained by any con-
sideration for America's obligations in Europe or any realistic
appraisal of the prospects of military success in Asia. They were the
one-idea men of the "China Lobby", whose advice the President
hardly ever took, but whose importance in the Republican Party
obliged him to make gestures and pronouncements which were
often embarrassing for American policy and to outsiders often
appeared truly alarming. The "China Lobby's" advocacy of forth-
right military action did, moreover, evoke a good deal of popular
support because it rested on the inviting assumption that no large,
Korean-like operation by ground troops would be needed to effect
it. Their talk was always of an air strike or of naval action, reviving
memories of the easy successes of the air raids on Japan or the
memorable triumphs of the Leyte Gulf in the late war. "The bomb"
would once again do it all; it was the "Maxim gun" mentality over
again. The easy, even, as it seemed, hubristic self-confidence of the
air and naval spokesman of this school reflected the esprit de corps
of the two most pampered elements in the American armed ser-
vices, the Strategic Air Command and the Pacific Fleet. In Wash-
ington they constituted powerful lobbies in their own right; Con-
gressmen vied with each other to anticipate their demands for
funds. Finally, behind the "China Lobby" and the pressures of
certain strategists, was a pervasive public mood particularly re-
ceptive to simple solutions of Asiatic problems, a mood powerfully
affected by the unaccustomed, frustrating, even humiliating "non-
success" of the Korean enterprise. Although basically pacific,
Americans in such a mood were indulgent to any advocates of a
short way with Asiatic Communism, and very suspicious of any
diplomatic or other dealings with the mammon of unrighteousness.
Negotiation and neutralism were thus equally heretical; in par-
ticular if advocated by European spokesmen, they were likely to be
regarded as signs of the guilty conscience of colonialism seeking to
appease the Lucifer of Communism.
Not only were almost all these attitudes alien to the viewpoint of
British administration, of whatever party complexion. They had not
even any counterpart in any substantial section of British public
94
SOUTH-EAST ASIA
opinion. In Britain there was no China Lobby, there was no Korea
or post-Korea mood. The Malaya operation was as protracted as
Korea and, to its participants, no less wearing. But it was, by com-
parison a clear success and, in any case, its reverberations on the
home front were faint and few compared with those of Korea on
the U.S.A.; few British soldiers were involved and, to a nation
long accustomed to having some part of its forces soldiering in
partibus infdeUum, the operation had nothing especially abnormal
about it.
But if the United Kingdom minded less about what Asian fight-
ing there was, it minded a good deal more about what fighting
there might be — or perhaps one should more strictly say, was more
vividly aware of the dangers inherent in any extension of the fight-
ing. No one can know for certain how much Mr. Dulles's "brink-
manship" frightened the enemy, but it was very apparent how
much it frightened us. This is a likely risk in any alliance in any
part of the world — that what seems a safe hazard to the leader
whose finger is on the trigger will seem a mad gamble to those who
line up behind him. But in South-East Asia, as in Korea, the
United Kingdom had special reasons for deploring and resisting
"brinkmanship". It feared a war in Asia not merely for what it
would be in itself, but for the diversion it would be bound to cause
in Europe; all the familiar "Atlantic First" arguments were just as
operative in the 1950's as in the 1940's. It had also what probably
was a truer assessment of the psychological hazards of "brandishing
the bomb" in Asia. Though not lacking a certain vein of self-
righteousness, the arguments put forward by British spokesmen on
this issue were probably valid — that since the atom bomb had so
far been used exclusively by the "whites" against the "yellows"
Asiatics regarded it as more than just a super- weapon; to them it
appeared as an instrument of genocide, the super-symbol of race
war. To the extent to which this was so, even threats of the bomb's
employment, it could be argued, harmed the cause of the West
amongst the "uncommitted" elements in Asia. This did not mean
that the British favoured any kind of nuclear disarmament in the
East. We have Eden's word for it that British diplomacy relied
hardly less than the Americans on "the deterrent power of the
hydrogen bomb. I was grateful for it. I do not believe that we
should have got through the Geneva Conference and avoided a
95
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
major war without it".^ The disagreement was largely over diplo-
matic technique. How did you use the deterrent? By brandishing it
publicly? Or by invoking it discreetly? It corresponded, almost, to
the difference between old world diplomacy and new.
Time and time again it was a solicitude for the "uncommitted"
elements that characterized British as opposed to United States
policy in South-East Asia. To leaders such as Dulles the condition
of being "uncommitted" was itself deplorable; by British policy
throughout all the post-war period it was generally accepted as a
tolerable substitute for positive alignment with the West. Some-
times this was because Britain took an unduly rosy view of Asiatic
Communism, as in the early days of Mao Tse-tung, but also it was
a by-product of the British relationship with India. Indeed it is not
too much to say that Britain's whole view of Asia was coloured by
her Indian experiences. The one great post-war venture which had
turned out better than was feared was the granting of independence
to the Indian sub-continent; the great pleasant surprise of a decade
which was generally marked by a decline of British power and
influence was the decision of India and Pakistan to remain within
the Commonwealth. And this not only established a gratifying
relationship; it also created a new set of obligations and attitudes.
For the first time the Commonwealth family became multi-racial,
with the Asiatic voice entitled to a large share in its councils. And
when the spokesman for that voice was the persuasive Mr. Nehru
it was seldom that Whitehall failed to listen. Whitehall did not
always agree with what he said, but it always took him seriously
and always insisted, when dealing with Washington, that he was
important not only in his own right as spokesman for India but also
as a representative voice, sometimes even the representative voice
of Asia.
The Americans were by no means always ready to accept this.
In accordance with that basic moral law of Anglo-American rela-
tions by which we each deplore the other's transgressions and
champion the cause of each other's underdogs, American opinion
had been very pro-Indian during the long years of waning British
rule. Mr. Roosevelt himself had not been above offering Mr.
Churchill recurrent advice on the subject. But India independent
seemed to lose for Americans much of the charm of India strug-
gling to be free and Mr. Nehru seemed a poor reincarnation of
^ Eden> op. cit., p. 123.
96
SOUTH-EAST ASIA
Mahatma Gandhi. It was partly that the war promoted General
and Mrs. Chiang Kai-shek into a first place in America's Asiatic
affections from which no rival could hope to dislodge them, but it
was also a result of the policies which the newly independent India
chose to pursue — something very like socialism at home and
neutralism abroad. The first was venial, the second much less so,
particularly when it involved not only the recognition of Com-
munist China but also a good deal of (as it turned out) optimistic
assessments of the new China's course and attitudes. Incarnated in
Mr. Krishna Menon's performances at the United Nations, the
Indian disposition to lecture both sides impartially, or worse still,
as it often seemed, partially, grated sharply on the American con-
sciousness. By contrast, Americans found Pakistan sympathetic and
responsive. The Moslem mood was closer to North American
activism than the Hindu — at least where anti-Communism was the
issue. And there was no Pakistani Menon to behave like a moraliz-
ing Mephistopheles in New York.
In Whitehall, the Foreign Office constantly endeavoured to
associate India whenever possible with any diplomatic negotiations
or arrangements involving the Far East or South-East Asia, even
at the risk of provoking from Mr. Dulles his oft-quoted complaint
that British policy was subject to a veto from Delhi. Apart from
their solicitude for the Commonwealth connexion, the British de-
fended this deference to the Indian viewpoint on the dual grounds
that India constituted a certain link, or channel of communication
with Peking and that she had an interest of her own in securing
the stability of the area. The first argument cut both ways in Wash-
ington; it would only work where some agreement or modus
Vivendi with Peking was accepted as desirable, as in the negotiation
of a Korean armistice, though even so the Indian role as mediator
was liable to prove, in American eyes, a suspect one, as in the dis-
putes over the repatriation of prisoners. The second argument
hardly admitted of rebuttal, but was liable to evoke a corollary not
very acceptable to Britain — that if the United Kingdom put for-
ward India, the U.S.A. would advance the claims of Chiang Kai-
shek. This was the American contention even in a context as un-
suitable as the formation of the South-East Treaty Organization.
Mr. Dulles, according to Sir Anthony Eden, "explained that if
there was any question of extending the security arrangements west-
wards to include India, there would be a 'strong demand' in the
G 97
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
United States to extend it eastwards as well, to include Nationalist
China and Japan ... I did not like (said Sir Anthony) this balanc-
ing of India against Formosa. The two did not seem to me com-
parable."^ The State Department however persisted in the attitude
assumed by its chief and "repeated its warning that any attempt to
include India would be countered by the inclusion of Formosa". ^
Whether indeed any more accommodating American attitude
would have affected Indian policy on this particular issue remains
doubtful. India in 1954 was too deeply committed to a thorough-
going neutralism: even the Chinese takeover of Tibet had not yet
affected India's public stand. Paradoxically indeed, any overt shift
in India's position would probably have destroyed her value to the
democracies no less than to the Communists as a viable and reliable
neutral, whose services at Panmunjon and later as Chairman of the
three-power supervisory commission for the Indo-China settlement
were almost indispensable. In that sense, though she was not a
member of the Geneva Conference, India's support for its solutions
was a pre-condition of its success.
Ironically, almost the same could be said of the U.S.A. The
American dislike of the whole Geneva operation was intense, in-
volving as it did sitting down at the same table with the Chinese
Communists and bargaining about the precise extent to which they
should be allowed to retain gains which they had no right to in
the first place. Moreover the Americans could claim with some
justice that they had been put into this position as a result of the
failure of one of their major allies, the French, to make their
colonialist regime in Indo-China acceptable or to construct a viable
local administration on their colonialist foundations. Thus grumbles
about "colonialism" were uttered in the same breath as dire threats
about air strikes in defence of Dien Bien Phu, and Mr. Dulles
absented himself from almost the whole of the Geneva proceedings
even though the U.S.A. was a major participant in the conference.
Indeed there was the supreme and especially painful irony that in a
real sense the success of the conference was due to the U.S.A.;
Eden's patient diplomacy may have been the efficient cause of the
agreements on the cease-fire and the partition of Vietnam, but it
was the knowledge of American atomic might which made the
Communist powers want an agreement at all. Yet, since the agree-
1 Eden, op. cit., p. 97.
2 Ibid., p. 98.
98
SOUTH-EAST ASIA
ments presented concessions to the enemy, not only of territory but
also of human beings (the armistice line legalized the passing
under the Viet Minh of over twelve million people), they were too
distasteful to be openly endorsed by the American Government.
Mr. Dulles told Mr. Eden that it would be difficult to "persuade
Congress to guarantee, in effect, the Communist domination of
North Vietnam" and so the U.S.A. did not in fact associate them-
selves with the final declaration of the conference. Instead in a
unilateral statement the United States Government announced that
it would refrain from disturbmg the cease-fire agreements by force
or by the threat of force and would view any forcible violation of
them with grave concern. It is hardly profitable to inquire how far
this was a moral concession by Mr. Dulles's right hand to his left,
and how far it was a political concession by the American executive
to the American legislature and to the intransigent elements in the
Republican Party.^ For our purpose it is more important to note the
severe strain which the unequal sharing of the Geneva burden
placed on Anglo-American relations and particularly on the per-
sonal relations of Mr. Dulles and Mr. Eden, each regarding the
other as making up his own rules for playing what was supposed to
be a common game.
Thus the Geneva Conference displayed with painful clarity the
difficulties of the alliance in executing a tactical retreat from an
untenable position. And after the retreat there was still the re-
grouping. To get a settlement and to make the settlement stick, it
was almost certainly necessary at the same time to be affirming a
collective will to stand firm on the positions newly taken up. But
however necessary, it was a ticklish operation to combine the pacific
motions of the conference table with the belligerent gestures
associated with building up an alliance. Here too the Eden-Dulles
partnership proved barely equal to the strain which tactical neces-
sity imposed upon it. In Europe, thanks mainly to the clear and
firm boundary line between east and west and the overwhelming
and unmistakable effectiveness of American atomic power, there
had been the time and assurance necessary to build the N.A.T.O.
1 Mr. Dulles might perhaps have claimed that this sort of "moral"
stand over the whole Geneva operation was an indispensable pre-
condition of his securing from Congress the large slice of economic
aid for India for which he successfully pleaded while the Geneva agree-
ments were being concluded.
99
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
structure with adequate deliberation, stage by stage. Moreover,
although American support had been absolutely crucial, the
organization had sprung from local initiative and rested on a firm
local will to resist. In South-East Asia, on the other hand, the
boundary line between Communists and anti-Communists was
neither clear nor firm and although American atomic power was an
ever-present asset the whole allied experience in Korea had shown
that it was in no sense a substitute for conventional forces on the
ground and that too crude an exploitation of the psychology of the
deterrent could easily boomerang. The greatest obstacle, however, to
the speedy construction of an anti-Communist "shield" was the
weakness of the South-East Asian polities themselves; local initia-
tive hardly existed; local wills to resist had to be carefully fostered
and sustained; there was only the most embryonic common regional
feeling. From this it was possible to draw either of two opposite
conclusions. To the Americans, shocked by the Vietnam collapse,
these local weaknesses only made the more urgent the throwing up
of some system of collective defence, however imperfect. If Indo-
China was the first domino even its partial fall made remedial
action imperative. To the British, however, the argument worked
the other way; not only were they anxious to get the Geneva Con-
ference over first, but in addition they were very conscious of the
need for conciliatory diplomatic groundwork designed to secure
the participation, if possible, of India and her neighbours or, if
active participation could not be secured, at any rate their passive
benevolence. We wanted a pact, not only because we wished to
secure an American commitment to the safeguarding of such pos-
sessions as Malaya and Hong Kong, but also because we hoped to
repair thereby some of the damage done to our Pacific position by
our exclusion from A.N.Z.U.S.^ This made it difficult for us to
insist as much as we should have wished on comprehensive advance
preparation. Nevertheless the United Kingdom did secure a very
reluctant United States agreement to approaching the five Colombo
powers, India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma and Indonesia while the
pact was still in the planning stage. It was no use. With varying
degrees of coolness all except Pakistan announced their non-partici-
1 Meeting in Washington on 30 June, 1954, the representatives of the
A.N.Z.U.S. powers had announced their "vital concern" with the S.E.
Asia area and their agreement on the need for "immediate action" on
setting up collective defence there.
100
SOUTH-EAST ASIA
pation. Plainly, had they come in, it could only have been into a
broader, less pugnacious type of organization that would not be
focused on the menace of Chinese aggression which obsessed the
United States.
Consequently when the organizing conference met in September,
1954, it was at Manila, capital of a country which only a year
before had negotiated a mutual defence treaty with the United
States, and of the eight powers represented only three were properly
Asiatic — ^the Philippines, Thailand and Pakistan; the other five
were the U.S.A., Britain, Australia, New Zealand and France. What
emerged was largely, but not exclusively, an American document;
in form at least the pact is for mutual defence against attack from
any quarter. But the omission from its text of any reference to
Communism provoked an American caveat that the only form of
aggression against which it would pledge itself to take immediate
action was Communist aggression. Hong Kong and Formosa are
areas specifically excluded from the benefits of the treaty but other
countries such as Indonesia not parties to the agreement may be
designated for protection if they so desire and all the signatories
agree. The commitments to action are much looser than under
N.A.T.O. and leave the signatories, in effect, free to determine
what action they will take in the light of the circumstances obtain-
ing at the time the treaty is invoked. The British Government,
significantly, was responsible for the insertion of the proviso that
"designated" territories should only be protected at their own re-
quest.
So S.E.A.T.O. began its life in vagueness and ambiguity, under
American stimulus and with British acquiescence rather than
positive enthusiasm. Its subsequent history has done little to increase
its popularity in Britain. It has not sunk appreciably deeper roots
in the life of the area; Siam, its most enthusiastic Asiatic member,
has provided Bangkok for the headquarters of its Council but it
cannot be said that the Council and Secretariat have been bodies
with much organic vitality. The alliance has not developed military
forces of its own; relying at first on Dulles's doctrine of "retalia-
tion" by the "striking power" of American air and sea forces, it
was a N.A.T.O. with no S.H.A.P.E. and all S.A.C. Initially, when
the Laos crisis broke out again in 1959, it was to the U.N. rather
than S.E.A.T.O. that the United States turned. Throughout, the
only operative bases available to the alliance within the area have
101
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
been the British base at Singapore and the American naval and air
bases in the Philippines. The Americans have all along been firm
in their refusal to commit land forces; the British and the other
Commonwealth members have not been willing to station their
forces outside the British territories in the area. Worse, S.E.A.T.O.
has not been able to organize itself effectively against the Com-
munist threat which is so much more pressing than outright war,
namely subversion. It has frankly admitted that this was primarily
a job for member governments themselves and that S.E.A.T.O.
could only play a "supplementary" role. Since Malaya attained
independence in 1957 she has evinced no desire to participate in
S.E.A.T.O., though she accepted British responsibility for her ex-
ternal defence by a separate treaty, and she has made plain her
desire that when Singapore joins Malaya S.E.A.T.O. should
abandon use of the Singapore base.
All this has provoked a growing disenchantment with S.E.A.T.O.
in Britain. Glad though the British Government may be to have an
American "presence" in the area which throws a mantle of military
protection over her remaining possessions and Commonwealth con-
nections there, doubt has increased as to whether the form given to
this American assistance is not more harmful than helpful. Some
of the American aid given bilaterally to individual members has
been used to feed local rivalries; it has intensified the ill-feeling
between Pakistan and India over the Kashmir dispute. Much of the
aid seems, even militarily, to have been wasted; worse, dollars
spent on arms have not been available for the economic develop-
ment which many people think should have the highest priority.^
Though no one in the British Government has claimed a right to
tell Washington how it should allocate its Asian aid, the poor re-
turns on American investment in countries like Cambodia and Laos
have not heightened respect for American policy.
For all these reasons the time seemed ripe when the Kennedy
administration took over from President Eisenhower for a re-
examination of American policy in the area. There was concern at
the high cost of American aid for the seemingly low returns ob-
tained, there was a waning of belief in massive retaliation and a
heightened awareness of the challenge of subversion. There was
even some willingness to accept the validity of neutralism as a
^ For an incisive American statement of this position see W. W.
Rostow, The U.S. in the World Arena, pp. 326-8.
102
SOUTH-EAST ASIA
posture for South-East Asian states. But there was also a powerful
sense of frustration and a growing feeling of concern that the Com-
munists were on the point of scoring a break-through. These diverse
elements were fused by the sharpening of the Laos crisis in the early
months of 1961 which provoked the urgent meeting of President
Kennedy and Mr. Macmillan at Key West in March. There were
relics here of the disagreements of seven years before. The British
favoured the revival of the Geneva International Control Com-
mission; the Americans were more sceptical. The British believed
in the practicability and desirability of a neutral Laos; the American
emphasis fell on the value of a tough warning to Moscow and
Peking. At the S.E.A.T.O. Council meeting which immediately
followed argument seemed to run along these lines and the com-
munique which emerged, hinting at "whatever action [the members
deemed] appropriate" if effort at an acceptable settlement failed,
was said to represent a compromise between the "tough" and the
"mild" approaches. But beneath these surface appearances there
seems to have been a ground swell which was producing a real
modification of American policy. When Kennedy and Khruschev
met at Vienna in June the neutralization of Laos was, apparently,
the one tangible agreement to be registered between them, although
by the early months of 1962 Americans were complaining with
some justice that the Pathet Lao treated "neutralization" as a cloak
for infiltration. Even so, the Geneva Conference was re-animated
in July and the "three Princes" of Laos did conclude an agreement
which gave some promise of stability. It is a matter for speculation
whether this could have come about had there not been a simul-
taneous show of allied strength in Siam. Actually the strength dis-
played was mainly American; when Siam in May, 1962, requested
S.E.A.T.O. assistance it was the United States which responded
with 5,000 troops; New Zealand and Australia sent only token
contingents and the United Kingdom only a squadron of jet
fighters. Even less was Britain involved when in the autumn of
1961 the decision was taken in Washington to commit American
strength to South Vietnam. The process of stiffening local resistance
by economic aid, the provision of arms and instructors and finally
by the establishment in February, 1962, of an outright U.S.
Military Command was as exclusively American in Vietnam as
similar action in Malaya had been British.
103
8
THE MIDDLE EAST
THERE is perhaps no region of the world in which the posi-
tion and interests of Britain and the U.S.A. vis-a-vis each
other have so changed as in the Middle East. In 1938
Britain dominated the area; she held mandates in Palestine and
Transjordan and effective control of Egypt, Iraq, the Red Sea and
the Persian Gulf. The U.S.A. not only had no military position in
the area; she had no political position there either. Her presence
was either philanthropic, as in the field of missionary activity or
the analogous field of higher education, or else economic.
"Economic" here principally meant the development of the oil
resources of the region, where American private enterprise had
taken the dual form of securing a share in British or European
dominated concerns, like the Iraq Petroleum Company, or of secur-
ing separate concessions such as those enjoyed by the Arabian -
American Oil Company and the Bahrain Petroleum Company in
the Persian Gulf.
As a corollary of this the Middle East was essentially a British
theatre in World War II. The role played there by British arms re-
flected alike the importance of the area in British strategy and the
dominance there of the existing British military and political estab-
lishment. Only in Persia, where the traditional expertize of the
United States Army Corps of Engineers gave a virtuoso display of
its abilities in the construction of the supply route from the Gulf to
Russia, did the U.S.A. have much of a part to play.
But by I960 the national roles had been strikingly reversed.
British political control was confined to the small group of Trucial
sheikdoms which bordered the Persian Gulf and, of course, to
Aden. Only two British military bases remained in the area — those
in Cyprus and Aden. (There is also a small garrison at Bahrain.)
The U.S.A. meanwhile had advanced to a position of eminence
throughout the Middle East. True, she had no territorial possessions
and was nowhere accorded any formal position as a protecting
power. But she had acquired bases in Turkey, Libya and Saudi
;o4
THE MIDDLE EAST
Arabia for the use of her Strategic Air Command/ while her Sixth
Fleet in the Mediterranean made it possible for her to deploy
marines and carrier planes in the Levant. Her position as a Middle
East military power was formally recognized by her membership in
the Military Committee of the Central Treaty Organization
(C.E.N.T.O.) and by the bilateral defence agreements which she
signed in 1959 with Iran, Pakistan and Turkey. Above all her
economic power was felt throughout the region, not merely in the
normal processes of trade and investment, but even more directly
through extensive programmes of economic and military aid.
This reversal of roles by Britain and the United States was not
the result of any sustained design on either side. Nor was it accom-
plished with much grace or suavity. Indeed, over the Suez issue in
1956 it precipitated the sharpest break in the history of the Anglo-
American alliance. It represented on one side the reluctant sur-
render of a historic suzerainty and on the other the reluctant assump-
tion of an uncertain responsibility. Within each country opinion
was sharply divided about the course which national policy in the
Middle East ought to follow and in the taking of many of the
principal decisions passion and sentiment played a dangerous part.
As a result the path of Anglo-American relations in the Middle
East has been thickly strewn with paradoxes. When the war ended
the British were sponsors of Arab unity, criticized by American
Jewry for their resistance to the full realization of Zionist aspira-
tions in Palestine. By 1956 they were accomplices after, if not
before, the fact in the Israeli attack on Egypt, while the United
States was supporting Egypt and the Arab world against the almost
isolated trio of Britain, France and Israel. When British ascendancy
in Jordan ended in 1956 with the dismissal of General Glubb from
his command of the Arab Legion this was generally regarded in the
U.S.A. as the overdue termination of a colonialist anomaly. Yet
little more than twelve months later British parachute troops re-
turned to Jordan under the auspices of the Sixth Fleet and the
Eisenhower Doctrine.
Contradictions of this sort flowed naturally, of course, from the
internal chaos of the Middle East itself, from its lack not merely
of any unity but even of clear internal lines of division. Where so
much was fluid, where the units of government were so numerous
1 Though one of these, Dhahran, in Saudi Arabia was due to be given
up when its lease expired in 1962.
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BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
and so arbitrary, where the social structure was so precarious and
the administrative structure so fragile, alignments were inevitably
shifty and changeable and to some extent great external powers
could be excused if their policies within the area also lacked con-
tinuity and consistency. They could less easily be excused for not
making up their own minds about what they wanted and for not
co-ordinating their policies each with the other. The history of
Anglo-American relations in the Middle East is a history of two
great powers educating themselves the hard way, by making costly
mistakes and by allowing pride and prejudice to become substitutes
for reason and enlightened self-interest. It is not our purpose to
follow that history through all its involutions, but since the present
position of the United Kingdom and the United States in the
Middle East is largely a product of the past, something must be
said of it.
Although the Middle East has changed a good deal in the last
two degades, enough has remained the same to enable one to speak
of certain continuing British and American interests in the area.
The oldest British interest in the Middle East arose from its posi-
tion athwart the line of communication to India and other British
possessions on the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Of this the classic
expression was the British interest in and part ownership of the
Suez Canal. With the emancipation of India, Burma and Ceylon
and the development of air transport it might be thought that the
traditional interconnexion of British world power and control of
the Canal was largely outmoded. This might be so, were it not
that in the twentieth century a new British (and indeed European)
dependence developed upon oil supplies from the Middle East.
For economical delivery the Canal route was virtually indispensable
— at least until the development of pipe lines from the Persian
Gulf to the Mediterranean, arteries which, however, had a special
vulnerability of their own. And just as the importance of the Canal
made it necessary for Britain to maintain a close concern in the
politics of Egypt, so the importance of Middle East oil supplies
gave her a similar concern in the politics of the great oil producing
countries of Iran, Iraq and the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabian
areas. As far as Britain was concerned, the stability of all these
states, in varying proportions, was menaced from two directions —
from without and within. The great external threat came from the
U.S.S.R.; it was consequently her historic and continuing endeavour
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THE MIDDLE EAST
to keep Russia from expanding beyond the Black Sea, the Caucasus
and the Caspian and to maintain in the states which were the
legatees of the Ottoman Empire a firm front against Russian
pressure. Internally, the same weaknesses, political and economic,
which had made it possible for the West, in the first instance, to
dominate the Middle Eastern states, made them unstable and rest-
less, wracked by mutual rivalries and a prey to powerful nationalist
jealousies and aspirations. Britain's aim here was always the same
— a friendly stability, but the preferred devices for securing
stability varied from place to place and from time to time. They
might involve a direct assumption of British political control, they
might take the form of bolstering a traditional and conservative
regime, they might seek to forestall revolutionary upheavals by
aiding local programmes of reform and economic betterment. By
the 1940's and 1950's the third alternative was most generally pre-
ferred, but often almost unavoidable recourse continued to be had
also to the second, generally in conjunction with it; the first sur-
vived, only to a very limited degree, in the Trucial states of the Gulf.
There was nothing in these Middle East interests of Britain
which the United States could not reasonably endorse. So as long
as the strength of her European allies was important to the United
States, Britain's concern with maintaining access to Middle East oil
supplies might be said to be identical with America's own. The
U.S.A. had no interest in expanding exports of American oil to
Europe; individual oil firms might be glad to do so, but the national
interest as a whole was better served by conserving the U.S.A. 's
indigenous oil resources and investing American dollars in the
ownership of oil wells in the Middle East, where the costs of ex-
traction and refining were so much lower than in the United States.
So although over individual concessions and upon certain occasions
commercial rivalry might develop between British and American
oil concerns — rivalry which might even extend to the backstairs of
local politics — there was no clash of basic national interests here.
Still less was it true, as conspiracy-mongers sometimes liked to make
out, that there was an unholy alliance of State Department and
American oil interests to undermine the British position in the
Middle East.
Similarly the U.S.A.'s acute concern about the world-wide
menace of Russian communism gave her every reason to support
the British policy of keeping Russia out of the whole Middle
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BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
Eastern area. Indeed it was, in a sense, in this area — at least in the
important Turkish sector of it — that she had first tried out her role
as inheritor of the Pax Britannica, by the Truman Doctrine of 1947.
And the U.S.A., no less than Britain, recognized the need for
stability in the Middle East and the dual set of threats, internal and
external, which the area had to meet.
These basic identities of interest have provided and still provide
the foundation for a vital Anglo-American partnership in this part
of the world. Yet they have not prevented recurrent and serious
divergencies — and even outright clashes — between Britain and the
U.S.A. in the Middle East. To what are these due?
The explanation must be sought on several planes. In the first
place there is what one might call the different intensity of involve-
ment. Though British and American interests here are broadly
identical, the British are rooted in a deeper and, to them, more vital
historical experience while at the same time coming closer to their
day to day concerns as a nation. For nearly two hundred years the
Middle East has taken prime place in the thinking of British policy-
makers. In the crucial year of 1940 when invasion directly threat-
ened Britain's island security it was to the Middle East that the
Cabinet, without one dissenting voice, had decided to dispatch
nearly half the army's best available tanks; the frontiers of Britain,
not for the first time, were felt to rest upon the Nile. Here was, so
to say, Britain's Panama. To the U.S.A., by contrast, the Middle
East meant nothing; even the United States Marines, ranging from
"the halls of Montezuma", had only reached as far as "the shores
of Tripolee". The American gateway to the East was by way of her
own west; more nearly perhaps than any other patch on the map,
the area between Suez and Karachi was to an American the other
side of the world. Thus territories which to British politicians were
soused in the dangerous imponderables of national tradition, pride
and sentiment, were to American policy-makers arid deserts over
which "area specialists" manipulated their divining wands. For one
component element in the American "nation of nations" and for
one only did the Middle East have a powerful emotional signi-
ficance, the Jews.
The support for the Zionist cause amongst American Jewry,
though by no means universal, was sufficiently sustained, intense
and focused to guarantee that ceteris paribus the Jewish case in
Palestine would take priority over all other considerations in the
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THE MIDDLE EAST
framing of American Middle Eastern policy, A peculiarly explosive
force was lent to Zionist propaganda by the ghastly fate of Euro-
pean Jewry before and during World War II, and also, though
sometimes subconsciously, by their anomalous position in American
life, half assimilated, half rejected, at once keepers of the American
conscience and strangers within the gate. The pressure thus
generated was crucial at certain stages in American Middle Eastern
policy, as in the refusal to implement the recommendations of the
Anglo-American Palestine Committee of 1946 and the lightning
recognition by Mr. Truman of the new State of Israel in 1948.
Even so, it did not succeed in introducing a consistency or con-
tinuity, however partisan, into American policy; the net product,
rather, was conspicuous for erraticism and contradiction, as when
the U.S.A. in 1948 suddenly and belatedly abandoned partition in
favour of a United Nations trusteeship which she would do nothing
to implement. Whether any harmony between an American-sup-
ported Zionism and a Bevin-directed British mandate could ever
have been attained is doubtful, but certainly the oscillations and
reversals in American policy, as first one consideration and now
another assumed dominance, created a maximum of friction and
confusion.
In a sense it was true, as American Zionists claimed, that it was
the inherent justice of their cause, the validity of their claims to
"self-determination", to a "homeland", to become a nation like
other nations, which won them their American support. Yet it was
also true that this support was not able to grow roots in any soil of
American national interest; American support for Zionism was the
generous (even sometimes the guiltily conscientious) supererogatory
action of a rich and powerful nation. As such, it had about it some
of the irresponsibility that attaches to a whim; the unpredictability
also, as became apparent when in 1953 the Democratic administra-
tions which had fostered Israel were succeeded by a Republican one
which was cooler to the arguments and pressures of American and
world Jewry. The result within less than four years was an astonish-
ing reversal of roles — a Britain which aided (if it did not inspire)
an Israeli assault on Egypt and a U.S.A. which denounced its oldest
allies and its youngest foster-child amidst the plaudits of the Arab
world.
For the full explanation of this paradox we must however look
less to Washington than to London. The intensity of involvement
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BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
which Britain felt in the Middle East led her to an unquestioning
persistence in certain beliefs and attitudes that no longer made sense
there. From the point of view of her own national interest she
greatly over-estimated the importance of maintaining physical con-
trol of the area. In the abstract, no doubt, it was still good to have
bases from which British strength and influence could radiate. In
practice, however, if those bases proved so unpopular to the coun-
tries in which they were situated that their maintenance taxed
British strength and stimulated hostility to British influence, their
existence became self-defeating. Moreover, with the abdication of
the British Raj the great historic justification for Middle East
bases, the maintenance of the lines of control to India, disappeared.
There remained, of course, the two other tasks — the continued ex-
clusion of Russsia from the area and the continuance of access to
Middle East oil. For both of these a British military "presence"
was certainly helpful — but only if it could be maintained without
alienating local sentiment, a consideration repeatedly overlooked in
country after country. Moreover, it was too readily assumed that in
order to obtain Middle East oil it was necessary to own the con-
cessions and even to control the countries from which it was ob-
tained; by the fifties there were already signs of that world surplus
of oil which afforded the best guarantee that the Middle East would
continue to supply what Europe would continue to require — ample
oil at reasonable prices.
It cannot be contended that the United States was entirely free
of these illusions or entirely innocent of such assumptions. It was
President Eisenhower who assured Sir Anthony Eden in March,
1953, that it was essential for Britain to maintain the base in Egypt
and that if Britain were to evacuate the Canal Zone before making
a Middle East defence arrangement she would be exposing herself
to Egyptian blackmail.^ In certain areas, for example Saudi Arabia,
she judged it every bit as much in her own interests to lend her
support to autocratic regimes that hardly represented the wave of
the Arab future. Her especial concern as the arch-organizer of the
anti-Communist front the world over sometimes led her to see
Middle East countries, factions and policies exclusively in terms of
a pro- or anti-Communist alignment. But in general she was free in
the Middle East of the particular historic illusions of imperialism.
In principle, at least, she was sympathetic to the rising tide of
1 Eden, op. cit., p. 249.
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THE MIDDLE EAST
nationalism. In specific situations this did not necessarily result,
unfortunately, in her being able to offer helpful assistance or pro-
pound a practicable solution, since the disinterestedness which gave
her a ready enough grasp of general principles was the reverse side
of the coin of non-involvement which denied her, in many cases, a
sound empirical judgement of actual situations. (This, for example,
was painfully apparent over the whole Suez affair in 1956.) Si
jeunesse pouvait, si vieillesse savatt. Moreover even when she had
the sympathies, she lacked in this area, time and time again, the
sense of responsibility, the willingness to see through the conse-
quences of her own recommendations and actions. The United
Kingdom, by contrast, charged with a responsibility which on the
whole she seldom tried to evade, all too often found herself inex-
tricably tangled in the toils of her own historic but now erroneously
conceived self-interests.
At an early stage — as early indeed as the establishment of the
Middle Eastern Supply Centre during the war — some reliance began
to be placed on economic and technical aid as the solvent which
would melt the age-old enmities, the internecine rivalries and the
nationalist suspicions of the Middle East. If only an improved
economy could be established, the instabilities of the social order
would be reduced and so the reliance of local governments on fraud
and corruption, their susceptibility to every gust of popular passion
or every touch of internal or external intrigue and subversion might
be ended. Then political problems which had proved intractable in
themselves might be solved indirectly by the removal of the
economic and social evils which had provoked them.
British in origin, such an approach was no less attractive to the
United States. It accorded with long-established American philan-
thropic interests in the Levant and appealed to every American
policy-planner who wished to improve the stability of the area
without having to incur the odium and the hazards of establishing
an American political or military presence there. In Israel Ameri-
can capital showed what could be done to raise the productivity of
one of the most arid Middle Eastern territories; if the Arab states
could be aided to do half as much, the improvement in their living
standards would be phenomenal. Between 1951 and 1956 the
United States provided $250 million for development and technical
co-operation to Israel and $86 million divided between Egypt,
Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.
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BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
Unfortunately the sheer scale of Middle East under-development
made any duplication of the Israeli scale of investment impossible.
Outside Palestine, there were two types of underdeveloped terri-
tory, each presenting problems of their own. Superficially more
fortunate were those states whose oil revenues afforded a consider-
able investment surplus, either in sterling or dollars. Here the
problem was not one of providing the funds, but of inducing the
local governments to employ them productively rather than in con-
tributing to the conspicuous waste of their ruling families or the
military under-pinning of a reactionary dynasty or, worst of all, the
financing of feuds with neighbour states. In curbing such intemper-
ances the representatives of what was known to be the richest
power on earth were not always at an advantage.
The other Middle East states whose subsoil lacked these fluid
riches were more straightforwardly dependent upon the U.S.A. or
Britain for the wherewithal of their economic development. Here
in theory the donor could dictate the uses of his gift and see that it
was not wasted, nor politically perverted, nor reconverted from
ploughshares into machine guns, or from tractors into tanks.
Practice, however, often made nonsense of theory and local ineffi-
ciency, corruption or political necessity often made hay of the
planners' hopes. In any case to secure a good return upon the in-
vestment of economic and technical aid it was necessary to have
available a far larger number of skilled administrators with local
knowledge than the U.S.A. could possibly supply.
Partly because of the difficulties of administering the programme
efficiently in purely economic terms, partly because of the need to
have something to show to Congress for its annual appropriations,
the temptation became irresistible to conceive the economic aid pro-
gramme in narrowly anti-Communist terms — i.e. to shift from a
concern for Middle East development per se to an urgent desire to
build up the Middle East against Communism. The result was two-
fold— first, to lend a readier ear to requests for military, as opposed
to economic, aid from those who could present themselves as
staunchly anti-Communist, even though this aid, when obtained,
often increased the armaments competition and so the internal
instability of the area; secondly, to require of would-be recipients
of economic aid a positively pro-western proclivity which seldom
accorded with their real desire, which was to stay out of the
Moscow-Free World conflict and cultivate their national identities.
THE MIDDLE EAST
For all these reasons Britain found that, invaluable as American
economic aid was, time and time again, in turning the tricky poli-
tical corners of the Middle East, it was almost as much a source of
problems as a solvent of them. The United States' failure to evolve
a consistent philosophy of economic aid meant that its biggest asset
in the struggle to achieve its purposes in the Middle East was not
only often wasted but sometimes even recoiled upon itself.
To sum up then, three main factors underlay Anglo-American
differences and difficulties in the Middle East — the different in-
tensities of interest in the area, the persistence in Britain of outworn
attitudes towards it, and the lack of any sustained philosophy of
economic aid. Diplomacy, however, is not made up of general
principles but of actions, often cumulative, in particular situations
and to see how Britain and the United States could in one case
succeed and in another fail to maximize their common interests and
transcend their mutual Middle Eastern suspicions and miscalcula-
tions it may be helpful to look at two concrete instances — the
Anglo-Iranian oil dispute and the Suez affair. The story of each is
sufficiently well known to make a re-telling unnecessary; my object
is merely to analyse some aspects of it from the distinctive point of
view of their significance for the Anglo-American relationship.
The two cases had a good deal in common. In each the major
interest involved was British (or Anglo-French), but in each the
American role was vital. In each the dynamic element was provided
by the explosive force of a local nationalism and it was on an ex-
ternal and so-called ""imperialist" preserve that it vented itself.
Over each affair loomed the presence of the U.S.S.R., not as an
active but as a potential participant. On both occasions the issue
was brought to the bar of world judgment, in the first case through
the Security Council and the World Court, in the second through
the Security Council and General Assembly.
But there were differences too and it was these, as will become
apparent, which accounted for the divergent outcome. To take the
Anglo-Iranian dispute first :
At the outset, in 1951, there was not much in common between
the British and the American view of the issues. An affronted and
expropriated Britain was convinced that she was entitled to full
American support in her conflict with Mosaddeq both because her
cause was just and because both countries had a common interest
in maintaining the flow of Iranian oil, in resisting what was
H 113
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
variously called "theft" or "unilateral denunciation", and in pre-
venting Iran's domination by a nationalist figure or faction strongly
hostile to the west. In fact the American attitude was initially cool
and even critical; no direct American interest was threatened by the
seizure of Anglo-Iranian; a different on-the-spot assessment was
made of Mossadeq's brand of nationalism, with the result that a
major American fear was that being tough with his movement
would open the door to Communism in Iran/ finally, even where
the legal merits of the British case won acceptance, there was a
certain distrust of the plaintiff based upon his numerous previous
convictions for colonial and imperialist malpractices. The result
was that not only did the U.S.A. make strong representations just
before the withdrawal from Abadan against any reclamation of
British property by force; even two years later, in September, 1953,
it was reported that the State Department had been urging Ameri-
can oil companies to combine to buy out Anglo-Iranian.^ From all
this it might have been supposed that the prospects of Anglo-
American co-operation in an agreed solution were slender. Yet in
fact thesis and antithesis worked themselves out to a harmonious
synthesis. Why?
In the first place the United States came by degrees to recognize
that Britain had a good case, especially after the United Kingdom
had appealed both to the Security Council and to the World Court;
though both bodies declined to accept jurisdiction in the dispute,
the result of appearing before them was in each case to present the
United Kingdom in the light of one seeking justice and Iran as one
reluctant even to allow the case to be heard. Secondly, the United
Kingdom did eventually succeed in persuading first the Truman
and then the Eisenhower administration that Mossadeq was not the
only alternative to Communism in Iran. In this no doubt they were
assisted by his own unreasonable behaviour but also ultimately by
the demonstration provided by General Zahedi and the Shah that
Mossadeq's overthrow was not the prelude to a popular wave of
Communism. Thirdly, Britain abstained, despite severe temptation,
from the use of force to settle the dispute, and made a continuous
effort, despite intermittent friction and changes of government on
both sides of the Atlantic, to work closely with the United States.
^ Cf. President Eisenhower's remark to Eden that "he regarded him
as the only hope for the West in Iran": Eden, op. cit., p. 212.
2 Ibid., p. 214.
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THE MIDDLE EAST
Fourthly, the United States was willing to accept a considerable
role not merely in the negotiations but also in the settlement, both
by participating in an Anglo-American marketing consortium for
Iranian oil and, hardly less important, by "sweetening" the final
stages of the negotiations with substantial dollar aid; over 127
million dollars of grants and loans were provided for the interim
period before oil revenues from the new consortium became avail-
able. Finally, in the later phases of the dispute there was intimate
co-operation between the men on the spot, the British and American
ambassadors in Teheran, Sir Roger Stevens and Mr. Loy Henderson.
The result was thus the translation of the Anglo-American com-
munity of Middle Eastern interests into concrete terms. The supply
and flow of oil to Europe were preserved. The independence of
Iran as a bastion against the U.S.S.R. was maintained without any
semblance of a diktat at the hands of a browbeating Western im-
perialism. Her economy, so utterly dependent on oil revenues, was
sustained even if it was not properly stabilized (an operation neces-
sarily the work not of a year but of decades).
The Suez affair was both shorter and sharper than the Anglo-
Iranian dispute, but it was in fact (if not in form) the culmination
of an Anglo-Egyptian tension which had been mounting at least
since the war. So axiomatic was the British assumption that a base
in Egypt was necessary to guard the Canal that the United States at
various times came almost to the point of believing it too. Especially
since the Truman Doctrine in 1947 London had pressed on
Washington the argument that the United States and the United
Kingdom had a joint defence responsibility for the Eastern Mediter-
ranean and that for its proper discharge this responsibility required
a base that safeguarded the Canal. But the American policy which
issued in the Truman Doctrine stopped at the boundaries of Turkey.
The U.S.A. was not willing to enter into binding mainland com-
mitments beyond; the air bases at Wheelus and Dhahran were con-
ceived of exclusively in S.A.C. terms, as springboards for retaliatory
attacks on the U.S.S.R. And although an Eisenhower might make
private expressions of endorsement of the British strategical
assumptions over Suez, as in his remarks to Sir Anthony Eden
quoted on p. 11 0, these were not translated into public statements
of United States policy. Rather the reverse: not only was Mr. Dulles,
as Sir Anthony Eden remarks, much less "clear and firm" on this
point, but when at a certain stage a plan was put forward for
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BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
American participation in an Egyptian defence base it broke down
because of Egyptian refusal to have American participation, Ameri-
can refusal to take part unless with Egyptian agreement and finally,
as Sir Anthony Eden puts it, American reluctance "to put any
pressure upon the Egyptians" to negotiate.'^
Before 1956, of course, the vexed question of a base on Egyptian
soil had been settled — on Egyptian terms. The reluctance of the
Americans to press British claims against Egyptian wishes meant
that all hope of maintaining an unpopular foothold had to be
abandoned and undoubtedly the gradual withdrawal of British
troops from the base by the treaty of 1954 was generally welcomed
in the U.S.A. as a wise winding up of an imperialist legacy. To that
extent Britain entered on the Suez dispute, in American eyes, with
clean hands. If the odour of "colonialism" was harder to eliminate
from Britain's dealings with Egypt than with Iran, she had, how-
ever belatedly, withdrawn an unwelcome presence and the Egypt
which chose to expropriate British and French property in the
Canal was a sovereign power with whom both the United Kingdom
and the United States treated on terms of equality. Compared with
the Iranian seizure, the nationalization of the Canal came nearer to
touching American interests — directly because some American oil
also flowed through its banks and indirectly by reason of the painful
analogy to the position of Panama. Moreover the act of nationaliza-
tion bore every evidence of having been precipitated, not by any
British or French misdemeanour but mainly by a reversal of Ameri-
can policy, the withdrawal of the promised aid for the Aswan Dam.
Thus far, at the outbreak of the dispute, the omens for a har-
monious Anglo-American response were, if anything, more pro-
pitious than they had been at Abadan in 1950. But two countering
factors were also present from the start. The first was that long
historic residue of involvement in the Canal which made its seizure
such a peculiarly sensitive matter for British national pride. Every-
thing associated with the area from Disraeli to the recollections of
every ex-serviceman who wore an Africa Star guaranteed that
Nasser's action would provoke an especially prickly response. And
it was an exclusive response. Owing something to Lord Cromer
and perhaps even more to that long line of Englishmen who have
written enormous volumes of beautiful prose bound in golden
buckram about their spiritual adventures in the Levant, the convic-
^ Eden, op. cit., p. 253.
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THE MIDDLE EAST
tion was general that "we could handle this"— i.e. handle it best
alone. A dangerous illusion at any time, this operated with par-
ticularly harmful consequences in 1956 by reason of the second
element present at Suez, which had been absent at Abadan. This
was the deterioration in the personal relationships of the principal
managers of the Anglo-American alliance, Mr. Dulles and Sir
Anthony Eden. At Suez the antipathy and irritation generated by
their disagreements over the Japanese Treaty, the Chinese question,
Indo-China and Geneva, E.D.C. and Western European Union had
accumulated to a point where mutual distrust was a normal char-
acteristic of their relationship. The retirement in Britain of Sir
Winston Churchill, with his sensitive over-riding awareness of the
primacy of the Anglo-American relationship, and President Eisen-
hower's increasing willingness to confide in the wisdom of his
Secretary of State left no effective restraints upon the free and
baneful play of temperament on temperament. As Mr. James
Reston remarked in this connexion : "There has seldom been a
period in modern history when personality has played so large a
part in so many unhappy world events."
All the same, one thought at the time, whatever the difficulties
in the way of Anglo-American agreement, the over-arching im-
portance of presenting a combined front to Russian pretensions
would surely, as in Iran, enforce co-operation. It should have. Why
did it fail to? Largely because the U.S.A. did not accept the British
assessment of the Soviet threat latent in the Nasser operation.
Relying on the Northern tier of anti-Soviet defences, from Istanbul
to Karachi, the Americans were a good deal less disturbed about
what the Russians might do through Nasser than they had been
about what they might do in Iran. The British could not succeed in
persuading Washington that Nasser was a mere Soviet stooge, or
even that like Mossadeq he was an absurd, unrepresentative figure
who could be replaced by a more Western-like leader equally if not
more acceptable to Egyptian taste. Nasser was no Mossadeq, Farouk
had been shown to be no Reza, and no Zahedi was in sight. Thus
the "Nasser must go" refrain in British policy fell on understand-
ably deaf ears in Washington, however much at moments they had
shared British feelings of irritation at his behaviour.
At Teheran the later stages of negotiations had been consider-
ably smoothed and the forces of Iranian moderation strengthened
by the wise application of American economic aid. Over Suez
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BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
negotiations never reached the point where any similar emollient or
buttress might be invoked. On the contrary. The efficient cause of
the whole imbroglio had been the abrupt withdrawal of proferred
American aid in circumstances which could be regarded, reasonably
or not, as a rebuff to national pride. A clearer concept of what
economic aid could achieve and a more consistent policy in its de-
ployment might have averted the whole crisis and would at least
have given the West an advantageous position for negotiation.
Although over Suez, as over Abadan, the British had taken their
case before the United Nations, it had profited them less as far as
the United States was concerned. To some extent this may have
been because the employment of other machinery, such as the Users'
Conference (at American instigation), had to some extent obfus-
cated the issue. But basically it was because before her appeal to the
Security Council, as after it, British was insistent upon her right to
resort to force if she could not get an acceptable remedy for her
grievances by any other way. If at certain early stages in the dispute
the President or his Secretary of State might have appeared to con-
done this, there could be no room for any illusions remaining in
Britain about the deep repugnance this would arouse in Washing-
ton once Sir Anthony had received President Eisenhower's message
of 3 September. The failure to heed this as marking the ne plus
ultra of American co-operation was perhaps the turning-point in
the diplomacy of the alliance. From then on, in place of the close
consultation and co-operation that had marked the Iranian negotia-
tions, there was an increasing breakdown of communications, in
Cairo, Washington and London — not to mention Paris and Jeru-
salem. If in the early stages heavy blame attached to Mr. Dulles
for deviousness, uncertain counsel, inopportune and ill-considered
statements — in general for that something-less-than-frankness
which throughout marred his diplomacy — it is certain that from
this time onwards the United Kingdom, under Sir Anthony Eden,
embarked upon a conspiracy with one ally, France, to the deliberate
exclusion and deception of the other, the United States. Such a
conspiracy when it erupted in violence and war would inevitably
lead to an open breach between London and Washington.
So irrational is this cross-channel conspiracy in the context of
the transatlantic community that even when all the known explana-
tions are to hand they still seem inadequate to explain it. Ultimately
they boil down to one, that the leaders of France and Britain at the
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THE MIDDLE EAST
time believed that there were vital national interests at stake which
their partner in the transatlantic alliance was refusing to treat
seriously. In their assessments of those interests they were largely
wrong, as their critics told them at the time and as subsequent
events have largely proved. But right or wrong, what seems most
incredible of all is their belief that by acting as they did they would
advance those interests more than they would harm them. The
basis for this illusion was a series of gross miscalculations. They
miscalculated their own military effectiveness and they miscalcu-
lated the reaction of the United States. Injured innocence is a de-
ceptive counsellor; statesmen who rely on its exclusive advice
seldom remedy their injuries and frequently impair their innocence.
It is hardly possible for a British observer, even an opponent of
Suez, to provide an objective assessment of whether the American
administration went too far in the "sanctions" which they applied
to the United Kingdom after the outbreak of hostilities in Egypt.
Their reported insistence at the United Nations upon the least
accommodating resolutions and the most exacting compliance, the
Vice-President, Mr. Nixon's, boast of an American "declaration of
independence" from "colonialism", the pressure against sterling in
the American market, the delays in the provision of emergency oil
supplies for the western hemisphere, the suspension of all diplo-
matic contacts in Washington, the President's refusal, however re-
luctant, to entertain a visit from Eden until after the withdrawal of
British troops from Egyptian soil — whether the line of policy thus
exemplified represented the truest wisdom must be left to others to
judge. It certainly represented the lowest point in Anglo-American
relations of the whole post-war period.
That the Suez falling-out should so quickly have been followed
by the promulgation in January, 1957, of the Eisenhower Doctrine
was logical enough. Once the Franco-British venture had failed, a
vacuum of power became apparent in the Middle East which had
to be filled by the U.S.A. if it was not to be filled by the U.S.S.R.
As such, the Doctrine was welcomed in London, though the joy
there was rather of the kind that is reserved for the sinner who has
repented. Ever since the idea of a Middle East defence system had
been first mooted in 1951 there had been expectations; hitherto
always frustrated, of American participation. Visiting the area in
1953 Dulles had aired the concept of a "northern tier" system to
embrace the countries directly bordering on the U.S.S.R. But when,
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BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
from this inspiration, the Baghdad Pact developed apace, Britain
found that her American partner was not prepared to follow
through. There was in this matter a significant reversal of the atti-
tudes which had prevailed over S.E.A.T.O. Now it was the British
who were pressing for an anti-Communist pact, even if it meant
leaving out many countries of the region, and it was the Americans
who were most worried about the effects on local neutrals, in this
case particularly Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The Americans did not
oppose it, any more than the British had opposed S.E.A.T.O.;
indeed they gave arms to Pakistan and Iraq in an encouraging way.
But they felt none of the urgency which Britain derived from the
loss of the Suez base and the fear that, without the Pact, she might
lose her military footing in Iraq when the Treaty of 1930 ran out
in 1957. So, despite the persuasions that Sir Anthony Eden exer-
cised on President Eisenhower when he visited Washington in
January, 1956, the most that the U.S.A. would do, before Suez, was
to join the economic and anti-subversion committees of the alliance.
Now, in place of this detachment, the Eisenhower Doctrine
offered, on request, to use American forces to assist any Middle
Eastern country which might be the victim of armed aggression by
a state controlled by International Communism, and made this
effective by offers of aid to responsive countries in the area. In
Britain the way was clear for a fresh harmonization of policies.
After the Macmillan-Eisenhower meeting at Bermuda in March.
1957, American participation in the military committee of the
Baghdad Pact was announced. In April the swift American response
to the Jordanian crisis, upholding King Hussein with the Marines
and $30 million's worth of aid, showed the U.S.A. as the lineal
inheritor of British policy. In the following year after the revolu-
tion in Iraq which represented a collapse of the British position
there, there was the swift and co-ordinated landing of U.S. marines
in the Lebanon and of British parachutists in Jordan. Whatever the
wisdom or otherwise of these demonstrations in the classic style,
they certainly represented an improvement in Anglo-American co-
ordination since Suez. In 1959 the United States signed bilateral
agreements with Turkey, Iran and Pakistan which embodied the
pledges of the Eisenhower Doctrine, in rather S.E.A.T.O.-ish
language, and when later in the year the Americans played host to
the alliance, now renamed C.E.N.T.O., they agreed to accept the
chairmanship of the military committee for I960.
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THE MIDDLE EAST
All this met with warm British approval as an indication that at
last the United States was accepting firm responsibilities in a region
so important to Britain and to the Commonwealth. If at Suez and
immediately after there had been a suspicion that the United States
was taking advantage of Britain's misfortunes to elbow her out of
her position in the Middle East, this soon passed. It was now recog-
nized that whoever was to blame in the past American strength was
indispensable; moreover it gradually became apparent that Suez did
not signify that extinction of British potency in the area which
pessimists had at first supposed. As something of a normalization
of relations even with Egypt was gradually restored, it was realized
that there was still an active role for Britain to play in the life of
the Middle East. It could not be played without the co-operation of
the United States; but neither could it be played without the co-
operation of the peoples who lived there. The problem was to find
a way of securing both.
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ONE of the most remarkable features of Suez was the absence
of any official post-mortem on the debacle. By any normal
standards — of the right or of the left, diplomatic, economic
or military — it was a major national disaster. On similar occasions
in the nation's past, demand for an inquest had been insistent and
the resulting investigation had generally been searching. The mis-
management of the Crimean War had produced the Roebuck Com-
mittee, the bungled conspiracy of the Jameson Raid had been in-
vestigated by a select committee of the House of Commons, the
tragedy of the Dardanelles had been reviewed by a Royal Com-
mission. After Suez no inquiry was held.
This was certainly not because all the facts were known. One of
the most extraordinary aspects of the affair was the secrecy which
attended its preparation and the mystery which hung about it after-
wards. Never in modern British history has so large an enterprise
been launched in peacetime with the connivance of so few and
seldom, if ever, have the lacunae in the written records been so
meagrely supplemented by the oral tradition of the well-informed.
Now as then, certain crucial features of the Suez imbroglio remain
baffling and unprobed, and the publication by the principal actor of
an apologia for his ill-starred enterprise adds substantially nothing
to our knowledge of what occurred.
Not only was no inquest held. None was seriously demanded,
from any responsible quarter of organized opinion. The Opposition
went through the motions of calling for one, but not as men de-
termined to get it. The reason was indeed only too obvious. The
nation had been brought to the brink of a major disaster, of a
rupture with the Commonwealth and a total alienation from the
United States. A chasm had opened up at the country's feet; Britain
had seen the peril of the position just in time and had instinctively
drawn back from the abyss. To ask how she had got there and to
arraign the guilty men would be to weaken her position still further.
It would reveal blame and dissension not only within the Cabinet
but also within the alliance; in the recriminations which would
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assuredly follow the position of persons indispensable for con-
tinued leadership in Britain would be weakened; worse still, rela-
tions between Britain and the Eisenhower administration — an ad-
ministration just about to embark on a second four-year term —
would be wrecked in a cross-fire of charge and counter-charge. So
when the physical collapse of Sir Anthony removed both the
principal architect of the nation's misfortunes and the central wit-
ness for any inquisition, the public mood readily accepted chivalry
as a substitute for justice and gratefully turned its gaze away from
the blotted page of Suez to the new leaf being turned over by Mr.
Harold Macmillan.
The new Prime Minister, nonetheless, had a difficult task to
hand. He had to retreat without turning round, to reverse a policy
without admitting that he was changing course, to repair an alliance
without officially recognizing a rent. Never was the boasted
empiricism of British conservatism given a better opportunity to
show its paces. Here, however, our concern is not with his parlia-
mentary and political management but with the substance of his
policy. The heart of this is to be found in a reassertion of priorities;
the unity of the Commonwealth and the maintenance of the Anglo-
American alliance were to be given priority over the entente with
France and even over the assertion of our rights and interests in
traditional areas of British influence and control, like the Middle
East. Fortunately — it was the saving grace of the whole Suez affair
— no choice had to be made between the first two priorities;
Britain's relations with the Commonwealth dove-tailed with, indeed
supported, her relations with the United States. (Never was this
more conspicuously displayed than in those lonely days after the
Anglo-French landings when, both in Washington and in the
United Nations, it was only the other members of the Common-
wealth who kept open lines of communication which, as far as
direct contact between London and Washington was concerned, had
been cut.) The importance which Mr. Macmillan attached to
strengthening those Commonwealth bonds which Suez had so
severely strained was exemplified not only at the routine Common-
wealth Prime Ministers' Conference in 1957 but also by his own
20,000-mile tour of the Commonwealth in 1958, the first ever to
be undertaken by a British Prime Minister while in office. The
restoration of relations with the United States was conveniently
symbolized in the popular image of Macmillan and Eisenhower
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BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
renewing an old comradeship which went back to their wartime
association in North Africa. A symbol, however, is all that it was.
After all, the personal amity of old comrades-in-arms had been
even more impressively symbolized in the Churchill-Eisenhower
relationship which lasted from 1953 to 1955, yet these were the
years in which the unity of the alliance most notably began to
deteriorate. The test was whether, behind the symbolism, they
could make a reality of partnership. A precondition of this was that
Britain on her part should make a realistic assessment of her in-
terests and potentialities and that the U.S.A., on hers, should
remember that it was an alliance she was leading and should accept
her consequential responsibilities for both consultation and decision.
Suez illuminated more than just the failure of British Middle
East policy and the breakdown of her relations with her major
ally. It showed up the inadequacy of her whole defence poliq' and
called into question the scale and diversity of the commitments
which the nation had been trying to shoulder. Although Britain had
spent £7,000 million in five years on defence, it was now revealed
that her forces were still not equipped for a comparatively simple
operation and that what equipment they had was not what they
needed. (It might also have been observed that the most costly of
her armaments, the nuclear weapon, could not for political reasons
be deployed at all.) The strain put by the Suez operations upon the
national finances was a reminder that the nation was like a man
with weak lungs whom the least over-exertion would find short of
breath; the limits of its politico-military endeavours were set by the
weakness of its monetary reserves, the least overstrain producing a
run on the pound. Thus, as time and time again after World War
II, the country's foreign and defence policy had to be re-examined
in the light of what the economy could support. (Since, in such a
plight, the only possible source of succour was from the dollar
world, since in fact the financial crisis required the invocation of the
waiver in the Anglo-American loan agreements, even this recutting
of the national cloth involved harmonizing British policy with that
of the U.S.A.) A glance at the nation's accounts revealed that if
there had to be cuts the defence budget was a particularly inviting
place to make them. This was for the double reason that so much
defence expenditure took place overseas and that so much even of
what was spent at home consumed the products and manpower of
those industries, notably engineering and electronics, which were
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particularly needed for the export trade. It was not difficult to argue
that the heavy burden of defence which Britain had carried during
and since the Korean war had substantially contributed to the infla-
tion which had undoubtedly diminished her effectiveness as a world
power.
This was the thinking which was made explicit in the revolu-
tionary Defence White Paper of 5 April, 1957, and which was
invoked to justify its programme of cuts, switches and revised com-
mitments. The White Paper virtually assumed that it was defence
which would have to bear the brunt; it did not consider the possi-
bility of cutting investment or consumption, no doubt because the
first would have imperilled an already inadequate rate of economic
growth and the second would have disappointed expectations
nursed by both Government and Opposition. In any case the New
Year that saw the withdrawal from Suez under the cover of a
United Nations expeditionary force was not a season for invoking
the heroic mood. The national disposition was rather to explore,
with some avidity, the compensations of "leaving it to Dag",
Ten years earlier and in a related part of the world Britain had
once before arrived at the conclusion that her reach had exceeded
her grasp. In the Greco-Turkish crisis of 1947, a similar retrench-
ment having been forced upon her, she turned to the United States
and persuaded her to move in in her place. Her case then for relief
as a war-weary, austerity-ridden partner was in many ways better
founded in 1947 than it was in 1957 when she was floundering in
difficulties largely of her own making. Yet paradoxically the Britain
of Macmillan and Selwyn Lloyd seems to have found in Washing-
ton a readier acceptance of her desire to cut commitments than did
the Britain of Attlee and Ernest Bevin. By 1957, without doubt,
the United States had become only too painfully cognisant of the
recurrent problem of Britain's balance of payments and hardly
needed much convincing as to the limitations set by our inflation-
prone economy. Moreover if the "New Look" in British defence
policy was at any time queried in Washington its British advocates
could claim with some justice that they were only following a pre-
cedent which the Eisenhower administration had laid down.
The Eisenhower new look had its basis in the contention — almost
identical with that of the British White Paper — that, as the Presi-
dent insisted in his State of the Union message in January, 1953,
"adequate military strength" must be achieved "within the limits
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BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
of an endurable strain" on the economy. Rooted in this conviction
of the dependence of military power on a balanced budget, the
disposition to cut the United States defence expenditure was stimu-
lated by the sunnier international prospect that opened with the
death of Stalin and the ending of the Korean War. Technolog-
ically, the demonstration of the annihilating power of the hydrogen
bomb at the Eniwetok explosion in November, 1952, encouraged
the belief that the immense destructive power of nuclear weapons
would provide the all-purpose answer to the needs of defence. The
result was the emergence, at the point where defence and diplomacy
meet, of the doctrine of "massive retaliation" which received its
most challenging enunciation at the hands of Mr. Dulles on 12
January, 1954 :
"Before military planning could be changed, the President and
his advisers in the National Security Council had to take some
basic policy decisions. This has been done. The basic decision
was to depend primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate,
instantly, by means and at places of our choosing. Now the
Department of Defence and the Joint Chiefs of Staff can shape
our military establishment to meet the enemy's many choices.
That permits a selection of military means instead of a multi-
plication of means. "^
The re-shaped "military establishment" that this implied was re-
vealed in the President's 1954 budget message with its proposals
to expand the Air Force from 106 wings to 137 by mid- 195 7 and
to reduce the Army from 3 '4 million men in 1954 to 3*2 million
in 1955 (further cut to 2-85 million in 1956); funds were re-
allocated between the services in proportion and the 1953 expendi-
ture of 43"6 billion dollars was to be cut to 41-5 billion in 1954
and 37'6 billion in 1955 respectively.
Some of the problems which this "new look" implied for the
alliance have already been mentioned. The increased reliance upon
nuclear striking power seemed to imply a set of exclusively
American decisions about intervention around the globe — or, to
put it another way, about when and where to turn a local "con-
ventional" conflict into a global, atomic one. The shift from
conventional to atomic forces if persisted in seemed also to imply
^ Documents on American Foreign Kelations, 1954, pp. 7-15
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EUROPE: DEFENCE
a re-allocation of burdens in the alliance, with the U.S.A. making
her contribution mainly through the atomic deterrent plus a reserve
possibly stationed in a "garrison America", while her allies manned
the local ramparts and provided the bulk of manpower. Much of
the alarm this aroused in Britain was based upon the all too ready
assumption that every tendency will be developed to its logical
conclusion; as a result, revolutionary implications were read into
what was often only a shift of emphasis. But indisputably the effect
of the new strategical posture was, as we have seen, to weaken the
bonds of alliance both by reducing confidence in American leader-
ship and by inciting similar strategies "of their own choosing"
amongst other members of the alliance who thought they could
afford them.
In Britain indeed a mild dose of infection had already been
caught well before 1957. The 1954 White Paper envisaged a
"gradual change" in the defence effort with a "tendency" to a
declining expenditure on the army and "greater emphasis" on the
R.A.F.; accordingly, it announced the decision to begin construc-
tion of the V-bomber force. The decision in 1955 to build a British
hydrogen bomb marked a further stage in the same direction. The
1957 White Paper is however properly regarded as a new departure
with its abolition of conscription by I960 (thus cutting the army
strength by 50 per cent), its immediate cut in the Rhine Army by
13,000 men with more to follow, the demotion of the Navy, and,
above all, the reliance on nuclear weapons. Though its progress was
to be spread over five years, its impact made itself felt immediately.
Nowhere was it greater, or more painful, than in N.A.T.O.
Though the White Paper envisaged a strategy which rested
almost entirely upon collective action, renouncing isolated British
action in all except the most "brushfire" of operations, its immedi-
ate effect appeared to be a reduction in the British contribution to
the various alliances she supported, and particularly to N.A.T.O.
The decision to stop conscription, the reduction in the naval
contribution to N.A.T.O. forces, the halving of the tactical air
force in Germany, and, above all, the cut in the British Army of
the Rhine — these all seemed to point to a weakening zeal for the
North Atlantic alliance. The cut in the Rhine Army caused par-
ticular unease; only two and a half years earlier Sir Anthony Eden
had secured French consent to a German army with the pledge to
maintain on the continent four divisions and the tactical air force
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BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
and not to withdraw them "against the wishes of the majority of
the Brussels Treaty powers". The powers concerned did not
formally set themselves against the British decision — though they
prevailed on the British government to effect a smaller reduction
than that originally desired — but they made no secret of their
dislike of it. For this and the other economies in their overseas
defence expenditure the British could indeed produce a strong
debating argument over and above the over-ruling claim of neces-
sity. This was that throughout the fifties the United Kingdom had
contributed to defence a higher proportion of her national income
than any other West European country, except France, and in hav-
ing to contribute most of it abroad carried its burden in a peculiarly
onerous form. Nor, it was said, could France complain so long as
the mass migration of the French army to Algeria left only one
shadowy French division in N.A.T.O. But this kind of retort did
nothing to ease N.A.T.O. 's problem as an alliance less than half
equipped with even the thirty divisions which its supreme Com-
mander had reluctantly accepted as a reduced target two years
earlier. The fact of the matter was that the 1957 White Paper
represented a further shift in the balance of N.A.T.O., with less
emphasis on the conventional shield and more reliance on the
nuclear sword. The White Paper claimed that it would be in her
provision of a nuclear deterrent — the V-bomber force, missiles, the
arming even of her conventional forces with nuclear weapons —
that the main British contribution to collective defence would be
made.
When N.A.T.O. was first established the sword on which it
relied was an exclusively American one — the atom bomb, to be de-
livered by S.A.C. The manufacture of the weapon and the main-
tenance of a means of delivery were both immensely costly. Why
did Britain seek to duplicate them? The answer, of course, has little
to do with N.A.T.O., though much with the United Kingdom's
position vis-a-vis the rest of the world: possession of the super-
weapon seemed indispensable to the maintenance of her position
as a world power. (And of course possession of the weapon de-
manded as a corollary capacity to deliver it.) But paradoxically the
American refusal to share her own atomic secrets with the ally who
had contributed most to her own atomic programme provided a
supplementary stimulus, since access to American atomic secrets
was restricted by the McMahon Act to allies who were also atomic
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powers. Thus to enjoy the benefits of association we had first of all
to demonstrate that we "could go it alone".
This was the first great raison d'etre for the British deterrent.
But from the outset there were supplementary ones too. From the
outset of the alliance there was always the problem of maintaining
Britain's voice in its councils when one member, the U.S.A. dis-
posed of a strength not merely so much greater but of a wholly
different order from that of all the rest. If this power were aug-
mented by a monopoly of the super-weapon, Britain's voice might
dwindle to a whisper. To be heard, she had to be able to make a
big bang too. In a double sense this was felt to be wise. Vis-a-vis
America Britain had to establish her right to be consulted in all
decisions which might involve the use of the bomb. Vis-a-vis the
U.S.S.R. her possession of an independent deterrent entitled her to
an independent voice at Moscow and guaranteed that she would be
respected in any bilateral controversy and also gain admission to
any East- West exercises in summitry. The logic behind these argu-
ments was something less than water-tight; the U.S.A. had a moral
obligation to consider any ally who might be involved in a decision
to use the ultimate weapon; if the U.S.S.R. decided to strike, the
smaller British sting would add little to the U.S.A.'s large one and
if the U.S.S.R. insisted on a two-man summit Britain's bomb would
not guarantee her a third seat. But the logic of these counter-
arguments was not quite water-tight either. In a world where reason
counted for less than the vague penumbra of respect inspired by
power the British deterrent seems to have secured her certain ad-
vantages in both Washington and Moscow. In Washington in par-
ticular it was Britain's status as a nuclear power which was largely
responsible for her retaining, on an informal basis, that right to
"pre-annihilation" consultation originally formally embodied in the
Quebec Agreements. More certainly, this status admitted Britain to
consultation with the Americans on contingency planning, on
target selection and the like from which she would otherwise
almost certainly have been excluded. Finally in all the East- West
negotiations, including particularly those on disarmament and
nuclear testing, it secured her a voice which she would otherwise
have been denied. This whole intangible or "prestige" value of the
deterrent found as explicit assessment as any in statements con-
secutively made by Opposition and Government leaders in the
House of Commons debate on the manufacture of the British
I 129
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
hydrogen bomb on 2 March, 1955. Mr. Attlee, supporting the
Government's decision, said :
"I think that we have influence in the world. That influence
does not depend solely upon the possession of weapons, although
I have found, in practical conversations, that the fact that we do
possess these weapons does have an effect upon the rulers of
other countries. It is quite an illusion to think that it does not
have an effect. I am quite sure that we should not have had the
influence we did have upon the events in Korea if we had not
had the Commonwealth Division there. "^
Mr. Macmillan, as Defence Minister, defended the decision in
these terms :
"It may be argued that because the main deterrent force is Ameri-
can there need be and there ought to be no British contribution.
I think that is a very dangerous doctrine.
It is doubly dangerous on two levels of thought. Politically, it
surrenders our power to influence American policy and then,
strategically and tactically, it equally deprives us of any influence
over the selection of targets and use of our vital striking forces.
The one, therefore, weakens our prestige and our influence in
the world and the other might imperil our safety."^
But to these arguments, as "New Look" thinking developed on
each side of the Atlantic, there was added another, which strikingly
revealed the grim logic, the self-multiplying potency of weapons of
destruction. In the May Day parade of 1954 Russians displayed the
rudiments, at least, of a S.A.C. of their own; in November, 1956,
they boasted in their anti-Suez note to Britain of their ability to
bomb London with rockets with nuclear warheads. Thus was
ushered in a new phase of strategic thinking — and worrying — in
Britain, based upon the fact that the U.S.S.R. could wield a nuclear
deterrent of its own. In the event of war would S.A.C. give the
same priority to attacks on Soviet bases which directly threatened
Britain as the V-force would? And, looking beyond this to the
I.C.B.M., the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, with its 5,000-mile
1 HC Deb., 5th series. Vol. 537, col. 2175.
2 Ibid., col. 2181-2.
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EUROPE: DEFENCE
range, what would happen when the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R.
could fire at each other direct? When United States bases were no
longer needed in Britain would the U.S.A. still regard a threat to
Britain as a threat to herself.'^ Against such a day Britain must have
a deterrent of her own.^ The trouble about this argument was that
it proved too much. It envisaged the collapse of N.A.T.O. and all
hope of a collective defence based on collective guarantees. If it was
valid for the United Kingdom vis-a-vis the U.S.A. it was valid for
every western European country against both the United Kingdom
and the U.S.A. That way total disintegration of the alliance lay.
None of this reasoning, it will be readily apparent, could have
recommended the new White Paper policy to Washington. Yet the
policy itself required and obtained not merely acquiescence but
even positive support from the U.S.A. Mr. Duncan Sandys' Janu-
ary 1957 mission to Washington was an indispensable precursor
of his April manifesto. With the V-bomber forces still on the draw-
ing boards the whole policy of a British deterrent was dependent
on the provision by the U.S.A. of the I.R.B.M.s, Intermediate
Range Ballistic Missiles, which was first negotiated by Mr, Sandys
and finally clinched by Mr. Macmillan in his Bermuda talks in
March. The considerations which persuaded President Eisenhower
to facilitate the British "New Look" by this extra-N.A.T.O. pro-
vision have not been made public. No doubt the logic of his own
"New Look" precedent counted for a good deal and the force of
the "economy" argument would not have been lost on the Presi-
dent. There was also a general desire to do everything reasonable
to make up the dissensions of Suez and to accede to any reasonable
British request. There was almost certainly, on the American ad-
ministration's part, a certain feeling of guilty conscience at having
failed to make good on its intentions about atomic secret-sharing.
Basically, however, one suspects there was a kind of live and let
live philosophy not untypical of the President, which rested the
alliance rather on a free co-operation of individual efforts than upon
any universally accepted and rigorously worked-out strategy and
allocation of functions. In a relationship so conceived something
^ Thus Mr. Sandys to the House of Commons on 16 April, 1957:
"When they have developed the 5,000 mile intercontinental ballistic
rocket can we really be sure that every American administration will
go on looking at things in quite the same way?" Ibid, Vol. 568, col.:
1761.
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BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
like the British "New Look" was a logical consequence of the posi-
tion in which the United Kingdom found herself in 1957, with its
blend of dependence and independence of the U.S.A. She was
dependent, as Suez had demonstrated, in her inability to wage a
war of which the United States disapproved, or to stand up to
Soviet threats alone. She was independent in having manufactured,
in her ally's despite, a considerable range of nuclear weapons (the
British hydrogen bomb was exploded in May, 1957). She was
desperately anxious to avoid economic dependence on United States
aid (hence the economic motive for the defence reductions) and
equally anxious to restore, as soon as possible, the broken intimacy
of the alliance. Finally she was as determined as ever not to go
farther into Europe than her transatlantic ally. These were the in-
gredients which, given the American policies of the last few years,
almost dictated the British White Paper of 1957.
This was the situation when, on 4 October, 1957, the Russian
sputnik shook the West. On British-American relations this mani-
festation of Soviet spacemanship had two important effects. Just as
the British crisis of 1948 made British bases highly desirable for
the United States strategic bombing force, so sputnik made British
bases almost indispensable for United States missile strategy. The
missile offer of the Bermuda talks now took on a new meaning as
a strengthening not only of Britain's nuclear deterrent but also of
America's nuclear defences. But, more than this, the natural desire
of the Pentagon not to put all their nuclear eggs in one basket led
to the attempt, at the N.A.T.O. meeting in December, to secure
agreements with other European allies about the deployment of
Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles on their territories. Here,
however, a further consequence of sputnik revealed itself — a new
distrust in continental Europe of American leadership and an
enhanced desire to negotiate with Moscow before incurring the
peculiar odium which Moscow professed to reserve for countries
that accepted American missile bases. The United States proposal
was shelved until 1958.
Two months before the inconclusive N.A.T.O. meeting of
December Mr. Macmillan had met President Eisenhower in Wash-
ington for what was, in effect, a sequel to the Bermuda meeting of
March. The atmosphere of renewed amity created at Bermuda was
intensified at Washington. The Times reported that "in terms of
the Anglo-American alliance participants in the talks have known
132
EUROPE: DEFENCE
nothing like them since the wartime conferences at Cairo and
Casablanca".^ The conversations concluded with a "Declaration of
Common Purpose", a somewhat wordy communique which for
British readers contained as its most significant item an undertaking
by the President that he would ask Congress to amend the Atomic
Energy Act to permit collaboration "between Great Britain, the
United States and other friendly countries". The emphasis through-
out fell indeed on "interdependence"; "national self-sufficiency"
was recognized as being out of date and was to be replaced by
"genuine partnership". Care was taken to stress that this was not
just an Anglo-American commitment, that in fact "the understand-
ings . . . reached will be increasingly effective as they became more
widespread between the free nations". As if to symbolize this, M.
Spaak, as Secretary-General of N.A.T.O., was invited to attend the
final session of the conference. From the British point of view,
however, the importance of the Washington meeting was as a mile-
stone in the restored and growing intimacy of the Anglo-American
relationship. As such it was hailed in London with applause which
was almost more heartfelt for being determinedly unobstreperous.
At last, it was felt, the ravages of Suez had really been erased and
the easy, informal, frank Anglo-American "intercom." was fully in
operation again.
On the continent of Europe, and particularly in France, "inter-
dependence" was translated as "the Anglo-American directorate"
and was proportionately ill-conceived. This was reflected in a de-
mand at the N.A.T.O. meeting for a strengthening of political
consultation within N.A.T.O., a demand for which France, how-
ever, failed to get significant support — -largely because she inter-
preted consultation to mean endorsement of French policies on the
N.A.T.O. periphery, Algeria in particular. But there was an in-
dubitable drawing together of France, Germany and, to a lesser
degree Italy, symbolized and fortified, immediately after the meet-
ing, by the coming into force on New Year's Day, 1958, of the
European Common Market. The political overtones of this economic
alliance rang loud for all to hear. They were ringing even louder
at the end of 1958 when France rejected the United Kingdom's
proposal to establish instead a free trade area for the whole of
Western Europe.
In February, 1958, the British- American missile agreement was
1 The Times, 26 October, 1957.
133
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
made effective, with the U.S.A. supplying sixty "Thor" missiles for
installation on fixed sites in eastern Britain. No other N.A.T.O.
ally offered America a comparably prompt response. Indeed by the
end of 1958 only Italy had become fully committed to an accept-
ance of these hazardous imports. (Turkey came in soon after.)
France, now fortified in her angularity by General de Gaulle's
assumption of power, most conspicuously declined to accept them
except on terms which guaranteed an exclusively French control of
the nuclear warheads. In the abstract terms of "principle" which
generally only serve to advertise a plaintiff's weak position, the
General was no doubt right to assert that it was a derogation of
national self-respect to provide housing for the missiles of a country
which would not even trust its allies with the key to their warheads.
But the contrast between British indifference and French sensitivity
on this score probably represented not different degrees of national
pride so much as the different psychologies of an atomic and a
not-yet-atomic power. As an atomically "have" nation, the British
sympathized with the American concern about the dispersal of these
"ultimate" weapons even to the length of being willing to forgo
some of her own undoubted "rights" in their control. Unfor-
tunately other events in 1958 contributed further to French stand-
offishness.
On 3 July announcement was made of an Anglo-American agree-
ment on nuclear weapons which at last represented that frank
sharing of atomic secrets which Britain had long claimed as a right
and sought as an ally. It provided for a full exchange of informa-
tion about both atomic weapons themselves and about their delivery,
thus making the United Kingdom at all points an equal partner
with the U.S.A. in the atomic field. ^ France, working hard to make
an atomic bomb of her own, was by contrast left still in the position
of total exclusion which Britain had occupied down to 1954. On
top of this a few days later came the Anglo-American landings in
Lebanon and Syria, conducted without even token French participa-
tion. It would be hard to think of any type of action in any other
area which would have so emphatically demonstrated Britain's
^ The coping-stone was set on this revived atomic alliance in
February 1962, with the joint announcement that a British nuclear
device would be tested underground in Nevada and American atmos-
pheric tests would be conducted on Christmas Island.
134
EUROPE: DEFENCE
change of priorities within the alliance and the revival of Anglo-
American intimacy.
The result was a strong Gaullist demand for the recognition of
France by the U.S.A. as an alliance partner at least equivalent to
Britain and for the creation of a political triumvirate within
N.A.T.O. which would deal with all problems of common concern,
inside Europe or without. The proposal won little support in Wash-
ington, especially since the first fruits of any such trinitarian policy-
planning would surely be a French demand for full support in
Algeria. Moreover, how deny to Adenauer, whose country after all
was contributing seven N.A.T.O. divisions to France's one, what
would be conceded to De Gaulle? For these and other reasons
Washington was unresponsive. In return De Gaulle became more
unco-operative. He declined to allow any of the French air force
to be integrated within a West European air command and in
March, 1959, withdrew from N.A.T.O. that portion of the French
Mediterranean fleet (approximately one-third of the total) which
had previously been under the operational control of N.A.T.O. 's
C.-in-C. Africa-Mediterranean. This was followed in midsummer
by a refusal to allow N.A.T.O. to station on French soil American
fighter-bombers which were armed with tactical nuclear weapons.
The immediate result of such a policy was only to reinforce the
links between London and Washington. Closely on the heels of
the French refusal came the announcement of a N.A.T.O. -United
Kingdom agreement providing for the transfer of the bulk of the
two hundred fighter-bombers concerned to airfields in East Anglia
(the rest being accepted by Western Germany). The promptness of
the British acceptance spoke for itself. Thus even within N.A.T.O.,
where the 1957 White Paper had undoubtedly done more harm
than good, British conduct appeared co-operative when contrasted
with the stubborn self-centredness of the French.
Meanwhile the British role in the basic American strategy of her
own nuclear deterrent remained. Technical development, though
proceeding at an over-accelerating tempo, had still not eliminated
the advantages that attached to an advanced island base. As the
missile replaced the bomber the day might come when Moscow and
Washington would think (and aim) only for each other, but in
i960 that day had not yet come. Indeed the first result of the de-
velopment of a Russian I.C.B.M. was the creation of a new function
for Britain in American defence planning; while she was still
W
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
passing from being the unsinkable aircraft-carrier to being tlie
short-range missile base she was also asked to become the early
warning screen of the west. In February, I960, agreement was
reached on the construction at Fylingdales in Yorkshire of a huge
radar screen which would detect missiles launched against Britain
or, over Britain, against America. It was to be a joint Anglo-
American project with the United Kingdom contributing £8 million
of its cost to the U.S.A.'s £35 million — a division roughly pro-
portionate to the warning times it would provide, four minutes to
the United Kingdom, and fifteen minutes to the United States.^
Meanwhile the conviction was belatedly growing in Britain that
the search for a British I.R.B.M. — "Bluestreak" — ^which would
ultimately replace the V-bomber force was costing more than it was
worth. On 13 April, I960, Mr. Watkinson, Minister of Defence,
announced its abandonment. Instead it was decided to lengthen the
life of the V-bombers by equipping them with the air-borne missile
"Skybolt", under design in the U.S.A. In June, on Mr. Watkinson's
visit to Washington, the Americans agreed to furnish "Skybolt"
when developed and to accept British participation in its develop-
ment, testing and production.
The search for the invulnerable deterrent led inevitably to the
sea. The development of the nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed sub-
marine followed a familiar course — first the U.S.A., then the
U.S.S.R. and then, in order of aspiration, the United Kingdom and
France. Thanks however to the 1958 Agreement the British did
not have to wait as long for American assistance over this as over
the atomic bomb. Nautilus, the first American nuclear-powered
submarine, was launched in January, 1954. In June, 1959, it was
followed by the George Washington, the first such vessel designed
to fire ballistic missiles. Offers of an atomic reactor suitable for
driving a submarine were made to Britain as early as July, 1957,
and France as early as July, 1958, but the restrictions of Ameri-
can law forbade the administration to follow through on the
promise to France. All that she received (by an agreement signed
on 7 May, 1959) was a promise of enriched uranium, spread over a
ten-year period, for experimental work. By contrast the sale to
1 A year later in July 1961 this kind of co-operation was taken a stage
further by the agreement to establish a ground station in Cumberland
which would take in information on missile attacks received from
satellites orbiting at an altitude of 300 miles.
1?^
EUROPE: DEFENCE
Britain of a complete nuclear propulsion plant was authorized on
3 July, 1958, an arrangement which materially accelerated the con-
struction of Britain's first atomic-powered submarine, the Dread-
nought, launched on 21 October, I960, Meanwhile for the Ameri-
can George Washington type of submarine, whose "Polaris"
atomic missiles had a range of only some 1,250 miles, a base in
British waters was, though not essential, certainly extremely ad-
vantageous. In November, I960, the agreement was announced by
which a submarine would be based on Holy Loch in the Clyde,
serviced by a depot ship of 18,500 tons and a small shore establish-
ment. Thus a facility for sea, comparable to the earlier facilities for
the air, became a feature of the Anglo-American partnership in
nuclear deterrence.
From the beginning British governments had fully realized —
and had often made public — the implications that the harbouring
of the American deterrent had for British security and British
relations with the iron curtain world. In I960, however, these
implications became explicit in a form which, though it left British
policy unchanged, yet temporarily jolted the smooth working of the
alliance and demonstrated the need for constant vigilance and the
utmost clarity in the allocation of spheres of responsibility. The
catastrophe of Captain Powers's U-2 flight which brought down
in its wake the summit meeting of May, I960, was nowhere felt
more sharply than in Britain. No country had invested more hope
or more effort in the long-contrived and quickly-concluded en-
counter of East and West; more practically, the secretive inde-
pendence of the United States Central Intelligence Agency was
suddenly realized as something that threatened the whole structure
of consultation and collaboration on which the alliance rested.
True, it was neither from nor to a British base that Captain
Powers's plane had flown, but such comfort as could be derived
from this fact was largely erased in July by the Russian claim to
have shot down an RB 47 which was based in Oxfordshire. The
RB 47 was almost certainly innocent of any violation of Soviet air
space, but put together the two incidents added up to a compre-
hensive reminder of the inescapable hazards of the cold war and
also of the imperative necessity of mutual trust and intimate con-
sultation for the successful working of the alliance.
The presence and functioning of the United States air force in
Britain was indeed a classic exemplification of the Anglo-American
137
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
alliance at its most informal. Accepted in 1948, in immediate
response to the Berlin alarm but ultimately in relation to the whole
growing challenge of the U.S.S.R., the S.A.C. striking force
operated from its British bases under what the Secretary of Air de-
scribed to the House of Commons in March, 1951, as "informal
arrangements"/ Though of course for some matters, such as finance
and the legal status of the forces, there were written agreements,
the great political and strategic implications of their presence were
not explored in any written document. This seems to have been the
position until 18 October, 1951, when what was variously described
as a "formula" and an "understanding" was arrived at between Mr.
Attlee and President Truman "under which the use in emergency
of bases in this country by United States forces was accepted to be a
matter for joint decision in the light of circumstances prevailing at
the time". But even this "depended on no formal document. It was
accepted as a mutually satisfactory arrangement which was subse-
quently confirmed in the joint statement issued on 9 January,
1952", 2 by Mr. Churchill and Mr. Truman; this simply made
public the Attlee-Truman formula in the terms quoted.
These agreements were of course in essence, as we have seen, an
application to changed circumstances of the wartime Quebec Agree-
ment about the use of the atomic bomb. As such they did indeed
provide an essential safeguard for the tenants of the unsinkable
aircraft-carrier in the event of war or imminent risk of war. They
served also as the model for the subsequent agreements about the
missile bases and the custody of the nuclear warheads. They were
not, however, applicable to the other "non-emergency" operations
of American aircraft based in Britain; these were left, in exactly
the spirit of the 1948 agreement, to be regulated, in writing or not,
by the joint decisions of the services concerned. There were ad-
vantages and drawbacks to such a system. As long as there was
American hypersensitiveness about any infringement of the Mc-
Mahon Act there was obviously much to be said for local arrange-
ments, in a spirit of intra-service amity, which did not put too much
down in black and white. Yet, as the U-2 and RB 47 incidents
illustrated, this might lead either or both services to excesses of
adventurous zeal and lead the political heads in either or both
1 HC Deb. 5th series, Vol. 485, col. 277, 21 March, 1951.
2 Quotations from statements by Mr. Macmillan to House of
Commons: ibid., Vol. 626, col. 1176-7, 12 July, 1960.
138
EUROPE: DEFENCE
countries into trouble for themselves and for the alliance. Some
tightening up was obviously necessary and Mr. Macmillan re-
sponded to a widespread British demand by taking the matter up
with Mr. Eisenhower before and during his visit to Washington in
October, I960. Security forbade any publication of the arrange-
ments made but Mr. Macmillan reported to the House of Commons
on his return that he was satisfied that they were satisfactory. "I
think I can say that we are fully informed on both sides of every-
thing that is proposed to be done."^
1 Ibid., Vol. 627, col. 2146-7, 25 October, 1960. The continued val-
idity of the Quebec agreements and their world-wide applicability were
also affirmed by Mr. Macmillan in a statement in the House of Commons
on 26 June, 1962: "There is an understanding which I had with Presi-
dent Eisenhower and now have with President Kennedy that neither of
us in any part of the world would think of using power of this kind
without consultation with each other."
139
10
EUROPEAN UNIFICATION
SEEN from Downing Street there are two Europes. There is
the Europe of defence, which is an integral part of the
whole North Atlantic region and finds its natural expression
in NAT.O., and there is the Europe of everything else, but prin-
cipally of economics — of trade, finance, communications and
cultural exchanges — which has found many partial expressions but
as yet none which is adequate. To Britons the distinction has seemed
as natural as that between geography and history. In determining
their relations with the first Europe the arguments of proximity
have taken precedence over all others and bound them to a main-
land only 20 miles away. In all else the bonds of Commonwealth,
race, language, culture, trading habits and investment have linked
them so strongly with other continents as to leave Europe as only
one competitor, and that not the strongest, for their island affec-
tions and attachments.
To a high degree Washington has accepted this dual view and
has operated, in its dealings with Britain on European matters,
upon a roughly similar distinction. It too has viewed European
defence as sui generis and in general, where practical issues are
concerned, has found the tempo and degree of Britain's fusion with
the continent fully acceptable^ — indeed for many purposes it has
found British insularity a positive advantage. But though it has
accepted the pigeon-holes, it has been less satisfied with the policy
it has found in them — or at least in the one labelled variously
European "union", "unification" or "integration". To Britons it
has never been easy to understand why, just because the Channel is
narrower than the Atlantic, Americans should expect them to have
an attitude to European integration so different from their own.
To Americans it has always been puzzling that a country so close to
Europe should on so many issues persistently remain aloof from it.
The explanation can, in the main, be found in three factors.
1 With the possible exception of the British attitude to E.D.C., for
which see pp. 55 ft'.
140
EUROPEAN UNIFICATION
Where defence has been concerned Britain has been, since 1941
(and before), a consistently reliable ally to the United States. In-
deed in the organization of West European defence British initia-
tive has counted for as much as American. Though no N.A.T.O.
member has a perfect record, Britain's role in the alliance has been
that of a strong, self-reliant partner able to contribute at least as
much as she receives. In other words in American eyes Britain's
assessment of her place in the defence of Europe has been justified
by results; she has pursued policies which she has been able to
sustain and which in the main have worked. By contrast, in the
economic field Britain has been a good deal less strong and reliable.
If she was a promoter of European co-operation in O.E.E.C. and
E.P.U., her own persisting inflationary pressures and balance of
payments deficits have weakened her role in European recovery
and obliged her to lean, time and time again, upon the economic
crutch of dollar aid. Thus a European role which has seemed
adequate where defence is concerned has not seemed adequate in
the economic and related fields. The same applies to the British
insistence on a "special relationship" with Washington. Around the
provision for S.A.C.'s use of reliable British bases was built both a
defence for America and the N.A.T.O. shield. But the hopes of
Washington planners that the Anglo-American loan agreement of
1946 would equally quickly establish an economically viable Britain
which in partnership with the U.S.A. would reconstruct world
trade and with it the economies of the free nations were shown to
be illusory. When Britain was found unequal to this role the
bilateral partnership had to be replaced by the European- American
venture of the Marshall Plan.
In explaining their reluctance to enter an "integrated" Europe
no factor was more often invoked by British spokesmen than the
ties between Britain and the Commonwealth. Where European
defence was concerned the Americans had little difficulty in recog-
nizing the Commonwealth connexion as a source of British strength.
Not only was Canada one of the pillars of N.A.T.O. but even
countries like Australia and New Zealand which accepted no ex-
plicit commitments to defend Western Europe were likely, if the
worst came to the worst, to stand by the United Kingdom as they
had done before. True, Britain was obliged, upon occasion, to
restrict her N.A.T.O. commitments because of the calls made upon
141
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
her by Commonwealth defence, and to this extent the Common-
wealth connexion was a European liability, but Americans recog-
nized the Commonwealth as a stabilizing element in the world and
consequently in general accepted this as merely the inevitable price
of Britain being a world power. However, when the issue at stake
was economic the Americans viewed the Commonwealth connexion
with more scepticism. Long before the war they had resented
imperial preference as only a country with a long protectionist tradi-
tion could; the British refusal in all the 1944-6 financial negotia-
tions to dismantle this structure had been generally regarded as a
perverse reluctance to join the forces of light. Even the sterling
area, for all its efficacy as a trading unit, was often regarded with
suspicion as a device for insulating the City of London against the
healthy blasts of financial competition. When therefore the claims
of Commonwealth trade were invoked as a reason for staying out
of Europe the argument seldom struck a really responsive chord in
the United States.
Finally, if the British attitude towards European "integration"
won little support in Washington, the contradictoriness and
gaucherie of British public pronouncements must carry a lot of the
blame. It was after all a British leader (in American eyes the British
leader), Winston Churchill, who in 1946 gave the first resounding
expression to the ideal of European unity in his Zurich speech
advocating a "kind of United States of Europe". Two years later it
was a British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, who announced his
belief that the time was "ripe for a consolidation of Western
Europe" and talked about "Western Union". No doubt, as events
showed, the British Government attached its own qualified signi-
ficance to this term, but they ought to have known that read on the
other side of the Atlantic the phrase could bear only two meanings;
it was either the name of a private company engaged in the tele-
graph business or it stood for a federal government on an American
model. How little the United Kingdom meant the latter was
quickly shown by the Labour Party's refusal to send any repre-
sentative to the "Congress of Europe" launched in 1948 as the fore-
runner of the Council of Europe. This was underlined by the Bevin
sneer in the House of Commons: "I amalgamated a lot of unions
into one union but the first thing I looked at was the assets." When
in 1950 the Schuman plan was proposed the British refusal to co-
operate was given a needlessly arrogant and doctrinaire twist by
142
EUROPEAN UNIFICATION
the coincidental publication of the Labour Executive's pamphlet on
"European Unity"; this manifesto of British isolationism, though
not a Government statement, was sufficiently close to one to neces-
sitate the British ambassador in Washington proffering an official
apologia to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Finally the
hopes raised by Conservative Party spokesmen when in opposition
were rudely dashed when Churchill came to power in 1951 and
revealed himself on this issue as no more co-operative in practice
(and not much more mollifying in manner) than his Labour pre-
decessors. Small wonder that when the European idea revived in
the later fifties and was accorded a much more serious consideration
in Britain the United States remained sceptical of Britain doing
anything much of her own volition and consequently took it upon
herself again to be a persistent gadfly in the cause.
In Britain the depth and intensity of American commitment to
this cause were often not appreciated or, when felt, not understood.
Facile explanations about the United States being a federation and
so regarding federalism as the only wear do less than justice to the
impulses behind the American attitude. The Americans were not
hawking a nostrum of political science but projecting their whole
national experience — indeed their raison d'etre as a nation.
America is a united Europe, a society and culture, as well as a
government, within which all the peoples of Europe (and some
others as well) have found it possible to live and let live. To recom-
mend this achievement of the New World for the emulation of the
Old was therefore not a disinterested act of benevolence or a
gratuitous piece of impertinence, according to taste, but a preach-
ment which America could no more forego than she could abandon
the reason for her own being or dissolve the glue of her own
nationhood. If this causa causans had been understood then many
of the anomalies of American support for European union would
have been seen to be illusory.
Within this consistent American movement of support for
European integration three rough phases can be distinguished. The
first i?> the period of active pressure on Western Europe and par-
ticularly on Britain, as the most sluggish member of the side. This
is linked to America's role in the creation of the American-
European institutions such as N.A.T.O. and O.E.E.C. on which
Europe depended. The second phase, beginning with the establish-
ment of the European Coal and Steel Community and synchronizing
143
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
roughly with the change-over from Truman to Eisenhower, sees an
abatement of American pressure on the United Kingdom to go into
Europe and a certain wilHngness to accept the unification of the Six
as a substitute for anything more comprehensive. The third phase
begins with the effective estabhshment of the Common Market and
is dominated by a complex blend of American reactions — support
for the new venture combined with a new concern about its impli-
cations for American economic and diplomatic interests.
In the first phase the disposition in the United States was strong
to demand some European integration as a return for American aid,
the demand being justified on the grounds that so long as the
national economies of Europe remained unintegrated they would
continue to be non-viable and so become recurrent charges on the
American tax-payer. It was in these terms that the preamble to the
European Co-operation Act (E.C.A.) in June, 1948, formulated
American intentions and expectations :
"Mindful of the advantages which the United States has en-
joyed through the existence of a large domestic market with no
internal barriers to trade or to the free movement of persons,
and believing that similar advantages can accrue to the countries
of Europe, it is declared to be the policy of the people of the
United States to encourage these countries through their joint
organization to exert sustained common efforts to achieve
speedily that economic co-operation in Europe which is essential
for lasting peace and prosperity."
The following year's Act repeated these sentiments and added: "It
is further declared to be the policy of the people of the United
States to encourage the unification of Europe." When Mutual
Security replaced Marshall Aid the same objectives of "economic
unification and political federation" were avowed in the authorizing
legislation. And the Republican opposition was every bit as vocal
in these sentiments as the Democratic administration. It was Mr.
Dewey campaigning for the Presidency who announced in Salt
Lake City on 30 September, 1948: "We shall use [the programme
of aid to Europe] as the means for pushing, prodding and encour-
aging the nations of Western Europe towards the goal of European
union."
Wisely, for all the fervour of their advocacy, American integra-
tionists stopped short of actually requiring from any European state
144
EUROPEAN UNIFICATION
any surrender of powers to a supra-national organization. In resist-
ing specific movements in this direction the British were un-
doubtedly foremost and they shaped the institutions of the Marshall
Plan, such as the weak O.E.E.C. secretariat, with a determination
to prevent any such development. Within these limits, however, the
British were at least as active as other recipient states in promoting
co-operation amongst the European economies. As one close Ameri-
can observer of O.E.E.C. later wrote, the British "provided first-
class personnel and a quality of diplomatic leadership which played
a major role in developing common European attitudes towards the
recovery problems and a willingness to subordinate particular
interests to the wider needs''.^ In the labours of E.P.U. in making
multilateral payments possible and in the application of its Code of
Trade Liberalization the British were as active as anyone — and, it
may fairly be claimed, as co-operative.
As the European Recovery Programme realized its initial ob-
jective of salvaging Western European economies and liberalizing
Western European trade, and as the Korean War stimulated the
demand for German rearmament, the second phase of American
policy towards European unity began to develop. The emphasis
switched from the economic to the military and it was the future
of the European Defence Community which most exercised Wash-
ington— and indeed London. On the economic front there was, if
not a greater agreement with the British position, at least a readier
acceptance of it, partly no doubt because the continental powers
were now going ahead on their own; American policy stimulated
and assisted the Europeanists on the continent rather than any
longer goading the reluctant British into joining an operation for
which they felt no enthusiasm. The assistance took sometimes a
direct form, like the 1954 loan of $100 million to E.C.S.C. or the
1958 credit of $135 million to Euratom, together with the 20-years
supply of enriched uranium fuel and American participation in a
$100 million joint research and development programme. The
stimulation was sometimes indirect and unintentional; thus para-
doxically the experience of Suez, driving home the impotence of
France and the insufiiciency of Europe's fuel resources, stimulated
the "Third Force" advocates of European union and the believers
in Euratom as a short cut to plentiful supplies of fuel and power.
For Britain these were years when neither type of inducement
1 l^incolnGotdon onO.'E.^.C.^inlnternational Organisation, 1956, p. 3.
K 145
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
counted for much. Returning prosperity, despite recurrent weak-
nesses in the balance of payments, encouraged the belief that there
was no need, economically, to go into Europe. Consequently when
all other considerations pointed in the direction of cultivating a
bilateral relationship with the U.S.A., the disposition was general,
in economic as in military policy, to adopt towards Europe a kind
of British variant of the American line — i.e. to support European
unification from outside, to offer all aid short of coming in. Even
during the year of estrangement, 1956, the Anglo-French alliance
on the Middle East had no counterpart on the European front, and
from the collapse of the Suez venture, as we have seen, a very
different moral was drawn in London from that which gained
acceptance in Paris.
Thus down to the ratification of the Rome Treaties by France
and Germany in July, 1957, Britain did not feel that the progressive
consolidation of the Six constituted a serious problem for her, nor
that the admitted difference of views between London and Wash-
ington over Britain's role in Europe was anything more than an
amicable agreement to differ. The Americans had dropped their
forcing policy; the implications of the Six had yet to emerge. The
painful British awakening came first with the dawning realization
of what the European Economic Community (E.E.C.) could mean
to her. Her first response took the form of exploring the idea of a
European free trade area, co-extensive with O.E.E.C., an abortive
enterprise in which she may have been encouraged (whether ad-
visedly or no) by the expression of occasional American anxieties
about E.E.C.'s possible discrimination against non-members. How-
ever, as 1958 went on, French hostility to the free trade area
hardened without any corresponding rise in American anxieties
about the Community. Rather the reverse. In the O. E.E.C. meetings
of December, 1958, when Sir David Eccles for Britain and M.
Couve de Murville for France became deadlocked in their violent
disagreement over the virtues of their respective "Area" and "Com-
munity", it was taken as an omen that the American observer at
the session was curiously silent when asked for the views of the
United States. The explanation was not far to seek, but it was
political more than economic. In American eyes a rarely favourable
juncture had arrived in the affairs of continental Europe. France,
under De Gaulle, had a government that could govern; Germany
still had in Adenauer a ruler unshakeably committed to the West.
146
EUROPEAN UNIFICATION
But for how long? He was old and he did not lack enemies. In the
plans for the Community these two pillars of anti-Communism had
found an accord which the Americans desperately wished to make
permanent, by binding France and Germany in the institutions,
initially economic but finally political, of the Six. Only so, it was
felt, in face of Russian pressure, could Western Germany resist the
attractions of neutralism with its inviting rider of possible reunifi-
cation. By comparison, the British were somewhat less committed
to the idea of a Western Germany permanently and militarily bound
to the West. In 1958-60 they were prepared, at least in return for
a real settlement with Russia, to envisage an atom-free zone in
Central Europe on Rapacki lines or at least a negotiated status quo.
For such a policy a Franco-German fusion was a good deal less than
necessary.
When Mr. Macmillan visited Washington in March, 1959, to
lay plans for an agreed approach to "summit" talks with Mr.
Khrushchev there was an obvious connexion between his desire that
tiie West should retain the maximum freedom of negotiation over
Germany and his concern lest the U.S.A. should pledge herself to
the Six. On the German question in relation to summit talks a
working (or perhaps one should say a paper) agreement was
reached but on the subject of the economic split in Europe the
Americans remained unpersuaded.
After what happened at the Eccles-de Murville encounter, and
against the known background of American attitudes to European
unity, this should have occasioned no surprise. The fact was that
a new and more positive phase of American policy was under way.
Significantly, it was associated with, and indeed largely directed by
Mr. Dillon, who in 1957 joined the State Department as Deputy
Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs. A known Franco-
phile and intimate of M. Jean Monnet, Mr. Dillon was an appro-
priate mouthpiece for a policy which backed the "Europeanists".
But he was more than a mouthpiece. Mr. Dillon belonged, as con-
spicuously as anyone in the late fifties, to that American "Establish-
ment" of internationally-minded lawyers-cum-Wall Street bankers
whose association with foreign policy-making has been continuous
in Washington, irrespective of administrations, ever since Roose-
velt's presidency in the mid-thirties. In the last years of the Eisen-
hower regime, as Dulles's powers failed, Mr. Dillon became a key
figure in the shaping of American economic policy.
147
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
The United States indeed had its own worries about the Common
Market, but they were rooted in something quite different, and
indeed quite novel, in an economic development which Europeans
found hard to appreciate — the deterioration in America's balance
of payments. The deterioration first began to attract attention in
1958 when the American annual deficit rose to $3*4 billion from a
"normal" figure of about $1^2- billion. For 1959 the figure was
$4 billion. That there should be a United States "dollar problem"
within ten years of the launching of the Marshall Plan was some-
thing which to Britain and indeed to all European ears was scarcely
credible. In fact it was largely a consequence of the success which
had attended American efforts to promote European recovery.
When at Christmas, 1958, the pound and other principal European
currencies were made externally convertible the result was to pro-
mote a movement of capital from the once overwhelmingly attrac-
tive dollar area to the centres of high interest rates in Europe. Most
of this was no doubt "hot money" rather than long-term invest-
ment, but coming at a time of lowered vitality in the American
economy it was naturally a matter of concern in Washington. In
particular it promoted an American demand that the U.S.A. 's
European allies should take a larger share of the burdens of
economic aid to the underdeveloped countries and the cost of the
common defence, and also that they should not discriminate against
American exports. It was principally in this last connexion that the
Common Market aroused American apprehensions. This however
did not mean, as was all too readily assumed in Britain, that the
American stance on this issue was becoming identical with the
British. Far from it.
Having failed to persuade the Six to float their Common Market
in a larger European free trade area, the British proceeded in 1959
to create out of the seven excluded O.E.E.C. members a Free Trade
Association of their own. This was intended to be a protective and
bargaining association which would, by the threats of reprisals,
persuade the Community to maintain liberal trade relations with
the Seven. Natural though such a counter-alliance might be for its
members, it was too much to expect that it should enjoy American
backing. In so far as it weakened the Six it would frustrate the
political hopes which, as we have seen, the Americans attached to
the Community. In so far as its trade bargaining was successful the
net result might easily be an agreement between the two blocs to
148
EUROPEAN UNIFICATION
practise a joint discrimination against third parties, of which the
U.S.A. would be the main victim. Finally a protracted duel between
the Six and the Seven would impede the realization of the U.S.A. 's
other urgent objective, of securing European assistance with over-
seas aid and defence costs; instead of uniting in the common tasks
of the alliance, Europe would split into two camps with ill-feeling
(as became very apparent by the end of 1959) rising daily between
the two sets of rivals. Thus though the United States and Britain
had an interest in resolving the conflict it was not an identical
interest.
When therefore both Six and Seven accepted in December, 1959,
the American proposal of a Paris meeting at which they would talk
to each other (and to the United States) for the first time since
December, 1958, it was with considerably different expectations
and objectives that Britain and the United States approached the
conference table. From the British point of view the meetings were
only semi-satisfactory. The Americans gave a low priority to the
healing of the rift between Six and Seven and on this no tangible
progress was made, beyond the setting up of a twenty-nation group
(the old O.E.E.C. membership but not under O.E.E.C. auspices) to
keep communications open. Instead the Americans insistently
pressed for action on the aid front and launched the idea of a suc-
cessor body to O.E.E.C. which should co-ordinate (and increase)
the aid programmes of member states and which would have the
U.S.A. as a principal participant. As negotiations went on through-
out the spring and summer, argument developed on the powers of
this successor body, the O.E.C.D. (Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development). The smaller European states,
assisted by Britain, pressed for the inclusion, amongst its objectives,
not only of aid and economic growth, but also of trade expansion.
At the end of July the U.S.A. gave in on this point, on the clear
understanding that she could not be bound, in the tariff field, by
any collective decision of the Organization, and on 14 December,
i960, the convention was signed at Paris establishing O.E.C.D. to
come into effect in 196I when the requisite number of members
ratified the agreement.
Meanwhile, however, the conflict of Six and Seven had grown
sharper and given rise to further asperities between London and
Washington. When the Six proposed in March, I960, to accelerate
their union by enforcing their common external tariff on 1 July
149
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
instead of the original date of 1 January, 1962, the Seven received
this as a severe jolt to their hopes of a negotiated settlement. It was
obvious that the Six were deliberately hurrying to put themselves in
a position where no pressure from the Seven could undo their
partnership. Worse still, this move appeared to enjoy American
blessing. What other interpretation could be put on the phrase in
the communique issued at the end of the Eisenhower-Adenauer
meeting, on 14 March, which spoke of the proposal as "a major
contribution to a general lowering of world trade barriers"? When
later in the month Mr. Macmillan visited Washington in his turn,
ostensibly to resolve differences over nuclear tests and disarmament
in preparation for the "summit" meeting in May, this issue was
almost as much on his mind as the problems of east and west.
At this visit, as in 1959, an agreement, somewhat more procedural
than substantive, was reached on east-west issues, but there was no
meeting of minds over the Common Market issue. Indeed so com-
placent an indifference to the British point of view did Mr. Mac-
millan encounter that he apparently felt it necessary to shock his
American hosts with a vehement expression of his views on the
approaching rift in Europe. He was subsequently reported (in a
Washington "leak" whose authenticity was not wholly denied by
British officials) as reminding Mr. Dillon that once before, in
Napoleon's day, Britain had frustrated French attempts at estab-
lishing a hegemony in Europe.
The Six meanwhile had taken the precaution, in planning their
acceleration, of offering a "sweetener" to the United States in the
form of a 20 per cent cut in their common tariff for any other states
who might offer a quid pro quo. The United States administration
liked this as a talking-point with Congress in their campaign for
freer trade and were similarly assisted a couple of months later, in
June, when the Six offered a comparable concession to the only
openly hostile American pressure group, the farmers, by announc-
ing the abandonment of any direct quantitative restrictions against
grain imports, as well as certain tariff reductions for American
tobacco.
Thus I960 continued with no abatement of American support
for the Six and no sign of American willingness to act as broker
between them and the Seven. Increasingly, as the presidential elec-
tion approached and President Eisenhower's own mandate ran out,
it became impossible to hope for any change of direction or new
150
EUROPEAN UNIFICATION
impetus from Washington. Fortunately for Britain, however, some
change was occurring on the continent. Though the impulse for the
Common Market did not wane, the process and the goals of unifi-
cation were being modified under the nationalistic instincts of
General de Gaulle. His conception of L'Europe des Patries pro-
duced a shift in the decision-making of the Six away from the
federalists at Brussels to the individual governments in their
sovereignty-conscious capitals. This implied a considerably more
limited political objective for the Common Market and one much
more acceptable to the British. At the same time as this change
occurred in Paris, a ferment was working in Bonn. Here anxiety
was developing not so much over a supra-nationalist Six but over
the hyper-nationalist One, to wit de Gaulle. The relentless refusal
of the French President to co-operate in the political and military
processes of N.A.T.O. except on his own terms was causing not
only irritation but also (especially since the collapse of the "sum-
mit" in May) a real anxiety about its effect on the Atlantic alliance.
In meetings held at the end of July and the beginning of August
this came to a head. Dr. Adenauer, it would seem, was disappointed
at Rambouillet that he could not move General de Gaulle by con-
siderations of this kind. Mr. Macmillan coming to Bonn soon after-
wards found the Chancellor in consequence especially receptive to
his contention that French leadership was taking Western Europe
6ut of the Atlantic alliance into a "Third Force" isolation and that
to stop this the Germans must throw a bridge by which the
Europes of the Six and the Seven could reunite in an Atlantic
alliance under American leadership. Whatever exactly was said in
these meetings a new mood seems to have developed; the British
thought more kindly of a Common Market which would not aim
at a precipitate federalism and the Germans were now positively in
favour of healing the split. Both changes of heart seem to have
come without any shadow or hint of encouragement from Wash-
ington, but both reflected a dominating awareness of Western
Europe's need of America.
The year ended with a significant demonstration of America's
need of Europe. The continuing weakness in the American balance
of payments led by the autumn to a further sharp drain on the
U.S.A.'s gold reserves. In a series of measures reminiscent of
British policy in 1947 or 1951 President Eisenhower directed all
federal agencies to cut down their spending abroad, required a
151
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
stricter "Buy American" policy for foreign aid funds and ordered
a reduction of 200,000 in the number of service dependents living
abroad. At the same time Mr. Anderson, the Secretary of the
Treasury, and Mr. Dillon visited Bonn to press for a $600 million
contribution towards the cost of maintaining American troops on
German soil. The ill-timed and tactless proposal provoked a jarring
refusal and an unacceptable set of counter-proposals. Only London,
where the Bank of England forced gold prices down by using, in
part, gold bought from the official United States reserves, was able
to give immediate aid to the giant of the Atlantic alliance.
Thus already by the end of I960 a variety of factors was making
for a revision of Britain's position on the question of "going into
Europe". The switch from a rather run-down Eisenhower presi-
dency to a brisk and enterprising Kennedy administration did not
alter any of the elements entering into the triangular relationship
between Britain, the United States and the Common Market, but it
considerably accelerated their operation. Any Kennedy expectations
that French irritation at "the Anglo-American directorate" could
be easily eliminated, as for example by the Presidential state visit
to Paris in June, foundered on the irrefrangible rock of de Gaulle's
"one-outmanship". Over N.A.T.O., over Berlin, over the United
Nations, over nuclear weapons, there was little or no effective
Franco-American rapprochement. But this in no way diminished
the American conviction of the political desirability of an economi-
cally united Europe; indeed it intensified it, on the principle that
the only abrasive which might reduce French spinosity would be
her incorporation in a larger whole. The continuing American
balance of payments problem pointed in the same direction; only an
economically integrated Europe, it increasingly seemed, could give
the United States effective assistance in the reallocation of the
burdens of common defence and overseas aid. Finally, the new
fillip which Kennedy dynamism was willing to gwt to the thirty-
year-old American drive for freer trade required as an absolute sine
qua non a. comparable dynamism in the form of European integra-
tion.
From the British point of view, equally, the pressures that had
been forming in I960 intensified themselves in 1961. The high
price of exclusion from a closely integrated Six came to seem ever
more costly. The scope for possible leadership in a new Europe
began to seem more attractive. American pressures towards integra-
152
EUROPEAN UNIFICATION
tion did not abate. What was more, the willingness of the Kennedy
administration really to carry forward the earlier hints of a liberal
trading policy over the whole Atlantic area went far to remove the
deepest of British fears, that involvement in Europe would mean
detachment from the U.S.A. If the United States was really pre-
pared to lower her own tariffs and to press for a low external tariff
in the Common Market then a new way seemed open by which
Britain could reconcile her interests throughout the Common-
wealth, across the Atlantic and across the Channel.
Though it suited the British Government to give the impression
that it found a new attitude in Washington towards the problems
of British entry into the Common Market (cf. much British press
comment after Mr. Macmillan's Washington visit in April, 1961),
the real difference lay elsewhere. It manifested itself in the presence
of some new faces at the top,^ in a new approach, at once more
pragmatic and more aware of Britain's peculiar problems, and above
all in a greater sense of urgency. When the long-accumulating
pressure finally tipped the scales and Her Majesty's Government
made their historic decision on 31 July, 1961, to apply for ad-
mission to the Community, this was nowhere received with more
gratification than in the United States. "We welcome," said Presi-
dent Kennedy, "the prospect of Britain's participation in the insti-
tutions of the Treaty of Rome and in the economic growth that is
the achievement and promise of the Common Market."
^ Though not all of these were new, e.g. Mr. Dillon.
153
II
THE BRITISH ECONOMY AND THE
UNITED STATES
EVEN before the war the British economy had more links
with the American than with any other in the world, the
Commonwealth countries alone excepted. American booms
or slumps, the raising or lowering of American tariffs, had a
peculiar significance for Britain by virtue of the exceptionally in-
timate trading relationships of the two countries. Even in 1938,
when the total value of world trade had fallen to sixty-eight per
cent of what it had been ten years earlier and when the develop-
ment of Imperial Preference had cut into the traditional patterns of
Anglo-American trading — even then the United Kingdom and the
United States between them were directly responsible for about one
quarter of the world's trade, while "the Anglo-American group"
(i.e. the British Commonwealth and both Americas) accounted for
virtually half.^ In direct trading 12-8 per cent of all United King-
dom exports came from the United States (only the Dominions
supplied more) and 6 per cent of all American imports came from
Britain (only Canada and Japan sent more). If 6 per cent seems
a modest figure (it represented only 5 '4 per cent of British exports)
the explanation lay, of course, in the pattern of indirect, multi-
lateral trading which, for example, sales of Malayan tin and rubber
to the U.S.A. helped to make up the difference./The British-
American trading relationship was indeed a crucial part of a world- Q
wide system to whose functioning both London and New York
were indispensable. ;
Even so, there was an imbalance in the relationship in 1938 and
had been for some years. Even when the trading with third parties
was added in, Britain's trading accounts did not balance. Between
1936 and 1938 the excess of Britain's merchandise imports over
her exports averaged £388 million a year, a sum which invisible
exports such as shipping, banking, insurance services, etc., did not
suffice to make up. Britain was living off her overseas investments
1 The Network of World Trade (League of Nations, 1942), p. 69.
154
BRITISH ECONOMY AND THE UNITED STATES
— and off the capital, as well as the interest. In terms which his
successors were frequently to echo the President of the Board of
Trade warned the House of Commons that the early months of
1938 had shown a worsening in the balance of payments position
with the United States so pronounced as to be "disquieting".
In other words Imperial Preference had not solved the problems
of Britain as a trading nation. She still needed imports which only
the U.S.A. could supply. She still had to find some way of paying
for them. The negotiation in 1938 of the Anglo-American Trade
Agreement was a recognition of this. Britain and America reduced
their tariffs on imports from each other and, of course, thereby
gave most-favoured nation treatment to other traders too. Hesitant
and reluctant though it was, the Agreement represented a move
away from Ottawa, a response to Mr. Cordell Hull's belief in a
liberal world of multilateral trade. Even if there had been no war,
Britain was thus committed to responding to the magnetic pull of
American commercial policy. When war did break out, what had
been a persuasive attraction became an urgent compulsion.
The war produced a swift and progressive British dependence on
North America for all essential supplies, with Lend Lease taking
the place of normal methods of payment. Unfortunately much of
the endemic weakness in the British position came to be mistakenly
attributed to the abnormal strains of war, with the result that the
country entered the peace without a full, instinctive comprehension
of the economic task before it. The United States itself was prone
to a comparable error, as was demonstrated by the various mis-
calculations embodied in the Anglo-American Financial Agree-
ments of 1946.
In consequence weaknesses in the British position which might
have been accurately predicted by any dispassionate student of pre-
war economic trends broke upon the publics of each country as a
disconcerting series of "crises" in the fifteen years after the end of
the war.|^The British balance of payments looked like the tem-
perature chart of a patient with undulant fever, one attack develop- / ^ c ^
ing as its predecessor died away. [The British Government found
itself repeatedly obliged to turn to America for aid or to adopt
successive short-term policies at odds with its long-term commit-
ments to the United States\./ Britain's post-war impoverishment was
relieved by the American and Canadian loans only to be succeeded
155
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
by the convertibility crisis of 1947 and the ensuing devaluation of
the pound. The strains produced by the Korean war and the Ameri-
can "recession" of 1950 led to the tightening controls of Mr.
Attlee's last year in 1951. In 1955 Mr. Butler as Chancellor of the
Exchequer had to repeat the medicine, raising the bank rate by 1^
per cent to 4-|- per cent (the highest rate since 1932), imposing a
credit squeeze in the summer and bringing in a supplementary
budget in the autumn. The Suez fiasco of 1956 produced an immed-
iate run on the pound and led in 1957 to the invocation of the pay-
ments waiver provided for in the Anglo-American Financial
Agreements and the raising of a $500 million line of credit from
the Export-Import Bank, Even though 1958 ended with de 'lure
convertibility restored for current transactions and 1959 saw a real
improvement in Britain's basic economic position, which permitted
the removal of licensing requirements over virtually the whole field
of imports, even then all was not well. The old weakness rede-
veloped in I960 leading to another 7 per cent peak in the Bank rate
in 1961. 1961-2 also saw the profits and wages "pause", and a per-
sistently inadequate level of gold and dollar reserves. However
much Britain's difficulties might be the result of eff^orts in a com-
mon cause, it was embarrassing to be seeking recurrent American
aid. It was even more embarrassing when, as after Suez, they were
largely the result of over-exertion in a far from common cause. *.
Embarrassment apart, the weakness of Britain's reserves on more
than one occasion prevented her playing a full part in the various
common enterprises to which the two countries were committed.
We have seen how American hopes for a swift post-war return to
multilateral trading conditions rested upon an exaggerated estimate
of the tempo of British recovery. Here at least the British were not
to blame; their warning notes were so loud and clear as to be
written off as alarmist. But the British Government itself was slow
to recognize the restraints imposed by its balance of payments posi-
tion. Americans could fairly complain of the suddenness of the
Treasury's awakening which led to the withdrawal from Greece
and Turkey. Both in Korea itself and in the European rearmament
programme which was its corollary British efforts were limited by
restricted overseas resources. In the launching of any common
economic venture, from the U.N. Expanded Programme of Tech-
nical Assistance to the salvaging of India's Five-Year Plans, the
British share has had to be so severely limited as to leave her too
156
BRITISH ECONOMY AND THE UNITED STATES
little power of initiation or, comparatively speaking, of control.
Finally, in enterprises where the British interest was predominant,
such as the salvaging of the British oil investment in Mossadeq's
Persia, Britain's economic stringency left her so little scope for
movement that she was really dependent on American aid for the
achievement of a satisfactory solution. When, as over Suez, this
was denied, the result was failure.
The harmful consequences of this weakness in the British balance
of payments would have been much greater if Britain had not
secured official American acceptance (at least after 1947) of the
necessity for protective discriminatory measures, at least in the
short run. Without an apparatus of controls, involving a rigid
elimination of all non-essential dollar purchases, Britain's payments
position would have been enormously, impossibly worse. But how-
ever ready Washington officials might be to accept the need for
this,^ Congressmen who voted aid funds and were highly sus-
ceptible to constituency pressures of every kind were seldom so
sympathetic. They showed a marked reluctance to recognize that
the quickest way to become independent of American aid was to
buy as little from the dollar area as possible. It was one thing to
accept this as an intellectual proposition; another thing to make it
palatable to American taxpayers who made their living out of goods
they hoped to sell to overseas customers, the British included. It
was thus a welcome day in 1959 when, in recognition of the first
British trade surplus with the United States in a hundred years,
import controls were removed from all but a very small range of
dollar goods. The quantitative rise in imports was not enormous
(about £50 million in I960) but it had something of the same kind
of token significance as the 1957 easement of the currency restric-
tions on travel to dollar areas. The dollar curtain which, for all the
intimacies of officialdom, had hung between the New World and
the British private citizen as consumer or traveller ever since 1939
was at last beginning to disappear. The eventual consequences of a
restoration of real freedom of movement for goods and persons in
1 Sometimes they were not very ready, either because they had a
psychology of boldness such as only the rich can afford or because
they were doctrinaire liberals of a highly conservative kind, or because
like all American officials they had to serve two masters. Congress as
well as the President.
157
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
both directions across the North Atlantic might well be as signifi-
cant for Britain in the sixties as any ojfRcial pact between London
and Washington.
The quotas were removed but the tariffs remained. The history
of British-American tariff squabbles is a long and edifying one, the
details of which, even since 1938, defy brief analysis. But a few
salient features stand out. Thanks mainly to the action taken by
successive American Presidents under successive Trade Agreements
Acts, from Roosevelt in 1934 to Mr. Kennedy, who secured a
notable expansion of such authority in 1962, the American tariff
against British imports has fallen by sometimes between 50 and 75
per cent overall, though any single figure necessarily conceals wide
individual variations for certain categories of goods. The British
tariff against American goods on the other hand remains very little
changed and provides British producers with a considerably more
effective protection than their American opposite numbers enjoy.
This has not been fully appreciated in Britain or in the United
States, partly because the operative restrictions on trade have been
those imposed by quota and currency regulations, but also because
of the different significance that transatlantic trade has had for the
two economies.
For Britain, trade with North America and particularly with the
United States has been absolutely crucial. Even at the height of
Imperial Preference, even at the worst periods of dollar shortage,
Britain has been heavily dependent upon imports from the U.S.A.
because she alone could provide items that were essential to
Britain; consequently, until most of the world's major currencies
became convertible again, the imperative of the British mercantile
economy has been the provision of exports to pay for them. For the
United States on the other hand foreign trade in general, including
trade to Britain, however desirable and even for certain products
(e.g. tobacco) essential, has not been the vital core of the country's
economic life. Though self-sufficiency has never been practicable in
terms of the economic and other goals the United States has chosen
to set herself, such as a high standard of living, free enterprise and
heavy political commitments overseas, the natural resources of the
country are basically adequate for the support of its population in a
way that those of the United Kingdom have not been for over three
hundred years. When therefore the American legislator and official
turn their attention to trade it is either in terms of protecting some
158
BRITISH ECONOMY AND THE UNITED STATES
particular and generally local interest or in terms of furthering
some quasi-political objective — cf. the almost Cobdenite philosophy
behind the Trade Agreements Acts. For the British parliament and
government, however, once the laissez-faire tradition had been
broken down^ the furtherance of Britain's trade came near to hav-
ing an absolute priority as a sine qua non on which all else in the
nation's life depended.
Thus the British exporter's eye has always been quick to mark
(and the British journalist to headline) the least American threat to
British products, while the American Congressman (and the Ameri-
can leader-writer) have been much more sensitive to a British
trading transaction which violated a political prejudice (e.g. trade
with the Communist bloc) than to British tariff levels in general.
In consequence British trade policy as far as the United States is
concerned has very often appeared to consist of a series of protests
against malpractices which Americans regard as minor, the wool
tariff quota or the "escape clause" tariff on bicycles, and of justifi-
cations for peccancies which the Americans regard as major, such
as the sale of raw rubber to the U.S.S.R. or Vickers Viscounts to
China. The British argument in each case has been essentially the
same; in the former case, that restrictions which are minor in rela-
tion to the gigantic American economy may be major in the effect
they have on Britain's balance of payments; in the latter case, that
Britain cannot afford the luxury of foregoing trade with political
opponents save where it is conclusively demonstrated that its effect
would be to assist them in indubitably inimical enterprises. The
success which each category of arguments has won in the United
States has varied according to the domestic political situation and
the rise or fall in East-West temperatures. British attitudes over
each type of dispute are not likely to change in a foreseeable future,
rooted as they are in the persistent facts of her economic life, but it
is possible that the somewhat disproportionate significance that such
issues have assumed in Anglo-American policy may decline. The
development of the European Common Market and the change in
the American balance of payments are already pointers to a likely
American counter-offensive aimed at making sizeable breaches in
all European tariff walls and in expanding North Atlantic trade all
round. At the same time post-Dulles policy in the United States
has come to favour a more pragmatic approach to problems of East-
^ And indeed before it was established.
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BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
West relations and so (Cuba apart) is less likely to treat all forms
of trade with Communist countries as a traffic with the mammon of
unrighteousness.
The issues mentioned above do not exhaust the range of Anglo-
American commercial controversies which have their roots in the
persistent American temptation to use the great power of the
American Government to assist special interests or sectors of the
American economy and in the hypersensitiveness of the United
Kingdom to anything which interferes with her world-wide trading
interests. Thus a long-standing rivalry in shipping has provided in
its modest way some of the most acrimonious Anglo-American ex-
changes of the post-war period, with each side damning the sins
it had no mind to. Britain, the possessor of a great and indispensable
merchant marine, privately built, ^ owned and operated, was content
to rely on the advantages of skill, world-wide bases and connexions
and low operating costs (at least as compared with North America),
plus the bargaining advantages that naturally accrued to her as a
great bulk importer. For the American economy in peacetime its
mercantile marine was much less important, and, by reason of high
costs, much more expensive to build and maintain; yet for obvious
reasons it could not be allowed to collapse before the play of purely
economic forces. In full knowledge of this strategic indispensability
the American shipping interests could always secure generous
assistance from Congress. The building and operating subsidies
which they enjoyed were, in British eyes, "unfair" and objection-
able enough, but when in 1954 the Cargo Preference Act was passed
a new kind of mercantilism appeared on the American statute book.
Britain, along with other seafaring recipients, had reluctantly
accepted the principles written into Marshall Aid, Mutual Security
legislation and the like that fifty per cent of the cargoes involved
should be carried in American bottoms; they were American "gifts"
and had to be accepted on American terms. But the Cargo Prefer-
ence Act went a considerable step farther; it extended the principle
to cargoes even indirectly financed with government funds and ex-
cluded, for purposes of calculating the fifty per cent, cargoes carried
in government-owned ships. To Britain the Act was doubly objec-
tionable; in itself and as an incentive to other countries to adopt
similar discriminating legislation. The issue acquired a double, and
1 Except for the government assistance supplied to Cunard for the
construction of the "Queen" liners.
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BRITISH ECONOMY AND THE UNITED STATES
sharper edge in 1959 with talk of America's need to conserve
dollars in the interest of her balance of payments and at the same
time to enlist European countries in a common policy of aid to the
"underdevelopeds". Could she have it both ways? In June, 1959,
Britain made joint representations with eight other European coun-
tries; then and in I960 British Ministers of Transport made strong,
even indignant, protests in Washington. They were unavailing. The
American shipowners indeed were stimulated to stronger measures.
They contended that Britain was restricting competition by the
device of the shipping conference, the British-inspired institutions
which regulate services and freights on all the main shipping lines
across the world. Invoking the. sacred principles of anti-trust law.
Congress in 1961 authorized the President to "disallow" freight
rates negotiated by such a procedure. And so the battle went on.
In general, where American foreign aid is concerned, considering
the pressures playing on Congress and the opportunities afforded
by the gigantic and diverse aid programmes, the British manu-
facturer and exporter has had less reason to complain of American
self-favouritism in this field than he might reasonably have ex-
pected. Yet inevitably there is a dual aspect to all American activity
of this kind and the benefit it creates for American producers and
exporters are bound to be most acutely felt by the country which of
all others has the longest tradition of trade competition with the
U.S.A. and stands to lose most by being ousted from any of its old
markets. The United States cannot indulge in the benevolent exer-
cise of establishing an International Atomic Energy Agency without
at the same time creating certain predispositions in favour of re-
liance on American-produced equipment. She cannot participate in
the salvaging of the Indian Five- Year Plans, a high priority of
British Commonwealth policy, without invading a long-cherished
domain of British commerce. There must consequently always be
for Britain a double reaction to all American ventures in the inter-
national economic field; she welcomes them as the indispensable
blood transfusion without which successive embolisms would bring
the economic circulation of the free world to a paralytic standstill;
at the same time she has to scrutinize every point where the I'lfe-
giving American fluid is applied to see that it does not swamp an
established British connexion or deny Britain a fair competitive
share of the opportunities created.
Thus Britain has always been hyper-sensitive to any American
L 161
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
aid programme which obhged recipients to spend their dollars on
American goods. Not only is any such tied aid objectionable in
itself but when indulged in by the U.S.A. it has the added fault of
constituting a bad example which others of Britain's trading com-
petitors, such as Germany, are only too ready to emulate. Unfor-
tunately, with the emerging weakness of America's balance of pay-
ments the temptation to resort to this protective device has increased
and is likely to persist. There is of course a certain contradiction
between American advocacy of increased aid and her adoption of a
device which virtually guarantees a cut in the real value of all such
aid.^ Nonetheless, logic has been more than once over-borne by
sectional pressures and doubtless will be again.
In another context a comparable connexion between American
aid and Anglo-American economic rivalry may be observed.
Within N.A.T.O. a keen competition persists between Britain and
the U.S.A. for the provision of agreed weapons to other partners
in the alliance, conspicuously Germany. When the West Germans
began rearming it was the United States which provided free,
under Mutual Aid, their initial equipment. The habits thereby
established were hard to break and American sales pressure, re-
sponding to America's own balance of payments needs, took up
where American gifts left off. At the distasteful point at which
politics, economics and rearmament meet, the Americans enjoy an
obvious advantage from their preponderant role in the alliance. It
is consequently hardly surprising that it was May, 1961, before the
first substantial German armaments order was placed in London.
Of quite another order is the question of American investment
in Britain. Here the Government has had to face a problem created
largely by its own need to save dollars and so to discriminate against
dollar goods. To overcome the obstacles thus placed in the path of
their exports an increasing number of American firms have estab-
lished branches in Britain. Exact figures of the total investment
involved are hard to come by, since no official statistics appear to be
kept in Whitehall, but the total of United States investment in the
United Kingdom has risen from approximately $450 million in
1938 to $3,194 million at the end of I960. Although spread over
^ Because, of course, manufacturers supplying to such a protected
market feel free to raise their prices without any worries about con-
sumer resistance. The average effect on American aid, it has been
calculated, is to cut the real value by 25 per cent.
162
BRITISH ECONOMY AND THE UNITED STATES
hundreds of firms, this American investment has been mainly con-
centrated in the oil, motor car, chemical and aluminium industries.
In an economy for whose oversight the state assumes so much
greater responsibility than before the war, the British Government
has necessarily had to concern itself with this phenomenon. In
general it has been sympathetic to such investment, mainly for its
direct dollar benefits but also, in certain cases, for the indirect
gains accruing from the introduction of American productive tech-
niques or the results of American research. But it also tests each
application in the light of a set of principles which the Dollar
Exports Council has defined as follows :
"It is necessary that the project should be of sufficient benefit to
the British economy to justify such dollar expenditure [on
transfer of dividends or possible repatriation of capital] either
because it will earn or save hard currency, or because it is a valu-
able addition to the country's industrial efficiency. . . . New
schemes [should] not involve unreasonable additional dollar
outgoings for royalties, extra raw materials or components, pay-
ments to foreign technicians and similar charges."
In other words American investment has been welcomed provided
it meets all the requirements imposed by the weakness of Britain's
balance of payments. Even so, should it be welcomed? The question
has been pressed whenever a sizeable slice of any British industry
has in consequence come under American control, as in I960 when
Ford of Detroit purchased the minority shareholding of Ford of
Dagenham. It is the familiar menace, in a slightly different form,
of the American colossus crushing the British economy by sheer
size and weight. But notable though the post-war rise in American
investment has been there is no evidence that it has seriously or
banefully affected the working of British industry. Rather, indeed,
the reverse.^ Moreover, notable though one or two recent moves
have been, the changes in the two countries' balance of payments
and the regulations thus induced, together with the rising attraction
for American capital of the Common Market, strongly suggest that
the peak point of American investment in the United Kingdom has
1 For a summary of arguments pro and con see John H. Dunning,
American Investment in British Manufacturing Industry (London, Fair
Lawn — New Jersey, 1958).
163
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
by now been passed. In any case the whole movement cannot be
viewed in isolation. It is partly a particular aspect of that "mixing
up" of the two countries' affairs which, if welcome in other fields,
cannot be eliminated from this. More than this, it is also one ex-
pression of that multilateralism to which in respect of all other
economic activities Britain is deeply committed. Finally, were
Britain to oppose this manifestation of American enterprise her
position would be particularly hard to maintain, since British in-
vestment in the United States is one of the oldest and most respect-
able strands in Anglo-American relations. Although many British
holdings had to be liquidated in the early days of the war for the
purchase of essential requirements, more than $3,750 million's
worth of American shares are now in the hands of either the British
Government or private investors. In April, 1959, the Chancellor of
the Exchequer announced that, taking Canada and the U.S.A. to-
gether, British investment in North America probably fully matched
American investment in Britain.
Such conflicts of interest, real or imagined, as have been outlined
above have provided the focus for most of the discussion and con-
troversy in Britain about economic relations with the United States
since the war. This is perhaps natural, but it is nonetheless unfor-
tunate. It has the result of giy'mg an exaggeratedly nationalist and
political twist to what are essential economic rivalries, rivalries
which would persist just as vigorously if Britain and the U.S.A.
were under a common government, rivalries which have indeed
their exact counterpart within the U.S.A. in, for example, the con-
flicts between the textile manufacturers of New England and North
Carolina. Admittedly the British and American interests involved
seek and to some extent obtain in each country the potent backing
of their government and admittedly the American Government's
backing, if fully obtained, is potent indeed. But there are two limit-
ing factors of which British opinion is seldom fully aware and for
which it is seldom sufficiently grateful. The first is that although
any individual American interest group may be very clamant for
a one-way socialism (i.e. government benefits without government
control), the American electorate at large is in many ways more
suspicious of a government-directed economic drive than is the
British; countervailing interest operates in the politico-economic,
as well as in the purely economic realm. In addition to this there is
another, and where Britain is concerned a more decisive, factor in
164
BRITISH ECONOMY AND THE UNITED STATES
American policy throughout the post-war years; this is the pre-
dominance, taken all in all, of political over merely economic con-
siderations, or, to put it in other words, of the long over the
short-term. Despite the concessions that have had to be made, to
congressional or electoral pressure, or out of consideration for soft
spots in the body economic, the truly impressive feature of Ameri-
can policy as it has finally emerged is the regard it has shown for
certain persisting principles. Where Britain is involved these may
be summed up as respect for her position as banker for the sterling
area, concern to restore the viability of her economy and her balance
of payments, determination to secure in Europe and the North
Atlantic region in particular the largest practicable area of free
exchange, and finally, with increasing emphasis as the earlier ob-
jectives have approached realization, a resolve to accelerate the
development of backward areas in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
That all these urges had a common spring in American self-interest
is neither here nor there. What mattered to British policy-holders
was that these American policies took due notice of British interests
too and aimed at the creation and maintenance of an international
economic order within which Britain could thrive. Arrived at by
processes of open discussion in which not only official spokesmen
but also the free play of economic argument and inquiry on both
sides of the Atlantic played its part, they were proportionately
reliable and stable despite all the buffeting of particular interests.
As such, they formed a set of standards, mutually agreed, in relation
to which British policy could, with some assurance, be shaped and
to which, in the event of transatlantic disagreement, effective appeal
could be made.
165
12
THE PARTNERSHIP
TO look back over the nexus of relationships which Britain
maintains with the United States around the globe and in
all sectors of national policy is to see that they fall, very
roughly, into two categories. The first are mainly non-military, but
are otherwise as diverse as the world-wide ramifications of British
policy itself. They reflect often a rivalry but much more often a
community of interests, public and private, which proceed from the
past history and present interaction of our two societies. As such
they do not lend themselves to any simple classification or ex-
haustive cataloguing. Though they have become both more ex-
tensive and intensive since 1938 they existed already — almost all
of them — in the pre-war world and so served as the soil from which
the peculiar intimacy of the wartime alliance took such quick and
easy nourishment.
Since the war, however, the swiftly mounting challenge of the
Communist states, particularly of the U.S.S.R., has drawn Britain
and the U.S.A. together in a new defensive relationship which,
though harmonizing readily enough (in the main) with the other,
is different in character and aims. Its most oviously different char-
acteristic is its extension to embrace a diversity of other anti-Com-
munist powers, both in Europe and elsewhere; its typical vehicle is
the multi-national alliance— N.A.T.O., C.E.N.T.O., S.E.A.T.O. If,
within such alliances, the Anglo-American relationship is of
peculiar importance, this is partly the consequence of their intimacy
in the other sphere, partly the proportionate reflection of the scale
of British, and Commonwealth, operations around the globe.
If very little has been said about this relationship in its most
central aspect, as it bears directly on British policy towards the
U.S.S.R., this is solely because here at any rate is a feature of the
Anglo-American relationship so obvious as not to need stressing.
No one can doubt for a moment that London's confrontation of
Moscow rests on the assured and indispensable basis of Washing-
ton's support. Take that away and nothing remains. To say this, of
course, is not to say that British policy "takes its orders" in this
166
THE PARTNERSHIP
essential from Washington, but simply that both Britain and
America recognize, like their common partners in the North
Atlantic alliance, that a common front to Soviet pressure is the in-
dispensable condition of their survival in freedom. But just as this
fact is so obvious as hardly to need mention, so any elaboration of
it (at least in the present, inevitable condition of official secrecy
over the details of allied co-ordination) runs the grave risk of ob-
scuring the substance of agreement by the accidents of controversy.
It would not be difficult to chart any phase in the triangular relations
of London, Washington and Moscow in terms of fairly well pub-
licized Anglo-American disagreements about the precise timing,
tactics or style of their approaches to the Kremlin. From Churchill's
Fulton speech down to the negotiations over Berlin there have been
differences, frankly acknowledged and openly aired, about how
best to deal with the Russians. Nor in this continuing diplomatic
conversation between the English-speaking capitals can either side
claim to have had the last word. Now one, now the other, view has
prevailed. Moreover, where so much of the disagreement has been
tactical, very little of it can be ascribed consistently to an "Ameri-
can" or to a "British line". For these reasons a detailed analysis,
even if practicable, is hardly profitable. There are, however, perhaps
two differences in basic British and American attitudes here which
are sufficiently sustained and important to merit a mention.
The first proceeds directly from geography and recent experience.
Britain knows herself, by reason of size and accessibility, to be
more directly vulnerable to destruction in any future war with the
U.S.S.R. than the U.S.A. would be. She also knows, at first hand
as a result of her experiences in 1940 and after, what aerial attack
can do to a highly urban and centralized society. Consequently she
has no illusions about the possibility of surviving a war waged with
nuclear weapons. I am not aware that this has ever led her to in-
dulge in appeasement of Soviet appetites or to contemplate the
surrender of any agreed Anglo-American interest. But it has given
her a more continuously vivid awareness of what a resort to war
implies and provided a sharper, more urgent edge to her desires for
a negotiated settlement. This, at least, in comparison with the
attitudes publicly expressed by Americans at various levels below
the very highest peaks of authority; it is at least arguable that when
it comes to the conclusions reached by the ultimate decision makers
167
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
in London and Washington there has been much less to choose
than the publics of each country have sometimes assumed.
The second difference springs as much from national tempera-
ment and tradition as from specific experience; Americans lay
greater stress on Communism per se as the enemy, Britons worry
less about the ideology and show a greater readiness to accept the
faiis accomplis of Communist regimes. Manifestations of this occur
at least as far back as the October Revolution. Britain recognized
the Russian Communist regime in 1924, the U.S.A. not until 1933.
The war intensified the contrast; Russia, as a result of Hitler's
aggression, became an effective war ally in June, 1941, when the
U.S.A. was still nominally at peace; the Anglo-Russian Treaty of
May, 1942, never had any American counterpart. Yet, as we have
seen, when the war ended the real distance between Washington
and Moscow was no greater than that between London and Moscow
and it was, in fact, a British leader who sounded the tocsin at
Fulton, Missouri, in March, 1946. There ivere innate American
and Russian afiinities, as many observers, from Tocqueville on-
wards, have amply demonstrated. But they did not develop. Their
place was taken, for obvious reasons, by a persistent rivalry and
also, for less obvious reasons whose analysis lies beyond our scope,
by a feeling of moral revulsion and often total detestation. The
result was to g\ye to American policy, where Russia was concerned,
the air of a moral crusade. This note was seldom struck in Britain,
where emphasis fell more often on the Russian-ness of the
U.S.S.R.'s foreign policy, on its continuity with Tsarist imperialism,
on its traditionalist obsessions with "warm water" or with the
German menace or the Levant or Persia. Similarly with the satel-
lites of Eastern Europe; the British were readier to accept their
Communist governments as a distasteful but apparently unavoidable
cordon sanitaire between the U.S.S.R. and the West, and were less
reluctant to grant them official recognition and even to do business,
commercial and cultural, even if not ideological, with puppet ad-
ministrations which they despised but which they saw no way to
remove short of all-out war. The Americans more obviously chafed
at having to accept the blatant violations of solemn Soviet under-
takings and of every human right which these regimes represented
and made little or no attempt to find a t72odus vivendi with the
worst of them.
168
THE PARTNERSHIP
It would be easy to document, by chapter and verse, these diver-
gencies of national attitude to European Communism, and it would
be idle to deny that official policies, in each country, owed some-
thing to the different temperatures of popular feeling which these
attitudes generated. Yet if regard be paid solely to what was done
by the governments of Britain and the U.S.A., ignoring what was
so profusely said, the ensuing discrepancies will be found to be
comparatively minor. Even under the most explicit apologist for
the moral line, John Foster Dulles, it is doubtful whether the sub-
stance of American policy towards tht U.S.S.R. was significantly
different from that of Britain. Admittedly Dulles's weight was
thrown against a summit meeting, with the result that the Geneva
encounters of 1955 did not take place until Britain's most vocal
advocate of "summitry", Winston Churchill, had retired from
office. Admittedly too, Dulles delayed the Camp David encounter
between Mr. Khrushchev and President Eisenhower in the autumn
of 1959 (though he had acquiesced in it before his resignation in
April). But if regard be had to the subject matter of the negotia-
tions rather than to the timing or the form of them it is demon-
strable that at neither of these meetings, nor yet at the subsequent
"summits" of Paris in I960 and Vienna in 1961, was there any
substantial disagreement between Britain and the United States on
the terms which should be offered or accepted. Moreover such
differences as there were owed little or nothing to any distinction
between a crusading and a pragmatic approach. All the evidence
suggests that when it came to the clinch, in each of these unhappy
encounters, it was the real, not the rhetorical, interests of the West
which President and Prime Minister resolutely defended and that
there was no substantial difference in the interpretation which each
negotiator put upon them. In any case, with the waning of Mc-
Carthyism in the United States, the sobering shocks of sputnik and
the U-2 fiasco, less was heard of anti-Communist crusades even in
Congress or on the hustings and with the arrival of the Kennedy
administration realism, patience and caution seem to have emerged
as the dominant notes of American anti-Communism. There was
thus perhaps in 1962 less divergence, in style or substance, between
the Russian policies of Britain and the U.S.A. than at any time since
the creation of N.A.T.O. in 1948-9.
Yet this, paradoxically, co-existed with a considerably lowered
169
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
vitality in N.A.T.O. itself. For that there were many reasons, some
of which have been touched on earlier, but it would be dishonest
not to recognize that the working of the Anglo-American partner-
ship was one of them.^ We have noted the contradiction that was
built into N.A.T.O. at its very inception, that though a multi-
nation alliance in form, its essential strength was derived from the
possession by one member of a deterrent denied to the rest and
uncontrolled by them. So long, however, as the U.S.A. also made
its full contribution in conventional forces this constituted no weak-
ness in the alliance — was indeed an extra source of strength. It was
when the doctrine of "massive retaliation" with non-consultative
overtones was advertised that the problems created by the nuclear
deterrent began to corrode the alliance. When Britain, by unaided
efforts, broke the American monopoly of the deterrent and de-
veloped subsequently its own variant of reliance on the nuclear
weapon solidarity was further impaired. The French acquisition of
an atomic bomb took the process of disintegration a step further.
The British deterrent, though independently obtained, admitted
her, as we have seen, to a sharing of American atomic secrets. This
was mistakenly understood, amongst many members of N.A.T.O.,
conspicuously France, as constituting the basis of the distinctive
Anglo-American partnership; as such it stimulated the demand for
each member to have his own deterrent and so to gain admission
to the "atomic club", or else for the creation of a N.A.T.O. deter-
rent, whatever exactly that might mean. But although certain
admitted benefits did accrue to Britain in her relations with the
U.S.A. from the possession of a deterrent of her own, it was not
from this that the "special relationship" (if indeed it was "special")
derived its speciality. It did not even derive it from the partnership
which preceded the British deterrent — the availability of Britain as
the unsinkable aircraft carrier for S.A.C. Valuable as this was for
American strategy, this was not a unique service which Britain
rendered; other S.A.C. bases were soon established in Europe, Asia
and Africa in countries none of which acquired thereby a larger
voice in the alliance. What then was the essential nature of Britain's
relationship with the U.S.A. during these years and from what did
it derive?
^ Though paradoxically it was also the axis around which the rest
of NATO largely revolved.
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THE PARTNERSHIP
There was one thing which it was not; it was not a treaty rela-
tionship. The only important treaty relationships which Britain has
or has had with the U.S.A. since the war are the familiar anti-
Communist, multilateral ones of which N.A.T.O. is both the proto-
type and the most successful example. There arc indeed bilateral
agreements in plenty^ and some of these admit Britain to a pre-
ferred, exclusive defence relationship, mainly those relating to
atomic energy. But even the most cherished — or envied — of these
cannot be said to be the basis on which rests the close understanding
between London and Washington. They are the results, not the
causes, of that understanding. And not surprisingly, therefore, the
intimate consultation which is the best expression of that under-
standing does not proceed through the channels established by any
of these written undertakings, not even those of N.A.T.O. itself.
To go back to the distinction made at the beginning of this chapter,
any especial intimacy which Britain and the U.S.A. maintain in
their anti-Communist operations and organizations derives essen-
tially from a community of interests which is both logically and
chronologically prior to it.^
More surprising perhaps than the reluctance to codify the rela-
tionship in a treaty is the stubborn refusal to incorporate, or even
symbolize, it in an institution. The United States may not be a
country of very strong institutional growths, but Britain is, in
almost all departments of its national life. Yet there is no Anglo-
American equivalent of the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Con-
ference, or even of that shadowy wraith, the Council of Europe.
There are indeed Anglo-American institutions a-plenty, but they
are all private associations, smiled on sometimes by governments,
patronized by officials, but never claiming to represent legislatures
^ A list of them is provided in Appendix A.
2 Although at a thousand points co-operation in the North Atlantic
and other alliances has intensified that community of interests, in one
important sense it has actually proved an embarrassment for it. As
loyal allies with the rest, both Britain and the United States have
repeatedly had to disavow in public an intimacy which they enjoy in
private. Indeed their characteristic posture is often that of the laconic
heroes of Victorian boys' fiction whose amity is best expressed in a
silent hand-clasp and averted gaze, with perhaps only the occasional
tribute, at a Pilgrims, or English- Speaking Union dinner, of a tear
dashed away from a manly blushing cheek.
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BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
or executives on either side of the Atlantic. The nearest both sides
have ever come to creating such an embodiment of their relation-
ship is in the recurrent meetings of President and Prime Minister,
first instituted by Roosevelt and Churchill in the war, then largely
intermitted by Truman and Attlee, but subsequently resumed with
an increasing frequency,^ However, important as these encounters
are, they are not by any means distinctive or exclusively Anglo-
American; they are only the application to that relationship of a
diplomatic technique which the aeroplane has made possible and,
because possible, obligatory for heads of state everywhere. Though
by their frequency or otherwise they provide a rough indication of
the intimacy of consultation at the highest levels between London
and Washington, it is a very rough indication indeed. If we had a
chart of the telephone calls between Number Ten and the White
House that would tell us a good deal more.
The fact is that the distinctive feature of the Anglo-American
relationship, so far as governments are concerned, exists at a much
more mundane level. It is to be found in the generally informal,
frequently unofficial co-operation that has grown up as a kind of
second nature between civil servants and diplomats on each side of
the Atlantic, based on an experience of mutual trust and a joint
pragmatic approach to common problems, the whole over-arched
by a sense of common interests and common values — and, of course,
enormously facilitated by the use of a common language. In
London and Washington — and indeed in many other capitals where
British and American officials find themselves working together —
this often finds expression in committee meetings at a departmental
level which provide for regular consultation and discussion over a
wide range of matters of common concern. However even in these
it is not necessarily in the formal confrontation over minutes and
agenda papers that the relationship has its most distinctive ex-
pression. A seasoned American observer has given his impression
of what this means where defence is concerned :
"There are dozens of long, vehement, good-natured talks
between diplomats and soldiers, airmen and sailors here, in
Washington and elsewhere. Each participant carries into such
discussions all his national prejudices. But each is also conscious
^ See Appendix B for a list of such meetings to date.
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THE PARTNERSHIP
of the over-riding problem of winning the long duel with the
U.S.S.R. to the extent that, in the small hours, the two national-
ities often merge into a common effort."^
What Mr. Middleton says about the diplomats and fighting men
could equally well be applied to the economists and administrators.
The working relationships thus established not only guarantee a
smooth discharge of decisions arrived at at the highest levels; they
reflect and create a climate of common purpose and frank dis-
cussion. Consequently they persist, by a healthy momentum of their
own, even when, as at Suez, rupture and conflict impair the func-
tioning of "the highest levels". There is thus a kind of Anglo-
American Gulf Stream whose flow is little affected by the tempests
which may disturb the Atlantic surface.
To say this is not to ignore certain evident differences in the
British and American ways of doing business which show up in the
deliberations of officials no less than in the encounters of private
persons. The government which the British official represents is
comparatively small, trim and tidy, close-knit in its operations,
internally fairly disciplined and co-operative, equally seasoned in
all its important parts and generally stable both in its internal com-
position and in its relationship to parliament and the country. The
American executive by contrast is large, loose, even sprawling, set
by the Constitution and still more by the facts of the society it
serves under the jurisdiction of two masters, the President and
Congress, fluid in its individual memberships and fluctuating in its
popular support. The one enjoys privacy, the other lives always on
the frontier of publicity. Hardly surprising therefore if the com-
bined functioning of two such entities, or of their representatives,
gives rise to a sufficiency of those frictions, flurries, leaks, dropped
catches, or missed goals which form the frequent gossip of the
official capitals and supply much of the material for newspapers.
The most obvious operational weaknesses are likely, for the reasons
listed above, to be on the American side, and to be most amply
documented in Washington. It is, however, worth remembering
^ Drew Middleton in Neiv York Times ^ 25 February, 1960.
2 As Mr. James Reston once pointed out, "the Department of State
has been in a constant state of reorganization ever since World War
11": New York Times, 20 November, 1956.
173
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
that in such a relationship the too smooth functioning of a too pro-
fessional team may carry hazards of its own as great as the unco-
ordinated "playing by ear" of the amateurs. What is elegant and
intellectually satisfying in Whitehall may wear quite another
appearance in Washington; in a fast-changing world there are no
absolute experts, in administration or anything else, and the Ameri-
can contribution often gains a creative edge from its very unpro-
fessionalism. Moreover, unified as the Whitehall team may be, it
seldom plays alone; the Commonwealth partners, whose significance
has been earlier remarked, sometimes complicate life for American
negotiators who are accustomed to seeing such relationships in the
comparatively orderly form of the federal structure. To find, as the
leader of an alliance, exactly when to speak and what to say to all
the members of the Commonwealth on the matter of a developing
negotiation which concerns them all, but not all equally — that is as
pretty a problem for the American diplomat as any that the Ameri-
can separation of powers creates for the British. For Britain too,
as her maternal authority wanes in a world where parents are not
what they used to be, there are problems whenever she has to
negotiate with the United States on matters that affect other
members of the Commonwealth as well as herself. Even the
"Canadian bridge", valuable as it often is, can sometimes become a
"clover-leaf" on which the traffic has got into the wrong lanes. ^
1 It is much to be regretted that we have so litde record of what
the Anglo-American partnership is hke at this working level. One of
the few accounts of it written from within is that provided by Sir
Erich Roll in The Combined Food Board, Stanford, 1956. He sums up
his impressions as follows (p. 306):
"Some commentators have stressed the effectiveness of the British,
Combined Board team and have compared it favourably with that of
the American. It is true that more of the initiative came from the
British side and that with much smaller numbers the British were able
at the least to equal the American contribution. But this is hardly
surprising. Here was a small, compact team, having at its disposal an
amalgam of different qualities which a picked staff of varied antece-
dents was able to contribute, depending upon a highly refined and
efficient machine at home, never in doubt either as to its broad objec-
tives or as to the limits of its discretion on immediate issues, having
undivided responsibility over the entire field and, above all, because
of the general character of combined machinery in Washington, exert-
ing considerable influence in the councils at home. It would have been
174
THE PARTNERSHIP
For these and for other reasons this crucial "middle level" co-
operation in the Anglo-American field is no automatic, self -regulat-
ing mechanism. It requires all the skill and devotion which its
practitioners can bring to it and all the guidance and stimulus
which are provided by the wider, extra-governmental Anglo-
American community of which it is merely a partial expression.
astonishing, indeed, if in these circumstances it had not acquitted itself
well. What is far more remarkable is the speed with which the American
members, many of whom were necessarily less experienced in these
matters, were able, whenever the basic issue of their relations to
national responsibility and power was successfully resolved, to operate
with ease and assurance. It is true that there were some "tricks of the
trade" in combined procedure, such as methods of preparing meetings
and papers, co-ordination of instructions, effective liaison inside and
out, and all the other paraphernalia of smooth administration in which
the British were more at home. But there too the Americans quickly
learned; and on the major question of processing issues for decision,
there was not, in the outcome, any particular advantage on the British
side.
"The British may claim to have helped improve the United States
machinery at least by example, though sometimes by the kind of direct
precept which is permissible among friends and allies — an achievement
which is by no means diminished by the fact that it was based on a sort
of enlightened self-interest. The British soon learned that their main
concern was not in gaining some quick short-term advantage, but
rather that lasting benefit to themselves (and to the common cause)
depended upon the effectiveness of the combined machine and thus
upon the effectiveness, day in, day out, of the United States machine.
Clarification and, where appropriate concentration of responsibility of
the American side, even if it tended in the short run to militate against
some desirable United Kingdom objective, was in itself desirable, since
it would be bound to lead to more effective co-operation in the long
run.
"In aU this the Canadians played an extremely useful part. Being
fortunate in possessing a governmental machine which seemed to
combine the best features of the British with the best of the American,
closely tied politically and economically (in food particularly) to the
United Kingdom, yet having powerful bonds also with the United
States and being often faced with very similar domestic repercussions
of international decisions, they were able to make most valuable, and
at times, decisive, contributions to finding solutions that were accept-
able to all ..."
175
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
Fortunately for its good health, the part it expresses is quite a good
deal of the whole, as the common concerns of British and American
governments have come to range far beyond the traditional
province of diplomacy. An eloquent symbol of this is provided
by the British Embassy in Washington which has added to the
country house elegance of the original Lutyens building a far larger,
frankly utilitarian Chancery block which handles the day-to-day
office work of a microcosm of Whitehall. Behind this brick and
glass fagade almost 600 persons, the largest embassy staff in Wash-
ington, are engaged not primarily in "representation" as it was
once known, nor yet in "negotiation", but in the task of maintain-
ing contact with their American opposite numbers over what is
virtually the entire field of British government — from agriculture
to the West Indies. In London an even larger (and considerably
more elegant) structure in Grosvenor Square houses an equivalent
range of American officials discharging a similar function in rela-
tion to their opposite numbers. What the activities of these practi-
tioners are helping to create is hardly indeed, in the conventional
sense of the term, an alliance at all; it is more nearly a community.
Viewed from London, in 1945 or 1946, this community or alli-
ance had two principal functions to discharge. The first was to pro-
vide American aid in restoring Britain's war-crippled economy and
in reconstructing a ruined Europe. The second was to prevent any
return to American isolationism and to guarantee that American
power would be mobilized to check Russian expansionism. Looking
back over the fifteen years that followed, it is evident that both
objectives have been realized. Thanks in part to the Financial
Agreements of 1946, but more more to the European Recovery and
Mutual Aid Programmes, the United Kingdom and Western
Europe both found themselves enjoying a higher degree of pros-
perity than they had ever known, with economies resting on far
more stable foundations than in 1938. Thanks largely to the first
Truman administration and contemporary Republican leadership in
the Senate, American isolationism was routed and by successive
stands, over Greece and Turkey, over Berlin, over the North
Atlantic Treaty, over Korea, the balance of power in Europe, and
largely in the world outside, was held. In the process of so doing
a new relationship had developed between Britain and the United
States. Though the U.S.A. had assumed many of the global defence
burdens which had previously been Britain's, it was no longer a
176
THE PARTNERSHIP
relationship merely of British dependence upon American strength.
There was also an American recognition of her need for an ally
who maintained some structure of order in a generally chaotic
world and could even assist in the defence of the United States. In
the pre-sputnik era she had helped to keep America's frontier on
the further side of the Atlantic; in the post-sputnik era of over-
leaped frontiers she could still house weapons of deterrence that
lost their efficacy if housed in America itself.
But as the racing minute hand of invention passed from A-bomb,
through H-bomb, to I.C.B.M., the conviction intensified in London
and in Washington that the protection afforded by the new weapons
was fragile indeed. They were a sword hardly less perilous to wield
than to be smitten by. The result was a fresh search for some point
of detente with the Soviets and, if possible, some agreed and con-
trolled disarmament. Britain and the U.S.A. had their differences
of tempo and technique over this, which did not frustrate (even
though they sometimes obscured) the parallelism of their ap-
proaches. A great deal of diplomatic history of the late fifties is
made up of the details of abortive Anglo-American negotiations
with the Russians, but for any student of the alliance two points
stand out. The first, that the Russians never got anywhere in
their endeavours to divide Britain and America; the second, that
Britain and America never got very far in their search for a settle-
ment. At most they only learnt to Yxmq. with their problem and
hoped it would be willing to live with them.
Similarly in the economic field the relationship between the
United Kingdom and the United States had moved away from the
simple dependence of poor debtor on rich creditor. The huge dis-
crepancy of wealth and resources remained, but Britain now stood
reasonably firmly on her own feet, capable of being an active
partner, not a mere protege, in the tasks of economic leadership
that the Atlantic Alliance had to undertake around the world.
Meanwhile a Western Europe, revitalized in large part by American
(and indeed British) efforts, had emerged as a new bastion of
economic, and so potentially of political, strength. Whether the
European Economic Community developed as a "third Force" or
as a counterbalancing but still integrated element in the Atlantic
Alliance depended on the relationship which first Britain and then
the U.S.A. succeeded in establishing with it. To the simple concept
of "integrating Europe" was now being added in the U,S,A, a
M 177 '
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
new and sophisticated awareness of the need to prevent any new
European economic block from being exclusive and restrictionist.
By machinery such as O.E.C.D,, by the strengthening of interna-
tional agencies such as G.A.T.T. and the Fund, and by moves in
the direction of a freer American trading policy, it was hoped to
guarantee that the economic energies of the new Europe would be
outward-flowing throughout the Atlantic area and beyond. Britain,
forced at last to contemplate a plunge which created major problems
for her domestic economy, for her Commonwealth relations and
for her associations with the United States, was bound to welcome
an American interest which promised active participation in the
venture. There was at last a good prospect that if Britain went in
with the Six she would not be committed to an association which
would weaken historic and essential transatlantic links.
Meanwhile, however, beyond the European and North Atlantic
areas, a new world had grown up, as different in many ways from
the world of 1945 as from the world of 1938. Its dynamism was
variously labelled as "anti-colonialism", "anti-Western national-
ism" or "the revolution of rising expectations", though none of
these appelations fully described its character. Two things, however,
were certain about it — that it gave to aggressive Communism a
new weapon against the West with which to overleap the
N.A.T.O., C.E.N.T.O. and S.E.A.T.O. walls, and also that the
problems it presented were not such as could be solved by any
simple resort to force, as in Suez, or by mere metropolitanism, as
in Algeria, or by mere aid, as in Laos. As far as Britain was con-
cerned, moreover, though she had won important interim successes
in some areas, like South-East Asia or West Africa, it was apparent
that neither here nor elsewhere, as in the Middle East, could she —
or the Commonwealth — ^provide single-handed a solution that gave
any promise of permanence. And with every year of the fifties that
passed the number of countries so affected and the degree of their
affection increased.
It cannot be said that the alliance displayed the same vitality,
unity and creativeness in meeting this challenge as it had in the
great days between 1947 and 1950 which saved Western Europe.
Suez, in a sense, was the classic expression of its inadequacy. In the
light of that disaster, however, a growing awareness had developed
in Britain and America of the shape and dimensions of the task
before them. The Eisenhower-Macmillan meeting of October,
178
THE PARTNERSHIP
1957, and the N.A.T.O. meeting which followed it gave much
currency to the concept of "interdependence". "The countries of the
free world are interdependent and only in genuine partnership, by
combining their resources and sharing tasks in many fields, can
progress and safety be found. "^ At the time and in the light of the
actions immediately taken this was primarily understood as referring
to the numbers of the Anglo-American alliance and beyond them
to all the members of N.A.T.O. But it soon became apparent that
the words were susceptible of a wider meaning — and that in fact
they needed to be so interpreted if the essential interests, perhaps
of any members, but certainly of Britain and the U.S.A., were to be
safeguarded. In a shrinking world (and an expanding U.N.) the
fortunes and preferences of the so-called "underdevelopeds" were
daily acquiring a new significance; a Northern hemispheric partner-
ship which left out of account the emerging South would soon find
itself stalled in the animosity of the poor and the wreckage of its
own most essential values. Of course, neither in Britain nor else-
where had this challenge gone wholly by default; it was part, at
least, of the historic mission of the Commonwealth. But the fifties
provoked an acceleration of pressures so great as to constitute a
virtually new challenge and one which neither Britain nor anyone
else could meet alone. It involved both the elimination of the last
stigma of inferiority that attached to colonialism and the extension
to other parts of the world of the benefits of Western technology.
Britain, with the legacy of the greatest imperial power, and the
United States, as creator and manager of the greatest productive
machine in history, had irresistible commitments here. They lab-
oured also under painful disabilities — a tenacious tradition of colour
prejudice in both societies, an adherence in Britain, often in unex-
pected quarters, to outmoded attitudes and incompatible interests,
the prevalence in America of simpliste approaches, political or
administrative, to situations of historic complexity. But they also
enjoyed certain assets derived from their history and the nature of
their society. Their democratic and liberal traditions offered the
best guarantees available to human fraility that they would sub-
ordinate sectional interests to a wider view and learn some at least
of the lessons of experience. The United States had resources, in-
ventiveness, generosity and elan; Britain had the partnership of the
^ Communique of the Eisenhower-Macmillan meetings, 25 October,
1957.
179
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
Commonwealth and a tradition of administrative pragmatism. In
combination, these assets and these attitudes offered a fair chance
that the size of the problem would be realized and a serious effort
would be made to find a solution. It could not be an exclusively
Anglo-American solution. It would require the co-operation of
Europe, the mediation of international agencies, the admission even
of the clients to an equality with their patrons. But without the
partnership of Britain and America it was fairly certain that no
peaceful solution would be found.
180
APPENDIX A
Principal Treaties and Agreements between the
British and United States Governments,
June, 1945 to December, 1960
(References are to the Treaty Series and to Command Papers,
HMG=Her Majesty's Government and USG = Government of
the U.S.A.)
T.S. No. 17 (1946) Agreements between the Governments repre-
Cmd. 6837 sented at the Bermuda Telecommunications
Conference. Bermuda, 4 Dec, 1945.
T.S. No. 53 (1946) Financial Agreements between HMG and
Cmd. 6968 USG. Washington, 6 Dec, 1945.
T.S. No. 3 (1946) Final Act of the Aviation Conference and
Cmd. 6747 • Agreements between HMG and USG relating
to Air Services. Bermuda, 11 Feb., 1946.
T.S. No. 13 (1946) Settlement for Lend-Lease, Reciprocal Aid,
Cmd. 6813 Surplus War Property and Claims. Washing-
ton, 27 March, 1946.
T.S. No. 41 (1948) Economic Co-operation Agreement between
Cmd. 7469 HMG and USG. London, 6 July, 1948.
T.S. No. 69 (1948) Agreement for the Establishment of the U.S.
Cmd. 7527 Educational Commission [so-called Fulbright
Commission] in the U.K. London, 22 Sept.,
1948.
T.S. No. 56 (1949) North Atlantic Treaty. Washington, 4 April,
Cmd. 7789 1949
T.S. No. 13 (1950) Mutual Defence Assistance Agreement.
Cmd. 7894 Washington, 27 Jan., 1950.
T.S. No. 74 (1950) Agreement for the Establishment in the
Cmnd. 8109 Bahama Islands of a Proving-Ground for
Guided Missiles. Washington, 21 July, 1950.
181
APPENDICES
T.S. No. 3
Cmnd. 9363
T.S. No. 9
Cmd. 8757
T.S. No. 63
Cmnd. 265
T.S. No. 52
Cmnd. 9555
T.S. No. 55
Cmnd. 9560
T.S. No. 44
Cmnd. 178
T.S. No. 14
Cmnd. 406
T.S. No. 41
Cmnd. 537
T.S. No. 24
Cmnd. 1034
(Extended to cover additional sites by further
agreements on 15 Jan., 1952, 25 June, 1956
and 1 April, 1957.)
1955) Status of Forces Agreement of Parties to the
North Atlantic Treaty. London, June 1 9, 1 951 .
1953) Agreement to Facilitate the Interchange of
Patents and Technical Information for De-
fence Purposes. London, 19 Jan., 1953.
1957) The South-East Asia Collective Defence
Treaty. Manila, Sept. 8, 1954.
1955) Agreement for Co-operation regarding
Atomic Information for Mutual Defence
Purposes. Washington, 15 June, 1955.
1955) Agreement for Co-operation on the Peaceful
Uses of Atomic Energy. Washington, 15
June, 1955.
1957) Agreement amending the Financial Agree-
ments of Dec. 6, 1945 (The "Waiver").
Washington, March 6, 1957.
1958) Exchange of Notes Concerning the Supply to
the U.K. Government of I.R.B.Ms. Washing-
ton, 22 Feb., 1958.
1958) Agreement for Co-operation on the Uses of
Atomic Energy for Mutual Defence Purposes.
Washington, 3 July, 1958. (amended on 7
May, 1959).
1960) Exchange of Notes . . . Setting up of a Ballis-
tic Missile Early Warning Station in the U.K.
London, 15 February, 1960.
182
APPENDIX B
Meetings of British Prime Ministers and
United States Presidents since World War II
1945
1950
1952
1953
1954
1955
1956
1957
1958
1959
1960
1961
Nov. 10-16 Attlee — Truman
Dec. 4-9 Attlee — Truman
Jan. 5-22 Churchill — Truman
Jan. 5-8 Churchill — Eisenhower
at Washington
at Washington
at Washington
at Washington
Dec. 4-7 Churchill — Eisenhower — Laniel at Bermuda
June 25-28 Churchill — Eisenhower at Washington
July 17-23 Eden — Eisenhower — Faure
— Bulganin (Summit Meeting) at Geneva
Jan 30-Feb. 3 Eden — Eisenhower at Washington
Mar. 21-24 Macmillan — Eisenhower at Bermuda
Macmillan — Eisenhower at Washington
Macmillan — Eisenhower etc. at Paris
(N.A.T.O. Heads of Government)
Macmillan — Eisenhower at Washington
Macmillan — Eisenhower at Washington
Aug. 27-Sept. 2 Eisenhower — Macmillan at London
Mar. 27-29 Macmillan — Eisenhower at Washington
Macmillan — Eisenhower
Macmillan — Kennedy
Macmillan — Kennedy
Kennedy — Macmillan
Macmillan — Kennedy
Oct. 23-25
Dec. 16-19
June 7-11
Mar. 19-23
Sept. 27
Mar. 26
April 4-9
June 4—5
Dec. 12-22
1962 April 28-29 Macmillan— Kennedy
at U.N.
at Key West
at Washington
at London
at Bermuda
at Washington
183
APPENDIX C
British Ambassadors to the United States
Sir Ronald Lindsay
The Marquis of Lothian
Viscount Halifax
Lord Inverchapel
Sir OUver Franks
Sir Roger Makins
Sir Harold Caccia
Sir David Ormsby-Gore
appointed 11 May, 1930
29 Aug., 1939
22 Dec, 1940
25 Jan., 1946
22 May, 1948
31 Dec, 1952
2 Nov., 1956
21 May, 1961
American Ambassadors to the United Kingdom
Mr. Joseph P. Kennedy
Mr. John G. Winant
Mr. W. Averell Harriman
Mr. Lewis W. Douglas
Mr. Walter S. Gifford
Mr. Winthrop W. Aldrich
Mr. John Hay Whitney
Mr. David K. E. Bruce
7 Jan., 1938
6 Feb., 1941
23 Mar., 1946
26 Feb., 1947
7 Dec, 1950
2 Feb., 1953
7 Feb., 1957
2 Feb., 1961
184
INDEX
INDEX
Abadan, 114, 116-18
Acheson, Dean, 73-74, 79, 92
Aden, ,104
Adenauer, Konrad, 135, 146,
150-51
Africa, 124, 165, 170, 178
Africa Star, 116
Aid, U.K., Ill, 179
-Aid, U.S. 102-3, 148-9, 152,
161-2, 176
Aid, U.S. to Europe, 43, 46-47,
51-52, 145, 176
Aid, U.S. to India, 99 n.
Aid, U.S. to Middle East, 105,
111-13, 115, 117-18, 178
Aid, U.S. to U.K. 32, 36-40,
155-7, 160, 176
Alabama Claims, 22
Aleutians, the, 71
Algeria, 128, 133, 135, 178
Ambassadors, British to U.S.A.,
i9> 25, 30, 51,64, 143
Ambassadors U.S. to Britain,
28-29, 64, 76
Anderson, Sir John, 63
Anderson, Robert B., 152
Anglo-American financial agree-
ments 36-40, 42-43, 124, 141,
155-6, 176
Anglo-Canadian financial agree-
ments, 36
Anglo-Russian Treaty, 168
A.N.Z.U.S. Pact, 85-86, 100
Arabian- American Oil Co., 104
Arabs, 105, 11 1
Atomic energy and weapons, 1 5 ,
20, 50, 58 ff., 76, 95, 124, 126-
38, 152, 170-71, 177
Attlee, Clement, 42, 44, 55, 60-
65, 68, 76, 125, 130, 138, 156,
172
Australia, 71, 82, 85-86, 90, loi,
103, 141
Baghdad Pact, 120
Bahrain Petroleum Co., 104
Bases, British in the Middle East,
104, no, 115-16, 120
Bases, British in South East Asia,
102
Bases, U.S. in the Phillipines, 102
Bases, U.S. in U.K., 50-51, 68,
1 3 1-2, 134-9, 141
Bases, U.S. in Middle East, 104-5,
115
Belgium, 48
BerHn, 50, 138, 152, 167, 176
Bermuda, 30, 82, 120, 13 1-3
Bevin, Ernest, 36, 42-44, 46-49,
109, 125, 142
Bretton Woods, 39
British Purchasing Agency, 30
Brussels Treaty, 48-49, 56, 128
Burma, 71, 83, 90 n., 100, 106
Butler, R. A., 156
Byrnes, James F., 36
Cambodia, 102
Camp David Meeting, 169
Canada, 55, 59, 63, 85 n., 86,
141, 154-5, 164, 174
Cargo Preference Act, 160-61
Casablanca Conference, 60, 133
187
INDEX
Central Treaty Organization
(CE.N.T.O.), 105, 120, 166,
178
Ceylon, 74, 90, 100, 106
Committee for European Econo-
mic Cooperation (C.E.E.C.),
47, 51
Chamberlain, Neville, 25-30
Chiang Kai-Shek, 70, 73, 75, 83,
87,97
China, 72-76, 80-84, 87-89, 90-93,
97-98, loi, 103, 117, 159
"China Lobby", 87, 94-95
Christmas Island, 20, 69, 134 n
Churchill, Winston S., 26, 31,
32-34, 36, 38, 42, 54-5 5,
58-62, 68-69, 82, 85, 93, 96,
117, 124, 138, 142-3, 167, 169,
172
ChurchiU's Second World War
quoted, 32, 59, 60
Clark, Gen. Mark W., 80
Clay, Gen. Lucius D., 48-49
Colombo Plan, 20, 100
Colonialism See Imperialism
Colonial Development Corpora-
tion, 20
Combined Boards, 33, 3 5,i74n.
Combined Chiefs of Staff, 35,
53, 71
Combined Policy Committee,
60-64
Commonwealth, 19-21, 22, 72,
74-75, 78, 82, 85-86, 90, 96-97,
102, 121, 122-3, 140-42, 153,
154, 161, 166, 171, 174, 178-80
Communism, 47, 48, 54, 74,
90-91, 100, 103, 178
Communism, U.K. attitude to-
wards, 73, 77, 96, 166-9
Communism, U.S. attitude to
wards, 67, 73, 75, 77, 94, 98,
lOI, 107-8, no, 112, 114, 120,
160, 166-9
Conant, James B,, 61
Congress, U.S., 38-40, 43-45, 47,
49, 61, 64-69, 77, 81, 84, 88,
93-94, 99, 112, 133, 143, 150,
157-61, 169, 173, 176
Council of Europe, 142, 171
Crimean War, 122
Cripps, Sir Stafford, 51
Cromer, Lord, 116
Cunard Steamship Co. 160 n.
Cyprus, 104
Czechoslovakia, 29, 48
Defence White Paper, 1957, 57,
125-8, 131-2, 135
Destroyer-bases deal, 31
Dewey, Thomas E., 83, 144
Dien-Bien-Phu, 93, 98
Dillon, Clarence D,, 147, 150,
152, 153 n.
Disraeli, Benjamin, 116
Dollar Exports Council, 163
Dulles, John Foster, 56, 82-84,
87-88, 92-93, 95-99, 115,
117 ff., 126, 147, 159, 169
Eccles, Sir David, 146-7
Economic Cooperation Admini-
stration (E.C. A.), 52
Eden, Sir Antony, 25-29, 55-57,
79, 84, 93, 95, 97-99, 1 10,
114 n., 115 ff, 123, 127
Egypt, 29, 104 ff
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 34, 53,
69, 87-89, 90, 92, 102, no,
1 14-15, 117-20, 123-6, 13 1-3,
139, 144, 147, 150-52, 169, 178
Eisenhower Doctrine, 105, 1 19-20
188
INDEX
Eniwetok, 69, 126 GifFord, Walter, 76
Ethiopia, 27 Glubb, General J. B., 105
Euratom, 145 Greece, 29, 36, 41-45, 125, 156,
Europe, 28-29, 34, 45-57, 7^, 95> 176
99, 127 fF, 140 ff, 165, 178-80 Groves, Gen. Leslie R., 62, 64
European Defence Community
(E.D.C.), 5 5-5 7, 1 17, 140 n., 145
European Economic Community ^^^*^^^' ^ord, 28-29, 64
(E.E.C.), 133, 144, 146-53, Hall-Patch, Sir Edmund, 51
163, 177 Hammarskjold, Dag., 125
European Free Trade Association Harriman, W. AvereU, 43, 47, 5 2,
(E.F.T.A.) 146-51 ^4
European Payments Union Henderson, Loy, 115
(E.P.U.), 141, 145 Hickenlooper, Senator, 65-67
European RecoVery Programme hitler, Adolf, 28-29, 32-33, 168
(E,R.P.), See Marshall Aid
Far East, 27-29, 70 ff
Flynn, Erroll, 71
Ford Motor Co., 163
Formosa, 75, 82-84, 87-88, 90 n.,
98, lOI
Forrestal, James, 43-45, 49-51
France, 32, 46-48, 51-53, 55-57,
76, 86, 90-91, 98, loi, 105, 113,
116, 118-19, 123, 127-8, 133-6,
145-7, 150-52, 170
Franks, Lord, 19, 47, 51
Fuchs, Klaus, 67
Fulton, 36, 167-8
Fylingdales, 136
Holland, 48
Holy Loch, 137
Hong Kong, 70, 74, 80-81, 88,
lOO-IOI
Hopkins, Harry, 60
Hull, Cordell, 27, 155
Imperialism, British, 42, 70, 94,
105, no, 113-14, 116, 119, 129
Imperialism, French, 98
India, 71-72, 74, 82-83, 87, 90,
96-100, 102, 106, no, 156, 161
Indonesia, 36, 90, 1 00-101
Indo-China, 90-93, 98-100, 117
Iran, 36, 104-6, 113 ff., 157, 168
Iraq, 104, 106, in, 120
Ismay, Lord, 52
Isolationism, U.S., 26, 35, 176
Israel, See Palestine
Italy, 27, 47, 133-4
Gandhi, Mahatma, 97
Gaulle, Charles de, 134-5, 146,
1 5 1-2
Geneva, 88, 95, 98-100, 103, 117,
169
George VI, 30
Germany, 25-31, 35, 42, 49^
54-56, 127, 133, 135, 145-7, Johnson Act, 26
151, 162, 168 Jordan, 104-5, m, 120
Jameson Raid, 122
Japan, 27, 29, 70-72, 81-87, 9° n-.
94,98, 117, 154
189
INDEX
Kashmir, 102 Maudling, Reginald, 89 n.
Kennedy, John F., 89, 102-3, Maxwell-Fyfe, Sir David, 5 5
139 n., 152-3, 158 Menon, Krishna, 97
Kennedy, Joseph P., 28-29 Menzies, Robert, 86
Keynes, John M., 37-38 Middle East, 42, 104 ff., 122-5,
Key West, 103 146, 178
Khrushchev, Nikita, 103, 147, 169 Missiles, 130-33, 177
King, Admiral, 33, 71 Modus vivendi, the, 66-67
King, Mackenzie, 63-64 Molotov, M., 36, 46
Korean War, 54, 75-81, 87, 91-92 Monroe Doctrine, 71
94-95, 97, 100, 125-6, 130, 145, Monnet, Jean, 147
156, 176
Laos, 87, 101-3, 178
Ladjbird, zj
League of Nations, 74
Lebanon, 36, iii, 120, 134
Lend-lease, 31, 32, 35-37, 155
Libya, 104
Lindsay, Sir Ronald, 2 5
Lloyd, Selwyn, 79, 125
Lothian, Lord, 30
Montgomery, Gen., 33
Morrison, Herbert, 55, 83
Mossaddeq, Mohammed, 1 13-14,
Munich, 29-30
Murville, Couve de, 146-7
Mutual Aid, 33, 162, 176
Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 1 16-17
N.A.T.O., 41, 47 ff., 67, 72, 91,
99-100, 127-8, 1 3 1-5, 140-41,
143, 151-2, 162, 166, 169-71,
176-9
MacArthur, Gen. Douglas, 72, Nautilus, 136
75-79, 81 n., 86 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 72, 74, 96
McCarthy, Senator Joseph, 67, Neutrality Acts, U.S., 26, 30
75, 77, 81, 87, 169 New Deal, 24, 27
McMahon, Act, 64-66, 69, 128, New England, 164
133, 138 New Zealand, 71, 82, 85-86, loi,
McMahon, Senator, 61 103, 141
Macmillan, Harold, 88, 103, 120, Nixon, Richard, 119
123-5,130-33,139,147,150-51, North Carolina, 164
153, 178
Malaya, 70, 78, 81, 85-86, 90-91,
95, 100, 102, 103, 154
Manchuria, 26, 70
Manila, loi
Marshall, Gen. George C, 43,
46-49
Marshall Aid, 39, 41, 46 ff., 66,
141, 144-5, 148, 160, 176
Nuclear energy See Atomic
Organization for Economic Co-
operation and Development
(O.E.C.D.), 149, 178
Organization for European Eco-
nomic Cooperation (O.E.E.C.),
51-52, 141, 143, 145-9
190
INDEX
Pakistan, 74, 90, 96-97, 100-02,
105, 120
Palestine, 29, 44-45, 104 fF
Panama Canal, 108, 116
Panay, 27
Pathet Lao, 103
Pearl Harbor, 3 2
Persia See Iran
Persian Gulf, 104-7
Philippines, the, 71-72, 86. 90 n.,
101-2
Pleven Plan, 5 5
Poland, 29, 42
Polaris See Missile
Quebec Agreement, 60-66, 129,
138, i39n
Quebec Conference, 60, 62
Quemoy and Matsu, 87-88
Radford, Admiral Arthur W., 93
Rapacki plan, 147
Rayburn, Sam, 40
RB 47, 137-9
Reston, James, 117
Ridgway, Gen. Matthew B., 78 n..
Roebuck Committee, 122
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 25-31,
33, 35-36, 58-62, 70, 96, 147,
158, 172
Sackville-West, Sir Lionel, 24
Sandys, Duncan, 131
San Francisco Peace Conference,
83-84
Santa Lucia, 30
Saudi Arabia, 104-5, iio-ii, 120
Schuman Plan, 142
S.H.A.E.F., 33
S.H.A.P.E., 53, loi
Shoosmith, Gen. S. N., 80
Shin well, Emanuel, 80 n
Simon, Sir John, 70, 74
Singapore, 29, 70-71, 81, 85-86,
102
South-East Asia Treaty Organi-
zation (S.E.A.T.O.), 97-98,
100-03, 120, 166, 178
Spaak, Paul-Henri, 133
Spain, 29
Sputnik, 132, 169, 177
Stalin, 34-35,42, 126
Stevens, Sir Roger, 1 1 5
Stilwell, Gen. Joseph W., 70
Stimson, Henry, 62, 70, 74
Strategic Air Command (S.A.C.),
50, 55, 68, 94, loi, 105, 115,
128, 130, 138, 141, 170
Suez, 105-6, 108, no, 113, 115 ff.,
122-5, 130-33, 145-6, 156, 157,
173, 178
Syria, 36, 134
Thailand, 90 n., loi, 103
Tibet, 87, 98
Tizard, Sir Henry, 5 8
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 168
Trade, U.K., 20, 37, 39, 82-84,
90, 124-5, 142, 146-53, 154-8,
160-62, 164-5
Trade, U.K. with China, 74,
80-82, 88-89, 159
Trade, U.S., 105, 148, 150-52,
154-6, 1 6 1-2, 164-5, 178
Trinidad, 30
Truman, Harry S., 35-36, 42-43,
45-49, 52, 54, 61-67, 75-76, 82,
85, 87, 92, 109, 114, 138, 144,
172, 176
191
INDEX
Truman Doctrine, 41 fF., 108, 115
Turkey, 29, 41, 45, 72, 75, 104-5,
115, 120, 125, 134, 156, 176
U-2, 137-9, 169
United Nations, 35-36, 39, 44-45,
64-65, 74-79> 82, 89, 97, loi,
109, 113-14, 118-19, 123, 125,
152, 156, 179
U.S.S.R., 27, 34-36, 42-43, 45-49>
53-55, 59><^7, 72,74, 76-77, 82,
89, 103, 104, 106-7, no, 113,
115, 117, 119, 129-32, 135-8,
147, 159, 166-9, ^73, 177
Vandenberg, Senator, 45, 65-67
V-bombers, 53, 127-8, 130-31,
136
Vietnam, 98-100, 103
War Debts, 26
Watkinson, Harold, 136
Welles, Sumner, 25
Western Union, 48, 117, 142
Wingate, Orde, 71
Woomera, 20
World War I, 23, 26
World War II, 12, 30 ff., 58-63,
70-71, 79. 82, 86, 94, 104,
108-9, 133, 155, 168, 172
Yalu River, 76, 80
Yorktown, 23
Younger, Kenneth, 84
Yugoslavia, 43
Zahedi, General, 114, 117
Zionists, 105, 108-9
Zurich, 142
Due
Returned
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