Let's Stop Baiting Britain

...The existence of the sterling area and of Imperial preference in tariffs were treated as if they added up to a sinister conspiracy against American trade...

...Our own protestations of virtue are likely to fall on deaf ears...

...Secretary of State John Foster Dulles has been holding off-the-record gatherings with American correspondents in order to set the stage for Sir Winston's visit...

...There is little we Americans can do about this...

...These tactics," he says, "cast doubt on the peaceful intentions of at least some highly-placed Americans...

...Rather than take advantage of the existence of the Commonwealth as a force for order, stability and democracy in a troubled world, American officials for a time sought to thrust Britain, against her will, into Europe...

...In an effort to show the Republican backwoodsmen that he was no effete Easterner but "one of the boys," Dulles made declarations which shook British confidence in the responsibility of American conduct of foreign affairs...

...As a matter of interest...

...The British were brusquely excluded from the Pacific security pact (ANZUS) which the United States negotiated with Australia and New Zealand, only to be abruptly invited to join it in the revised form of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization when disaster threatened the region...

...We must get out of the habit of treating Britain almost as an enemy and British influence anywhere in the world as an indication of imperialism...

...There is always a danger, however, that politicians will believe their own slogans...

...These delusions survived both Roosevelt and the change from Churchill to Attlee in Britain...

...for over a year, expressed the opinion that Indo-China should not go back to France...

...In fact, the only hope for world salvation is that the British and the Americans should work together as closely as one blade of the scissors with the other...

...On the contrary, Britain and her Commonwealth must be recognized (and, more important, treated) as our most dependable ally in the uncertain world...

...After talking for some months about going it alone, the Administration found itself practicing what it preached...

...These few phrases embody a morsel of truth in a quantity of the self-deluding folly which characterized America's relations with Britain and Russia during the war...

...Dulles's bark was much worse than his bite and that, however he might cater to the mob in his public statements, in private he conducted himself in a reasonable and responsible manner...

...Thus, in another issue of Tribune, Peter Ibbotson asks, "What lies behind the American campaign against Guatemala...

...But these faults, except for the Bevanite minority, have never included the sublime folly of ignoring the necessity for Anglo-American cooperation...

...I am wholeheartedly supported in this view by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and by Marshal Stalin...

...Minor Bevanites do not seem even to make the meager qualifications in their condemnation of the United States and condoning of Communist behavior which their master does...

...Although the Americans ultimately recognized the grave threat of Soviet expansionism (and, in this respect, showed what many Britishers consider the excessive zeal of the recent convert), suspicions of the British Commonwealth persisted...

...Responsible British leaders have agreed with Churchill that the two countries' affairs are bound to get more and more mixed up...

...In line with this way of thinking, Britain has welcomed the interest the United States is taking in areas of the world which are new to it, such as the Middle East, even when this interest has, at times, been of such a character as to cause Britain considerable inconvenience...

...As Attlee tartly notes in his recently published autobiography, As It Happened, he found the Americans at Potsdam behaving as if British imperialism were the real peril to the postwar world, whose problems, in their view, could be amicably settled between those two great democracies, the United States and the Soviet Union...

...There have been faults on the British side as well...

...We have, however, our own responsibility to deal with the recriminations which are being launched here against Britain, and from the highest sources...

...It's time for Americans to stop suspecting Britain of sinister 'imperialism' Lets Stop Baiting Britain By David C. Williams Washington, D. C. Twisting the British lion's tail is an old Yankee custom which has recently come to be matched by a Cockney weakness for pulling the American eagle's tail-feathers...

...Americans in India treated the persistence of British influence as something like an inconvenient anachronism...

...Only now are they beginning to recognize the wisdom of Ernest Bevin, who, whenever the words "European unity" were mentioned, rumbled, "I prefer the word 'Atlantic'" It has been profoundly disappointing to Britishers that Eisenhower, who as a general showed an unprecedented genius for waging genuine coalition war, as President has permitted relations with Britain to deteriorate to their lowest point in decades...

...In Australia and elsewhere, American diplomats tended to play up the grievances which existed against Britain and to weaken the ties of friendship and mutual respect which bind the Commonwealth together...

...Many Americans were slow to recognize the significance of the British Commonwealth's development into a great association of peoples, with all but the 80-odd million inhabitants of colonies and semi-colonies taking part in it of their own free will...

...As Australian Foreign Minister Richard G. Casey put it recently: "If the day ever comes when the Americans wrap themselves up in the Stars and Stripes and the British wrap themselves up in the Union Jack, that would indeed be a tragedy for the world...

...So eager have Administration leaders been to find scapegoats for the Indo-Chinese disaster that they have for once credited the late President Roosevelt with the foresight which would have averted the disaster, citing his opposition to the reoccupation of Indo-China by the French...

...For a time thereafter, it was said that Mr...

...Since this has become a matter of public discussion, the late President's memorandum on this subject to Secretary of State Hull is worth quoting: "I saw Halifax last week and told him quite frankly that it was perfectly true that I had...

...It was true that France had been culpable of not preparing the Indo-Chinese people for the independence which was certain to come...

...We in America are naturally annoyed by the monkey-wrenches which the Bevanites are constantly throwing into the machinery of Anglo-American cooperation...

...Much more serious, however, is the evidence the President's words give of his tendency (which was, of course, thoroughly in the American tradition) to see in the British Foreign Office a sinister force which must be frustrated, even by invoking the superior wisdom of Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek...

...For the murder of 15 million Chinese, the extortion of "confessions" from prisoners-of-war and the other crimes against humanity listed by Mr...

...and looks from one end of that country to another without finding a single Communist...

...We must leave this problem to the rational elements in British Labor and applaud the fact that they have at last launched a determined attack upon the mischievous distortions which pervade Bevanite propaganda...

...Whatever the ultimate outcome of the present conversations between President Eisenhower and Sir Winston Churchill, these mutual recriminations are certain to continue unless sensible men on both sides of the Atlantic take a firm stand against them...

...The articles based upon these briefings (for instance, the series on Anglo-American relations which James Res-ton contributed to the New York Times) indicate that the old bogey of "British imperialism" is once more being taken out of the closet...

...A similar generosity and farsightedness is needed on the part of Americans...

...It is possible that independence might have forestalled Communism although, as the case of Guatemala indicates, independence is no certain bar to Communism and Marshal Stalin may have been fore-sighted in "wholeheartedly" supporting it...

...Sir Winston Churchill was compelled to make the humiliating admission to the House of Commons that the United States had not informed him about plans for exploding the H-bomb, and that he had not asked for fear of being rebuffed...

...In a recent issue of Tribune, for example, Aneurin Bevan deplores the charges made against Communist China by Ambassador Lodge...

...If the testimony of contemporaries is reliable, Bevan did not so casually dismiss the murder of Erlich and Alter as something the Soviets "felt compelled" to perpetrate...

...I see no reason to play in with the British Foreign Office in this matter...

...Lodge, Bevan has only these mild phrases: "British Labor does not condone many of the acts of Communist China, nor does it think that progress for us lies along the road she has felt compelled to follow...

...The rot began with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles's strenuous, and largely politically motivated, attempt to give American foreign policy a different look from what it had under Truman and Acheson...