Can Britain Deliver?
GELBER, LIONEL
Can Britain Deliver? Britain and the Tide of World Affairs. By Oliver S. Franks. Oxford. 71 pp. $1.25. Reviewed by Lionel Gelber Author, "The Rise of Anglo-American Friendship,'' "The American...
...In other words, as far as Anglo-American friendship is concerned, closed diplomacy may be hampered when open diplomacy has not, in the best sense, been open enough...
...as those of a former Ambassador at Washington, his remarks carry weight: "I know from my own experience that at the time of the Korean crisis our opinion counted and made a difference to what happened...
...Interdependence between the English-speaking peoples has long been incontestable...
...What must be remembered, nevertheless, is that France could never feel safe in a thoroughgoing Western European federal union without full British participation...
...Other equal Commonwealth powers, as Sir Oliver notes, still look to London for a lead...
...But the British and American backgrounds of thought are not the same...
...Some blend between open and closed diplomacy is needed nowadays, and Sir Oliver puts this, for Anglo-American purposes, in a fresh perspective...
...Two further observations of Sir Oliver's may be cited...
...Commonwealth ties underpin Britain's world status...
...By his own confession, nevertheless, even so well informed a public man as Sir Oliver did not realize, until he had arrived in Washington as Ambassador, how other Commonwealth countries pursued foreign policies of their own, and what these policies were...
...If I had to state what I thought the most prevalent single cause of misunderstanding and suspicion between the United States and Britain, I should name the failure to communicate the assumptions of a proposal...
...The British, he argues, have not been sufficiently articulate about their policies: "We prefer even among ourselves to say less than we think...
...On the vexed topic of European unity, Sir Oliver contends that American views have been sounder than British ones...
...The prospects for civilization would indeed be poorer if he were wrong...
...Yet, with oversea connections--Commonwealth, Empire and American--bulking so large in his own analysis, he himself could scarcely urge that Britain shed these so as to become a mere component of a European federal union...
...And that brings Sir Oliver, in his reassessment of Anglo-American friendship, to his second reflection: "The American," he asserts, "judges persons and nations more by their present than their past and more by his estimate of their future than their present...
...The Labor Government gets the usual pat on the back for letting India and Pakistan move from Empire to Commonwealth...
...But credit is not claimed where it might be: the skill required, when neutralism and interventionism coexist within the same Commonwealth, to keep an historic entity intact...
...Sir Oliver believes that they can...
...it is full British participation for which, at intervals, the United States so heedlessly clamors...
...I do not doubt that in the Indo-China crisis last summer the same was true...
...Reviewed by Lionel Gelber Author, "The Rise of Anglo-American Friendship,'' "The American Anarchy" Will Britain remain a Great Power...
...Trials of interdependence" is how Sir Oliver describes the current state of Anglo-American relations, and with that phrase he hits the nail on the head...
...Britain, he adds, has to be effective in her association with the United States...
...That is the question which haunts British minds and to which Sir Oliver Frank addressed himself in the 1954 BBC Reith lectures...
...from austerity at home to recovery, in trade and markets, abroad...
...Sir Oliver, in his effort to be fair, scolds his own compatriots undeservedly and praises unduly the oversimplifications to which American thinking, on this intricate subject, has been prone...
...The American tradition has little knowledge of glorious failures...
...to concert policies in common is something else again...
...Sir Oliver did well to remind his listeners of those factors in the American system which make for a responsible rather than irresponsible conduct of affairs...
...In the Anglo-American relationship British policy has to pass the test: Can the British deliver...
...Britain's postwar achievement runs from social reform to the production of engines and heavy aircraft whose quality is unsurpassed...
...this point can never be repeated too often...
...And in the end the compromise he suggests, that of cooperation short of integration, is the only one that has been practicable from the outset...
...What is left to be understood is misunderstood...
Vol. 38 • October 1955 • No. 41
