The End of the British-U.S. Alliance
ARNOLD, G. L.
The close partnership nurtured during and after the war is over, and Britain will now move closer to Europe The End of the British-US. Alliance By G. L. Arnold London The efforts now in progress...
...Toryism stands and falls on the assertion of something like independent great-power status and an "imperial" role...
...It looks as if they will have to—not this month or next, but fairly soon, nonetheless...
...Possibly there is still a restricted field for such claims in Africa...
...at least, recent events in Guatemala show that Americans look after their interests there...
...It could not do so even if the present plans for joining Britain to the European common market are accepted by Parliament, as they probably will be...
...and made amends...
...His Liberal and Labor critics, no less than his Conservative supporters, have been jolted into doingsome unexpectedly radical thinking...
...But Americans still haven't learned that a boat can sink wherever the leak is...
...From the American viewpoint, Britain and France are two middle-sized European powers which, having gotten into a mess in the Middle East, must somehow be helped to cut their losses so that the whole of Western Europe does not suffer through their fault...
...It is important to realize that this issue has now forced itself upon the consciousness of politicians in both parties, to say nothing of that influential middle group, often miscalled "Liberal," which oscillates between Labor and Toryism...
...A basic commitment to the United Nations enables most of its prominent figures to accept American leadership—provided it is exercised with some regard for European interests...
...From now on...
...If a policy of liquidating Britain as an extra-European power has to be carried out, it will have to be done under Labor leadership...
...What is certain is that British policy aimed at bringing it about and that this policy now lies in ruins...
...These uncertainties are not caused by the upsurge of anti-American sentiment among the Conservatives...
...Gaitskell and even with Mr...
...We must slash our defense burden and integrate our armed forces far more closely with those of France, Germany and the rest, first and foremost for European defense...
...but the dream of a special and exclusive Anglo-American relationship has evaporated for good...
...Americans are...
...But at a pinch they are willing to put up with Mr...
...Why not he realists...
...Hence, its leadership is more amenable to the influence of those Liberal organs of opinion which translate the economic rationalism of the business world into the language of politics...
...The Middle East, from India to NATO's and Europe's right flank in Turkey, has been a theater of conflicting American policies since a sick Roosevelt started to woo the Arab states before the war ended to please a myopic American "oil lobby.' So Britain, France and all Western Europe are really second-rate powers, more cozily and kindly treated by Americans than are the second-rate satellites by Russia...
...Official policy since the war—indeed, since the joint Roosevelt-Churchill proclamations of 1941—had been geared to this concept, which was never quite spelled out in detail because to do so would have meant disillusioning the many influential people in Western Europe who expected Britain to come down on the European side of the fence...
...In the financial district, all doubts on this score have been finally dispelled by the events of the past few weeks...
...The old structure of British influence in that area had unavoidably been weakened by historic erosion and deliberate withdrawal in the years since the war...
...No country has any hope in the UN if it is in the Russian ambit...
...Labor, being less hampered by imperial memories, has on the whole adjusted itself to the new situation and is trying to make the best of it...
...However that may be, the Conservative party cannot abandon its traditional outlook without in the literal sense committing suicide—or leaving the door open for a nationalist movement of the Continental European type...
...and Britain is now inescapably just another Western European country...
...So, of course, do the Liberals, who have now edged close to Labor on this issue...
...The Tories, as was to be foreseen, have reacted with a violent surge of emotion against the twofold humiliation of politico-military failure in the Middle East and public downgrading in the United Nations...
...These, however, are not the only fruits of Eden's disastrous Suez gamble—the desperate plunge of a man whose policy was already in ruins...
...The obstacles are largely irrational, but not for that reason any less real...
...What on earth are we doing, or getting, with year after year of ?,600 million—one third of a budget taking one third of the national income ?on defense...
...Now the one absolutely safe comment one can make on this advice is that no Conservative government can carry through a policy of slashing the British defense budget and integrating the United Kingdom in a united Europe...
...This is a gain for realism, but it is a hard blow for those who had staked all on an "Atlantic" concept so interpreted as to leave room for exclusive Anglo-American ties...
...There remains, inside and outside the United Nations, only the American alliance" (Economist, December 1...
...The first and most insistent problem is that of the Middle East...
...The point is that Labor takes the United Nations seriously, just as it took the League of Nations seriously...
...of course, that Labor is uncritical of American policy...
...National feeling, long sensitive to symptoms of declining power in a changed world, has been touched on the raw by the disclosure that British policy decisions now hinge on the availability of dollar oil...
...Graham Hutton is quite right in saying in the same letter: "We had Europe at our feet in 1945...
...There is no telling what sort of inter-Allied relationship will emerge when the immediate crisis over Suez is ended...
...By now there is precious little choice...
...It is high time we stopped dragging our feet there over coal and steel, the common market, etc...
...The Council and Assembly only act as sounding-boards for Russian and American policy...
...The Economist of the same date improved upon this candor by declaring that "Britain's proper attitude toward the United States is the attitude that Australia has long maintained toward Britain," i.e., private advice to the senior partner, coupled with unswerving loyalty on all major issues...
...Strange that one should have to say this after so many years of mutual bickering...
...Alliance By G. L. Arnold London The efforts now in progress to salvage the Atlantic alliance will probably enable Britain to get through the winter without economic disaster...
...A new American system may be formed, supported with American money, in the place of the British system, only parts of which can now survive...
...Although the joint Anglo-French intervention in Egypt has been a disastrous failure, it has not led to any clamor, even among the British Government's opponents, for a dissolution of the entente with France...
...Sir Winston saw all this coming long before, and shocked Europe at Zurich and America at Fulton by proclaiming it a decade ago...
...Butler's leadership...
...Doomed is perhaps the wrong word, for these countries—and Western Germany—free of commitments, have more rapidly-rising standards of life...
...It seems likely that the Government will survive this particular storm and that the Tory party will somehow hold together...
...If one wants to be cynical, one can say that they have renounced Realpolitik as incompatible with the real power status of Britain in the 1950s: Great powers can afford to be Machiavellian if they choose...
...It is a matter for guesswork whether such a movement would assume quasi-Gaullist features or develop into something worse...
...No doubt, the United States will continue to have close ties, through NATO, with Western Europe...
...Due to a narrow Tory-Labor "national socialism,' we have done it dirt ever since...
...But this highly realistic doctrine cannot possibly be proclaimed by the leaders of the Conservative party...
...the question stands.' Well, the City—and, in general, the forces which really control the Conservative party ?would prefer the necessary adjustment to be made under Mr...
...Beyond that, the outlook is nebulous...
...But the same issue of Britain's most influential weekly carried a letter from a well-known Liberal economist, Graham Hutton, which flatly challenged some of the basic assumptions of the still dominant "Atlantic" school: "The world is not ruled by the UN, but by America and Russia, who rule the UN...
...Hearken to the Financial Times of December 1: "The new position requires a reorientation both of our foreign and of our economic policy...
...Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether John Foster Dulles was not largely responsible for the catastrophe, this is a realistic attitude, but it is not one which commends itself to British spokesmen who for the past ten years have been telling the public that the alliance between America and the Commonwealth is a partnership of equals...
...the hope for British interests in the Middle East is that they will have America behind them...
...The bid has failed...
...Bevan...
...Judging from the popular response to the rancid chauvinism of the Beaverbrook press, something like a British variant of Poujadism seems not entirely impossible...
...The result of the intervention is that as a practical policy the old system no longer exists...
...For some of them, the crisis "has shown that Britain cannot succeed in any major external adventure on which it embarks alone...
...It is questionable whether such an alliance ever really existed...
...But, though Labor is insular and parochial enough, it is not weighed down quite to the same extent by Britain's imperial past...
...Look at Hungary...
...The reason is quite simply that Britain no longer has separate access to Washington...
...To quote the Economist once more: "When this crisis started, many Tories said that the Suez bid would determine whether Britain was to remain a great power or whether it was doomed to become another Sweden or Holland...
...Not...
...It is dubious if any Communist state in Panama would...
...Historic parties just do not commit suicide in this manner...
...The Suez intervention was pressed upon us by the logic of a system which had already substantially declined...
...Whether or not it does is now in a sense unimportant, for after the successive shocks of recent weeks there can in any case be no return to the relationship formerly described—though more often on this side of the ocean—as the "Anglo-American alliance...
...Even if the present crisis passes without a spell of mass unemployment, the psychological effect is going to be lasting...
...The State Department draws no distinction between British and French misbehavior, nor is the White House concerned to restore the semblance of the "Anglo-American alliance...
...All this is well understood by those Conservative leaders whose outlook has been molded by the experiences of the postwar era and who enjoy the confidence of that anonymous entity known as "the City.'' Their problem lies in persuading the Tory rank-and-file that Britain is no longer a great power and cannot afford to conduct a foreign policy in opposition to the United States...
...The Western European countries must, in their own interest, abide by the rule of law...
...Not that its leadership is markedly European in sentiment...
...To that extent, they will also help the Conservative Government to stay in office...
...That, indeed, is one of the many reasons why it is now becoming probable that Labor will win the next election and thereafter be the permanent majority parly...
Vol. 39 • November 1956 • No. 51
