Britain West of Pearl Harbor

...Aside from the United States, which, as we know, has policekeeping obligations throughout the entire world, Britain is the only nation maintaining large overseas garrisons...

...No sooner was Malaysia created, of course, than it was "confronted" by Sukarno, who promised to destroy it by terrible, nameless deeds...

...for whatever it costs, it is cheaper, easier and a good deal more effective for Britain to maintain the Anglo-American military presence East of Suez than for the United States to take it over...

...And these garrisons are inordinately expensive for Britain, a nation plagued by chronic economic headaches...

...If Harold Wilson ever stops to wonder why his head is being patted in Washington, he should not have to think very long...

...If that hole could be plugged, Britain could double her gold reserves in 12 years...

...All these bases, it was contended, were necessary as staging areas for the Far East, for the big base in Singapore...

...This is one way of looking at Asia's problems, and it is one which certainly has its advocates in Washington, but it is not the only one...

...Once military protection was provided by the garrison, the fleet and the staging areas, political protection was sought by creating a new state around the base...

...It is an impressive margin on the surface, but to get it Wilson had to call in some 100 peers and Cabinet ministers who ordinarily do not vote in such conferences, and had to ignore the implication of some 80 abstentions...

...He has committed Britain East of Suez not only because it pleases the Americans-intimate ties with Washington being the cardinal, indeed probably the only, point of his foreign policy-but because he sincerely believes that a Western military presence is the key to peace and security in Asia...

...They stayed on in the Middle East because they said they had to be assured of a supply of oil, although the other European nations found that the Arabs were perfectly happy to sell the stuff and did not have to be coerced...

...Thus the British find themselves saddled with overseas police-keeping functions which a good part of the electorate seems to reject, which are largely unwanted by the people living in the areas except for financial profit to be gained from the bases, which have been irrelevant in assuring Britain a steady supply of oil from the Middle East, which are inadequate to any full-scale conflict in which the Chinese may be involved, and which are militarily superfluous now that Malaysia is no longer being "confronted" by Indonesia...

...Presumably as much as is necessary...

...Together these arguments-especially the UN appeal, which always brings a tear to a good Socialist's eye-convinced most of the Labor party and they gave the Prime Minister a vote of confidence by 225-54...

...Franklin Roosevelt told the British it was time to start packing their bags in Asia, and after the independence of India it looked as though London really agreed...

...As it turned out, nothing of the sort happened...

...Harold Wilson gave another masterful performance, in which he listed four reasons why Britain had to stay East of Suez...

...In Britain they call it East of Suez, but it is the same problemfinancial woes aside-that lies at the heart of the agonizing debate over Vietnam in the United States...

...Examined more closely, East of Suez turns out to be West of Pearl Harbor, a British branch office of the U.S...

...What the Labor rebels demanded was the promise of significant cuts in defense commitments in the Far East by the 1969-70 budget...

...All of the other free-world nations of similar resources, such as France, Germany, Canada and Japan, have studiously avoided any gendarmery activities that Washington has tried to impose upon them...

...The result was Malaysia: a conglomeration of possessions whose boundaries were inspired mostly by the fear of the Malays that they might be outnumbered by those of Chinese ancestry...

...Further, it is difficult to see why Britain, of all the oil-importing nations of Europe, should find it necessary to maintain Middle East bases in order to assure itself of fuel...

...As far as the mammoth base at Singapore is concerned, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew has sworn he would dismantle it before he would allow it to fall into American hands...

...None of this, however, was reflected in the government's White Paper on defense, which calls for an indefinite commitment East of Suez, including the huge base at Singapore...

...Every year they eat up about $280 million in scarce foreign exchange-an amount equal to 8 per cent of the central gold and foreign exchange reserves of the sterling area...

...But the only alternative is massive transfusions from abroad, specifically from the United States, to keep the pound sterling afloat...

...Ronald Steel, author of The End of Alliance, is The New Leader's roving European correspondent...

...The important question is how much will Britain be paid for her deputy sheriff work in the form of U.S...

...Unless the British are willing to impose a settlement on everybody from Asia to Singapore, which they certainly have neither the means nor the inclination to do, it is difficult to see how their scattered military garrisons are going to do anything but drain their currency in a show of empty pomp...

...Although the sacred name of the United Nations often passes Wilson's lips, he has never indicated why it should fall upon Britain to set itself up as an honorary UN peace-keeping force, particularly in areas where its influence cannot possibly be decisive without the full support of the United States...

...First, there was the question of British influence in Asia: Are we simply going to "tell other people what they ought to do," he asked ingenuously, or are we going to help them do it...

...A nation which owes nearly $3 billion to foreign bankers, they argue, should not be spending $700 million on defending people who do not even feel in any particular danger...

...This suggests that if Britain is determined to be involved in the area, it might more profitably devote its efforts to building up local economies and local armies which would not be fiefs of the Western powers and thus might have some popular support...

...In this vast stretch of the globe which extends to Singapore and beyond, America and Britain now find themselves in common cause playing the role of peacekeeper...

...The challengers have been a mixed lot, collected from Labor's left, right and center, and their motives have been equally mixed: The left wants Britain to stop playing America's deputy sheriff in the Far East, the right believes that the British are wasting their money protecting people who are not in any particular danger, and the center feels that the end of "confrontation" should lead to a massive withdrawal of British forces from their garrisons in Southeast Asia...

...If the people of Singapore want the British base to remain, it may well be that their chief motive is financial...

...Americans, of course, grew up considering this to be colonialism and therefore immoral...

...A worthy motive, no doubt, but not one which the British taxpayer can be expected to support...

...Last fall the Conservative's brilliant shadow defense minister, Enoch Powell, set himself up as the leader of the opposition to globalism, British-style, by declaring that the limits of Communist advance in Africa and Asia would in the end be fixed by a balance of forces which is itself African and Asian: "We have to reckon with the harsh fact that the ultimate attainment of this equilibrium of forces may at some point be delayed rather than hastened by a Western military presence...

...That it will not be plugged is a foregone conclusion...

...Third, whatever the Chinese menace may be, it has so far manifested itself mostly through Peking's support for "wars of national liberation," against which bases like Singapore are useless...

...The base was there to save Malaysia, just as Malaysia had been promulgated to save the base...

...Open revolt was in the air and there was talk of 100 MPs voting against the government in the Parliamentary Labor party conference...

...Finally: Commonwealth interests and existing commitments had to be honored...

...Nevertheless, on paper the Prime Minister won his majority and beat back the revolt in the ranks...

...They were eventually kicked out of Suez, but found Aden a suitable replacement...

...Prompted by a desire to cut these lingering post-imperial commitments East of Suez, a group of Labor MPs recently challenged the government's defense policies in Asia...

...But it was never explained why the base in Singapore was necessary, except that it was already there...

...The only problem is that it did not solve the dilemma of how Britain can maintain its military East of Suez and still keep the economy afloat...

...But just as the President's judgment is coming under increasing attack, so the Prime Minister now finds himself assaulted both from within his own party, and from the Tory Opposition...

...For the British it is an old role, one which goes back to the palmiest days of the Empire and was then designed to restrain the "lesser breeds," as Kipling would say, outside the law...

...He is reported to be one of the few foreign leaders whose arrival does not bring groans of irritation from the White House...

...But now that Labor has a huge majority in Parliament, back-bench MPs feel free to challenge Harold Wilson on questions of policy without fearing that they will bring down the government...

...Harold Wilson, who seems to share Lyndon Johnson's belief that it is up to the West to set the limits to Communism, subversion and disorder in Asia, will no doubt receive the welcome he deserves in Washington...

...policy in Vietnam, and what they did last month by demanding a showdown vote over the defense budget East of Suez...

...Now, however, the policy of "confrontation" is over, the Indonesians and Malaysians have kissed and made up without even asking Britain's permission, and the British are left defending an area which is no longer-if indeed it ever seriously was-under assault...

...This has led a number of Labor MPs to wonder whether operations East of Suez could not now be diminished and British troops eventually brought home...

...This is precisely what they have been doing all along on the question of Wilson's support for U.S...

...After working through the precarious state of the pound sterling, the disintegration of NATO, the perfidies of the French and the intractability of the Rhodesians, they will no doubt settle down to their mutual headaches in that part of the world which Harold Wilson has labelled, in a revealingly Kiplingesque phrase, "East of Suez...

...None of this is to suggest that Harold Wilson is acting basely or had to have his arm twisted...

...But responsibilities, once assumed, die hard...

...Third: British power in the area is necessary in order to help out the United Nations, "neutralize Asian trouble-spots," and even avert a "nuclear holocaust" between America and China...

...Since there is no reason to suppose that the people of Singapore would spend money on the same scale that the British are spending it for them, the degree of the commitment is clearly in excess of the need...

...Second, on the question of power: Do we want to abandon Asia to America, Russia and China...

...Instead of bringing back their troops and shuttering up their bases as the French and the Dutch had done, the British lingered on nearly everywhere they could: in Cyprus, Suez, Aden, the Persian Gulf, the Middle East and all the way through to Singapore...

...Thus when the Prime Minister comes to Washington later this month, the two should have a very pleasant chat about their common problems...

...More British troops, ships and planes were rushed to Singapore, making it probably the best-defended city in the world, and the base at last found its justification...

...And since the base was there, it had to be protected-with a garrison of 60,000 men, a Far East fleet of 80 ships, 300 military aircraft, and a defense bill of nearly $700 million dollars...

...constabulary now extending its beneficent arms all the way around the world...

...It is Washington which has urged the British to maintain their bases and their garrisons East of Suez for perfectly valid reasons: because the United States finds it too expensive and too politically difficult to take over these bases itself...

...help for the ailing pound...