The Special Relationship: Anglo-American Relations Since 1945

Book Notes #45

The Special Relationship is a compilation of essays produced from a collaboration between the Ditchley Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The essays are the papers from a conference between their scholars, with additions made as a result of the conference. The “Special Relationship” was evoked or appraised with skepticism at the conference, but the actual topic of the conference was the relations between the United States and Britain since 1945. Whether the “Special Relationship” is myth or fact will be explored in this book.

The first essay by David Watt acknowledges what was in the previous book I reviewed, which is that prior to the World War II, Americans and Britons alike thought little of each other, if anything at all. The so-called “Special Relationship” was invoked by British politicians over a very short period of time, even for a young nation like America.

A previous owner of my book underlined these lines in red ink:

“namely, that the underlying basis of the Anglo-American relationship has always been interest and not, in the first place, emotion.”

and

That second sentence is a bit odd; it occurs in this context, on page three:

“In its broad outlines, the historical framework of the last forty-five years illustrates this proposition. The United States was confronted in 1940, as in 1916, with the prospect that its interests, which had become global, would be seriously threatened if the balance in Europe were destroyed and the continent dominated by a single power. the destruction of France not only made this a very possible outcome, and would almost certainly have forced America into hte war eventually, irrespective of the Japanese attack. It also made the alliance with Britain obligatory; no other serious resistance to Germany was available.”

This underscores the interpretation of the Second World War repeated by Thomas777, which is that Hitler understood that Europe would have to become a continental power to rival the United States if it were to maintain its sovereignty from the US. The elimination of the Soviet Union as a competitor was precursor to that. The apparent alliance between Third Reich and the Soviet Union eliminated the Soviets as a partner for the US, so they went to Britain. This is what David Watt puts forward, and in power-political terms, it is basically accurate. After the war, Britain remained a power through which the United States could try to contain the Soviet Union, so the relationship persisted.

P. 4

“At the point we have now reached, Britain is still an important ally of the United States. She remains, moreover, a more important ally than her size and economic strength would justify, for her situation has some unique features. Possession of nuclear weapons, membership of the Security Council, access to political and military intelligence, political stability, and willingness (at any rate hitherto) to devote an unusually high proportion of GNP to military purposes all these are valuable to the United States. British membership of the European Community is an asset of even greater importance, but it is an ambiguous one. On the one hand, so long as Britain maintains her Atlantic outlook, it helps to keep the Europeans from neutralist and protectionist excesses. On the other hand there is a dual risk: first, that Britain will be seduced into European heresies herself and, second, that a Britain that appears to be too close to the United States will be regarded by her Community partners as a ‘bad European’ and will therefore lose her utility. This situation ensures that British views are taken into account in certain specific areas of policy. But they are no longer strong enough to ensure either (a) a purely British veto over any single American policy (except where, as in the case of bases in Britain, British sovereignty is directly involved) or (b) a purely British ability to influence the general direction of American foreign policy.”

There are a number of observations here. Extracting what Mr. Watt does not exactly want to admit, Britain is not actually a very important country and only enjoys outsize importance because of a few managed properties and a carefully balanced relationship with Europe, and that Britain can no longer exercise any special influence over US foreign policy.

The “Special Relationship” was a creation of Churchill in order to guide public opinion to be more amenable to cooperation with the United States; but, it did not stop America from acting contrary to it even in its heyday, and “most traumatically of all,” acting against Britain during the Suez Crisis.

Underlined in pencil, perhaps by a different previous owner, is another important observation on page ten:

“British policy-makes have usually had a pretty hard-headed appreciation of what they were doing in relation to the United States. Stated crudely, their purpose has been to use the American connection to maintain British interests and security at a reasonable financial cost. They from time to time miscalculated the degree to which the Americans would permit themselves to be manipulated or underestimated the price they would exact, but the fundamental British illusion has had much more to do with the old vision of Britain as a major independent actor on the world stage than with any profound belief in the combined destiny of the English-speaking peoples.”

The post-Suez era was the third phase of British declension, after the loss of the Commonwealth and the Empire. In this phase, “Britain was running out of entry cards in Washington, and was ‘losing out,’ as the phrase went, in Europe as well.” Britain

The next essay is actually by David Reynolds, who wrote the Rich Relations book I just reviewed, although that book would not have been published for another ten years.

Reynolds writes about how Winston Churchill basically fabricated the “Special Relationship” in his postwar speeches, and his reinforcement of the general idea in his histories of the Second World War were taken “definitive for statesmen, scholars, and public on both side of the Atlantic.”

Reynolds warns us literally against revisionist history that emphasizes America's dominance over Britain and the “unforeseen and unique” crisis that created the alliance—that being the fall of France. When these regime historians warn against “revisionism,” they are actually warning against their own profession. As with the book by Reynolds I previously reviewed, their interest is not really in “doing history” but in protecting the post-was consensus. Although historical research is done for their books, the books themselves are not really history books per se; they are propaganda. Reynolds tells us that “F.D.R., though anxious to see Hitler contained, had no wish to become embroiled in another European war.” As another book I have reviewed argues, there is much reason to doubt that as well.

In any case, Reynolds continues and writes about how “invisible earnings” were at the foundations of Britain's economic order—earnings from shipping and financial services. American decolonization foreign policy directly undermined this power, and Britain sought more “informal” means of maintaining its great power status, such as utilizing the “manpower and resources” of India and “resource development in Britain's African territories, and “alternative centers of British military power in the Middle East.”

During the Great Depression, Great Britain imposed protectionist economics for the empire with the Imperial Preference system. Roosevelt wanted a “multilateral world economy” for the post-wat consensus.

P. 32:

“After prolonged negotiations in 1941-2 the State Department secured a general (and not unambiguous) commitment that part of the repayment for Lend-Lease would be an end to British economic discrimination. Similarly, in 1943-4 London's approval of the largely American drafts for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank reflected her need to secure the continuation of Lend-Lease after Germany's defeat. And at the end of 1945 Britain's ratification of the Bretton Woods agreements and her commitment to sterling convertibility by 1947 was extracted from a resentful Parliament only because the abrupt termination of Lend-Lease that August (again in response to US domestic pressures) left the UK reliant upon an American loan tied to this ratification.”

Reynolds seems to give Roosevelt the benefit of the doubt that America ended up dominating and being responsible for supposedly “international” institutions. Britain “benefitted” from these arrangements that formed a “Special Relationship” in that Washington and London imposed a new international order on the world, but Britain can only be said to have “benefitted” in the sense that it was at least able to have a say in the way it would be incorporated into the American post-war order, unlike many other countries.

Churchill espoused the importance of the Special Relationship likely to caution the British elite against going against America. It was really a “Special Dependence.” America was happy to allow Britain its great power pretenses so long as Britain played within the same rules as everyone else.

The British themselves maintained delusions of grandeur that would allow themselves to think their superior statesmanship would allow them to maintain an equal footing in the partnership.

To the extent any “Special Relationship” existed, it was in intelligence sharing and cooperation on nuclear weapons.

In analyzing why the wartime alliance existed at all, Reynolds argued that there was a “sense of shared threat and mutual need” because “for disarmed America the British Isles and its fleet were initially the last bastion against Hitler and later the essential base for liberating the continent of Europe.”

What does this even mean? America was so “disarmed” that a country (Germany) which couldn't even assault an island directly off its territory (Britain) was a threat to America, across the Atlantic? And America was so “disarmed” that Germany was a threat, even though America clearly wasn't disarmed enough to not be able to strike back at the Japanese? The British fleet was essential, even though America possessed a fleet sufficient to survive a surprise attack by the Japanese? And Europe has to be “liberated” from… itself?

People like Reynolds are unable to see the naked aggression of the United States and Britain, and for that reason, the wartime alliance and thus the“Special Relationship” always remains something that was necessary and just makes sense because of this or that reason, such as “shared language” and “a tradition of liberal, capitalist democracy.”

I suspect that to the extent the subsequent essays address the origins of the “Special Relationship,” we will see the same failure to comprehend parts of it’s nature, such as that it was an alliance of a severely weakend maritime power with a rising powerful maritime power, an alliance not made so that the weakened empire (Britain) could maintain its empire, but so that it could pursue an ideological-religious war against a land power (Germany). The talk of need and necessity simply obfuscates the manifest lack of any such need or necessity.

Chapter Three’s essay begins with a paragraph:

“Secretary of State Dean Acheson once discovered British and American diplomats working on a paper defining their countries' 'Special Relationship'. Horrified, he ordered all copies of 'the wretched paper' to be destroyed.¹ The Secretary believed that a special relationship did indeed exist. But he knew that efforts to define it would raise severe difficulties, since the British, who had coined the term and almost monopolized its use, woud seek to define it in expansive terms. Acheson feared that formalization of a privileged British position vis-à-vis the United States would disturb other allies and horrify American opinion.”

This essay highlights some differences between the the Truman Administration and the British Government. The British were not given nuclear secrets after the initial cooperation on the Manhattan Project. British imperial interests in Iran were not defended when Iran nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Instead, the U.S. worked to get negotiations going. Truman supported Jewish statehood and immigration into Palestine while leaving the responsibility for it with the British. The Americans pushed for a plan to make the Pound Sterling convertible as part of a $3.75 billion loan. U.S. aid to Greece replaced the British, as they were no longer able to match the U.S.’s ability to provide funds, and were denied a special level of partnership in aid to Greece above other European powers that would have given Britain an at least semi-independent role. Britain was denied a more privileged Anglo-American-Canadian military alliance in favor of NATO with commitments to Europe and more German deindustrialization and rearmament than the British would have liked. The Americans and British also differed over China and whether or not the government in Peking ought to be recognized.

D. Cameron Watt of Oxford in the next essay writes:

P. 72:

“Any historian of Anglo-American relations who contemplates the history of the 1950s can only be struck by the contrast between the rhetoric and the realities of alliance.”

It appears that he will argue that the 1950s had a perception of British decline and not actual.

P. 73:

“If, as seems at least arguable, those perceptions were mistaken, and if what was significant in the history of the 1950s was not the actual decline of British power but the general belief in its occurrence, then the contemporary historian will face a dual task: first, of examining the working out of the effects of those misperceptions, and secondly, of explaining how they came to arise.”

Mr. Watt does indeed seem to take the ultra-cope stance that British decline was a side-effect of misunderstanding and perception rather than the actual intended policy of the United States.

P. 73:

“In no sphere does this task seem so essential as in the assessment of Anglo-American relations in the 1950s. Not only was this the period in which what, at least on the American side, had been intended to be a temporary military and economic commitment and, at least on the British side, had been hoped was a temporary dependence, became seemingly permanent; it was also the period in which the decline of British prestige and authority became perceived as irreversible. To that process of decline American policy and American misperceptions were perhaps, outside political and economic mismanagement of economic development and investment in Britain, the major contributor.”

While it is true that “British decline” was not the spelled out, formal policy of the United States as a goal in and of itself, it was concomitant with America’s policy of not entertaining any Schmittian exceptions for the British in the case of “international law.” British power depended on a right to imperial holdings which were anathema to America foreign policy.

P. 74:

“What the historian, assessing the history of Anglo-American relations in the 1950s, has to do is to explain why American policy-makers so misunderstood the power relationship between Britain and the United States in the 1950s; why they failed to understand the degree to which the sources of British power and influence were at risk in the 1950s, and the degree to which their own actions and policies were contributing to translating these risks into reality; and why they failed to understand the degree to which the consequences of their actions and policies were weakening America's own position by extending the areas in which American interests were vulnerable, where Britain's presence had once protected them.”

This just seems like the exact same kind of nonsense the British revanchists in the 1950s believed, but I guess we'll see what his points are.

P. 74:

“So far as the consequences of American actions are concerned, they can be seen in four areas: in the destruction of the British position in the Middle East begun in the 1940s in Palestine and Saudi Arabia; in the polarization of conflict in Indo-China and South-east Asia inherent in American policy toward South Vietnam and Indonesia; in the failure to take more advantage of the succession crisis in the Soviet Union on Stalin's death; and in the persistent US pressure for the loosening or dismantlement of the sterling area, and of sterling as the most important alternative to the dollar as one of the world's great trading currencies.”

That last one… oh boy. How can he not understand that the strength of the Pound Sterling made it a competitor to the dollar, something to be destroyed? This is the sort of basic cluelessness that pervades historians.

P. 80:

“It is high time that American historians of Anglo-American or American-European relations in the NATO period begin demythologizing American historiography on this point. It is too late perhaps to disillusion the present generation of American policy-makers. But there are always their successors to consider.

Underlying this historiographical problem there is another question which needs the most serious examination. Did the American obsession with the federalizing of Western Europe ever make sense? The Community of today in no way resembles the vision pursued with such vigour by Harriman and Hoffman, among others, under the Truman Administration. The political obsession with European unity in the form of the European Defence Community delayed the rearmament of West Germany for four crisis-fraught years. The belief that Euratom and the Treaty of Rome were the pathfinders for a federal Europe played directly into the hands of President de Gaulle and threatened to confront America with a closed trade group entirely alien to American economic doctrine. In 1963 the concept of the Multilateral Force was to nullify the effects of America's Cuban missile crisis victory. Its ultimate absurdity was to be seen in 1965-6, when the Pentagon was seriously discussing ‘taking out’ French nuclear capacity and de Gaulle expelled NATO’s headquarters from Paris. The American pursuit of European unity, or rather the attempt to force it on reluctant allies, has resulted in the separation of European defence co-operation in NATO from European economic, financial, and political relationships in the European Community. For more than thirty years American political discussion of relations with her European allies, and the historiography of those years of discussion, has been obsessed with the pursuit of an illusion. ‘To dream the impossible dream’ may have been an admirable characteristic in Don Quixote. It does, however, seem an odd basis for the conduct of the foreign policy of a superpower, and an even odder concept for its historians to take on board.”

Mr. Watt doesn’t follow the the logical conclusion of America being a “superpower.” If America’s NATO policy weakens Europe, then of course it makes sense. A superpower neither needs nor tolerates other powerful states.

Mr. Watt was also upset by American anti-colonialism. His contention is that a less aggressive anti-colonialism on America’s part would have led to more “progressive” and stable, independent rule in the colonies. The question is, is this something America would have wanted? Mr. Watt assumes the the colonies would have followed a certain “progressive” path, although the British intention at Suez suggests it may have been otherwise. Indeed, America’s policy to driving the Europeans out of their colonies ensured that America had no colonial competitors in its “free market” global economics, as the new enormous Navy secured the seas. Mr. Watt presumes that America was interested in “stability” and the interests of its “allies,” as opposed to something else.

P. 81:

“The last contention is that in yielding to the illusions of anti-colonialism America did a great deal to render more difficult the inevitable transition from European nineteenth-century colonial rule to independence. The history of the British, French, and Dutch overseas empires had shown long before John Foster Dulles became Secretary of State the transition of imperial thought from direct colonial rule to the development of colonial governments in which the indigenous inhabi-tants were to play an increasingly prominent and important part. The problem was, of course, enormously complicated where, as in the Dutch East Indies, Algeria, Rhodesia or South Africa, a settler population of European origins but native birth had sprung up. In the original dominions the early development of independence and the mass inrush of European settlers internalized such problems so that Amerinds in Canada, Aborigines in Australia, Maoris in New Zealand present problems of interracial relations with which the greatest of all the now independent, once European-settled colonies, the United States itself, is only too familiar.

But in the main body of European colonial territories as they existed in 1939, for example, one could distinguish two forms of colonial rule, the progressive developmental models of French, British, and, after the trauma of Indonesia, Dutch colonial rule, and the stagnant, exploitative model of Belgian, Spanish, and Portuguese rule. Without the heavy external stimulus provided by American anti-colonialism in the early 1950s it is possible to conceive of a more gradual, less pell-mell rush toward independence, one which would have done less to augment the drain on the economies of the colonial powers arising from their attempt to control or halt the pace of decolonization, and more to reduce catastrophes such as the panic Belgian withdrawal from the Congo in 1960 or the gratuitous delivery in 1962-3 of the inhabitants of Western New Guinea to the colonial rule of Indonesia.”

Again, Mr. Watts makes the assumption that America wanted strong allies as opposed to clients. Specifically it is exactly the “international networks of trade” and Britain’s “central role in the management, insurance, and financing of world shipping” that had to be eliminated to make way for the American Thalassocracy. Fundamentally, he doesn’t “get it” when it comes to the Special Relationship.

P. 83:

“Behind the assault on British, French, and Dutch ‘colonialism’, there lay a failure to comprehend the degree of strength the economies of modern Europe drew, not so much from their colonies (which were on the whole a drain on the domestic economies, though, save in time of major colonial campaigns, seldom a very severe drain) as from the international networks of trade, investment, and payments overseas which had come into existence concurrently with the growth of the Victorian colonial empires. Britain’s earnings from the industries generated by her central role in the management, insurance, and financing of world shipping and of the cargoes carried in the world’s shipping, let alone the oil earnings and the banking facilities available to the members of the sterling area, were of the first importance to Britain’s economic well-being. In much the same way the aggressive arms salesmanship of the American military-industrial concept did much to destroy or retard the development of the British and French aerospace industries.”

Mr. Watt’s comments on the “inexperience” of the Americans versus the deeply experienced British ministries belies a fundamental chauvinism that also afflicted the British politicians of the time. It was not the “inexperience” of American bureaucrats that undermined the alliance; they were doing exactly what they were supposed to do to ensure American dominance. The relationship between America, Britain, and Europe was never meant to be one of equal partners.

P. 84:

“British politicians, commenting in retrospect on their experience of the Anglo-American relationship, are inclined to confine their comments to relations between presidents and prime ministers, secretaries of state and presidential advisers on national security problems and foreign secretaries, ambassadors, and senior political appointees to the Pentagon and the State Department. What has repeatedly defeated the achievement of true relations of confidence between allies, or more frequently the maintenance of relations of confidence and co-operation once established, has been the constant entry into the lower levels of presidential, treasury, State, and defence department advisers of new, inexperienced appointees, unlearned in the practices of alliance, culturally single-eyed in their conviction of the innate superiority of the American approach and the American view-point, conscious of American power and honed into competitiveness by the ethos of success, and concerned solely with the response of American constituencies to their actions and advocacies. For such individuals, the doctrine of interdependence, evolved by Macmillan in the last years of the Eisenhower presidency, was essentially rhetorical. The understanding that just as failure to react to the anxieties and interests of the various American constituencies where support was essential to the realization of administrative policy would result in the loss of support in Congress or in the electorate, so failure to heed the anxieties and interests of the differing constituencies of opinion among their allies on the eastern shores of the Atlantic would lead to their alienation and the weakening of inter-Allied co-operation, was a new, alien, and unwelcome doctrine. It was, and is, easier to believe in European ingratitude, European degeneracy, European propensity towards appeasement. Such constituencies after all play no part in the American electoral process and it is through the electoral process that such new entrants are mainly able to emerge. Since 1976, the increasing dominance of American politics by men whose sole experience of politics has been competition to achieve election either for themselves or for those to whose public coat-tails they have attached themselves, has almost driven from American political discussion the issue as to how power once achieved should be exercised, let alone the existence of constituencies in no way part of the American electoral process, yet on whose support the effective exercise of power depends. Successive presidents have brought with them kitchen cabinets of driving, ambitious, yet inexperienced lawyers, business executives and quondam academics, for whom doctrine must of necessity fill the gaps that knowledge and experience simply cannot.”