April 5, 2013

Finest Hour 155, Summer 2012

Page 58

The Relationship Matured: Britannia Still Ruled SomeWaves

By Alan P. Dobson and Steve Marsh

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Drs. Dobson (St. Andrews University) and Marsh (Cardiff University) are co-authors of U.S. Foreign Policy since 1945. Dr. Dobson is writing a book about Roosevelt and the development of U.S. civil aviation; Dr. Marsh’s specialties are Anglo-American relations and EU foreign and security policy.


President Obama in May 2011 said a close Anglo-American relation “doesn’t just have to do with our shared history, our shared heritage, our ties of language and culture, or even the strong partnership between our governments. Our relationship is special because of the values and beliefs that have united our people through the ages.”1

It would seem to the joy of some and the chagrin of others, that the Anglo-American Special Relationship has endured into the 21st century. But there are sceptics who see such statements as empty sentimental rhetoric and are inclined to enquire: where’s the beef? Well, currently, the USA and the UK enjoy the world’s largest bilateral investment relationship. Their trade in goods and services amounts to around £120 billion a year; they share the world’s largest venture capital markets; approximately one million Americans work for British companies in the USA; and approximately one million Britons work for American companies in the UK. Over seven million people cross the Atlantic each year between Britain and the USA and of those travellers about 33,000 of them are Americans coming to study in Britain and 9000 Britons going to study in the USA. Further examples of these complicated relationships were cited in these pages by former U.S. Ambassador to Britain Raymond Seitz.2

Anglo-American intelligence and nuclear cooperation is closer than between any other two countries and Britain has supplied military contingents second only to the USA in the First and Second Gulf Wars and in Afghanistan.3 The institutions of global governance largely remain those fashioned by Britain and America in the aftermath of World War II. English remains the lingua franca of international business and Anglo-American culture flows around the globe more freely now than at any time in the past. For some, the UK and USA even form the core of an emergent “network civilisation,” the Anglosphere.

Numerous studies have enquired into the origins, nature and even existence of all this, and there is a Manichean divide between the schools of sentiment and interest. The former see shared values, culture, democratic principles, and kinship leading on to habits of cooperation about how to deal with international issues. The latter see shared and overlapping national interests forming a utility or functional relationship that will be “special” only while common interests abide and each side can be of importance to the other.

Edward Ingram denied the Special Relationship ever existed, Max Beloff and John Dickie wrote of it respectively as a myth in the 1960s and as “being no more” in the 1990s, while H.C. Allen professed its strong reality in the 1950s and David Reynolds its resilient if changing continuity in the 1990s. At the start of the 21st century Robert Kagan wrote of Europeans, including the British, as being so different from Americans in their reluctance, even moral inability, to wield hard power, that it was almost as if they were from Venus and Mars respectively. His thesis quickly ran up against Prime Minister Tony Blair standing with President George W. Bush and committing substantial numbers of British troops to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.3 One commentator observed of their meeting in March 2003: “The choreography of the Camp David war council, so reminiscent of the FDR-Churchill meetings on that very spot, seemed to echo the greatest moments of the Anglo-American Alliance.”4

Amidst all this controversy it is fascinating to find a constant that all sides can agree upon: the seminal importance of Winston Churchill. Churchill was half American, his life a boy’s own adventure: heroics in the Boer War, First Lord of the Admiralty in the First World War, Prime Minister and triumphant war leader in the Second World War, peacetime premier in 1951-55. Along the way he was a noted journalist, historian, accomplished painter and builder of brick walls; also a political turn-coat, an enthusiastic imperialist, an ardent drinker and cigar smoker, and an occasional if not serious depressive (see page 28).

His self-confidence is legendary. In the mid-1950s when his grandson Nicholas Soames, then about six years old, had the temerity to enter his grandfather’s study at Chartwell, impudently asking if granddad were the greatest man in the world, without any hesitation Churchill replied: “Yes—now bugger off.”5

But what concerns us here is what he publicly dubbed, in his 1946 Fulton, Missouri Iron Curtain speech, the Anglo-American Special Relationship. Churchill was present at its creation. He gave Anglo- American relations distinctiveness in the sentiment of “fraternal association.” He had a vision of a Special Relationship that married interest with sentiment in an inextricable bond: “If the population of the English-speaking Commonwealths be added to that of the United States with all that such cooperation implies in the air, on the sea, all over the globe and in science and in industry, and in moral force, there will be…an overwhelming assurance of security.”6 How did Churchill fashion Anglo-American relations to his vision? And to what success?

Churchill and Roosevelt met briefly in London in 1918 but not until Roosevelt’s presidency did relations develop between them, when Churchill sent him a copy of his biography of Marlborough “With earnest best wishes for the success of the greatest crusade of modern times.”7 Almost exactly six years later, with war in Europe and Churchill again First Lord of the Admiralty, Roosevelt wrote a letter of warm encouragement, which among other things mentioned that he too had held an important naval position as Assistant Secretary of the Navy.8

Already, then, there was a sense of overlapping experience, a continuity they shared in confronting the threat from Germany. That threat provided the grounds for common national interests, which married with shared sentiment regarding common cultural inheritances and political values—held by many of their fellow nationals—to produce the beginnings of the modern Special Relationship.

Isolationist public opinion and its Neutrality Laws required the USA to remain aloof from the crisis in Europe, but in September 1940, after the narrow margin of victory in the Battle of Britain, Roosevelt improvised aid to Britain with the Destroyers for Bases agreement. From Britain’s perspective the practical importance of the destroyers, which were elderly and in need of refitting, was not great, but the deal was of huge symbolic importance. This was the opening step on the path to dependency, with the USA and the UK locked together in an evolving Special Relationship based on sentiment and interest from which, it is argued, they have never since radically departed.9

Even before Pearl Harbor President Roosevelt promised to lend and lease Britain supplies and consummated that with the master Lend-Lease Bill in early 1941. In August that year Roosevelt and Churchill met off Newfoundland and sketched out a liberal and democratic future for the world in the Atlantic Charter. They later jested about the fact that it was not signed and they had no copies of it, but it was an iconic statement of general principles that was later to inform much of postwar planning. With American entry into the war came the Combined Chiefs of Staff, Combined Supply Boards, intelligence and technology sharing (including production of the atomic bomb), planning for what became the United Nations, and a new economic world order, and a mass mingling of the two nations as hundreds of thousands of GIs poured into Britain in preparation for D-Day. After it was all over, thousands of British war brides accompanied their American husbands back to the USA.

Former Prime Minister James Callaghan believed that “the Second World War was the apogee of the Special Relationship.”10 These were the days, as President Obama noted in May 2011, when “Roosevelt and Churchill could sit in a room and solve the world’s problems over a glass of brandy.”11 Concomitantly, though, the war years accelerated a significant structural change in UK-USA relations; the latter assumed super-power status and the former slipped progressively to middle-power status. British relative decline has often been seen as undermining the “specialness” in Anglo-American relations; for Churchill it was certainly contrary to his vision of a family partnership of equals.

Reassuming the British helm in 1951, Churchill immediately sought opportunity to demonstrate to the world that he was determined to restore Anglo-American relations and British prestige, which he felt the Attlee government had let slip.12 He wanted to resurrect intimate Anglo-American relations with President Truman, and to secure overt demonstrations of Britain’s special status with Washington, which would buttress British prestige and ease challenges to British power in the Developing World. No more in 1951 than during the war was Churchill willing to preside over what he saw as the unnecessary diminishing of British power and influence. He got his opportunity in January 1952 when he went to Washington for a summit meeting with Truman.

That meeting reveals much about Churchill’s ambitions and the extent to which he was able to achieve them. Part of his aim was to recreate the public impression of Anglo-American closeness and demonstrate Britain’s determination to pull its own weight. In this, facilitated by American desire for improved relations, he was quite successful, and returned home in a good mood.13

Churchill made to American officials what he called “the UK’s form of a declaration of independence”: the British government would take the necessary measures, and its people would accept the sacrifices, to deal with their internal problems.14 The Truman administration obligingly covered the reality of British economic dependence on the United States by dressing up assistance as a raw material exchange. They also afforded Churchill the privilege for the third time of addressing a joint session of Congress, which he used to promote the health and well-being of Anglo-American relations. The Foreign Office deemed the speech “a personal triumph” and British Ambassador Franks later reported from Washington that the summit had “reaffirmed and strengthened” the Special Relationship with “closer partnership and renewed personal trust.”15

Yet, while the Americans admired and even feared Churchill—his private secretary Jock Colville recalled that “the White House and the State Department clutched their life-belts and prepared to repel boarders”16—there were limits to their indulgence and what they would accept. They rebuffed Churchill’s penchant for free-ranging talks by insisting on an agreed summit agenda and refused to recreate formal structures of Anglo-American cooperation akin to the Combined Boards of World War II. This reflected a fundamental difference over the presentation of the special relationship. As Secretary of State Dean Acheson later recalled, “The British want to insist that there should be an exclusive UK-USA arrangement; that we do it together. We are always insisting that we can’t do that.”17

In Washington Churchill aimed also to dispel the doldrums into which he felt many British officials had slipped, and to emphasise that Anglo-American relations depended on mutual consideration. Britain was not to be taken for granted. Negotiations over naval commands offer insights into his concerns. The Attlee government had accepted a unified command in the Atlantic with an American Supreme Allied Commander (SACLANT), which Churchill vociferously opposed. He deemed the arrangements operationally unsound and a grave threat to British prestige and Britain’s privileged place in the naval defence of the West.

Churchill privately acknowledged his weakened hand on account of the widening asymmetry in Anglo-American relations and that he might ultimately have to concede SACLANT to the Americans. Nevertheless, aboard the Queen Mary bound for America, he insisted British officials prepare arguments against this, advocating instead a de facto Anglo-American naval condominium in the Atlantic that would secure British security interests and strengthen the Special Relationship. The Americans predictably balked but Churchill held out to the last, even against the expert counsel of his own officials.

His brinksmanship paid dividends. In return for finally conceding SACLANT, he secured operational changes, involving the British Home Station, and flexibility of command in the eastern Atlantic that ensured British control over vital aspects of British security. The Americans were pushed into recognising a de facto naval Special Relationship by acknowledging a mutual right of withdrawing forces from NATO in dire national emergencies—but that would be kept quiet regarding other NATO allies. British prestige was salved, The Economist opining that “Britannia still rules some waves.” Churchill sent clear warnings, both to British officials against unhealthy obeisance to the Americans, and to the Americans that though Britain paid heavily for maintaining the Special Relationship, the U.S. too had to pay a price for close interdependence.18

Sixty years on from that 1952 summit, Churchill remains synonymous with the Special Relationship. His personal power of words had called it into being; while out of office after the war he lost no opportunity to promote through his writing and speaking the cultural and sentimental bonds between the two countries. Returned to office, he worked to restore it. Over time, in life and death, he became the embodiment of the Special Relationship; his bust sat in the Oval Office and Churchill busts are now ordained for both the Pentagon and the House of Representatives side of the Capitol building.

It is perhaps fitting that a quip by arguably the least anglophile post-World War II President, Barack Obama, should capture so well Churchill’s ongoing Anglo-American legacy. At a White House state dinner for British Prime Minister David Cameron in March 2012, Obama declared:

“I intended to make history tonight. I thought that I could be the first American president to make it through an entire visit of our British friends without quoting Winston Churchill. But then I saw this great quote and I thought, ‘Come on, this is Churchill.’ So I couldn’t resist.”19


Endnotes

1. President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron, joint article for The Times, 23 May 2011, accessed 15 June 2012, http://xrl.us/bnc7jx.

2. Raymond P. Seitz, “All in the Same Boat,” Finest Hour 151, Summer 2011, 22-26. U.S. Census Bureau, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the British-American Business.com websites. See also M. Calingaert, “The Special Relationship—Economic and Business Aspects: American Perspectives,” in J.D. McCausland and D.T. Stuart, eds., U.S.-U.K. Relations at the Start of the 21st Century (Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2006), electronic version.

3. Edward Ingram, “The Wonderland of the Political Scientist,” International Security 22 (Summer 1997): 53-63. Max Beloff, “The Special Relationship: An Anglo-American Myth,” in Martin Gilbert, ed., A Century of Conflict: Essays for A.J.P. Taylor (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1966), 151-71. John Dickie, Special No More: Anglo-American Relations; Rhetoric and Reality (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994). Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Knopf, 2003). H.C. Allen, Great Britain and the United States: A History of Anglo-American Relations 1783-1952 (London: Odhams Press, 1954). David Reynolds, “A ‘Special Relationship’? America, Britain and the International Order since the Second World War,” International Affairs, 62(i), Winter 1985/86, 1-20. The most up to date bibliography on Anglo-American relations is in Alan P. Dobson and Steve Marsh, eds., Anglo-American Relations: Contemporary Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2012).

4. A. Sullivan, “Winds of War Are Blowing Britain away from Europe,” The Sunday Times, 30 March 2003.

5. Roy Jenkins, Churchill (London: Macmillan, 2001), 849n.

6. Churchill, “The Sinews of Peace,” Fulton, Missouri, 1946.

7. Churchill to Roosevelt, 8 October 1933 in Warren F. Kimball, ed., Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, 3 vols. (London: Collins, 1984), I 23.

8. Roosevelt to Churchill, 11 September 1939 in Ibid., I 24

9. See David Haglund, “Is There a ‘Strategic Culture’ of the Special Relationship?” in Dobson and Marsh, eds., Anglo- American Relations.

10. Interview with Lord Callaghan, conducted by Dobson, House of Commons, 26 November 1987.

11. The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, Remarks by the President to Parliament in London, United Kingdom, 25 May 2011.

12. Alan P. Dobson, Anglo-American Relations in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 1995), 90-100. Steve Marsh, Anglo-American Relations and Cold War Oil (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003).

13. Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: Norton, 1969), 594.

14. FRUS 1952-54, vol. 6, part 1, 747: U.S. Delegation minutes of the first formal meeting of President Truman and Prime Minister Churchill at the White House, 7 January 1952.

15. British National Archives, London, FO 371/97588: Washington Embassy to FO, “Survey of American Regional Press Comment on Mr. Churchill’s Address to Congress, 1 February 1952.” FO 371/97593: Franks to Eden, 27 January 1952.

16. John Colville, Footprints in Time (London: Collins, 1976), 233.

17. Harry S. Truman Library, Acheson Papers, box 75, folder 1, Princeton Seminar 11-13, December 1953, reel 1, track 2, page 12.

18. “Britannia Rules Some Waves,” in The Economist, 26 January 1952. A more detailed account is in Alan P. Dobson and Steve Marsh, “Churchill at the Summit: SACLANT and the Tone of Anglo-American Relations in January 1952,” The International History Review, 32ii, 2010, 211-29.

19. Video and transcript of President Obama’s exchange of toasts with Prime Minister Cameron during a state dinner on the South Lawn of the White House, Thursday 15 March 2012, accessed 15 June 2012, http://xrl.us/bnc7kd.

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