Britain, America, and the Special Relationship since 1941

B. J. C McKercher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138800007
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351776318
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Britain, America and the Special Relationship since 1941 examines the Anglo-American strategic and military relationship that developed during the Second World War and continued until recent years. Forged on a common ground of social, cultural, and ideological values as well as political expediency, this partnership formed the basis of the western alliance throughout the Cold War, playing an essential part in bringing stability to the post-1945 international order.

Clearly written and chronologically organized, the book begins by discussing the origins of the 'Special Relationship' and its progression from uneasy coexistence in the eighteenth century to collaboration at the start of the Second World War. McKercher explores the continued evolution of this partnership during the conflicts that followed, such as the Suez Crisis, the Vietnam War, and the Falklands War. The book concludes by looking at the developments in British and American politics during the past two decades and analysing the changing dynamics of this alliance over the course of its existence.

Illustrated with maps and photographs and supplemented by a chronology of events and list of key figures, this is an essential introductory resource for students of the political history and foreign policies of Britain and the United States in the twentieth century.

Part I
Prologue

1
The Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship’

The political and military relationship between Great Britain and the United States – the ‘Special Relationship’ – that developed during the Second World War was a strategic partnership. As the basis of the Western alliance during that struggle and the Cold War, it played an essential part in bringing stability to the evolving post-1945 international order. None of this suggests that social, cultural, and even philosophical ties linking the two English-speaking peoples were unimportant – or remain. They possess a common language, a conviction that ordered society finds basis on common law, a belief that capitalism provides the greatest good for the greatest number, and a confidence in liberal democratic governance and religious freedom. Tied to emotion and sentiment, these links underpinned the diplomatic and military relationship. Nor does it mean that the relationship was always smooth or its ‘special’ character universally accepted in each country. The perceived national interests of the two Powers did not always converge after 1941 – sometimes they collided spectacularly. Nonetheless, guided and used by British and American leaders for purely pragmatic reasons, the ‘special’ diplomatic and military relationship developed after September 1939 in a wartime context of expediency and realpolitik shorn of emotion and sentiment. After 1945, recognising its diplomatic and military utility, the foreign-policy-making elites in both states sustained it. Quite simply, working together offered the best means to protect and extend their perceived national interests and, thereby, better ensure international stability.

As indicated above, the ‘Special Relationship’ was unique because of British and American social, cultural, and philosophical bonds. Despite the American Revolution of 1775–1782 and the subsequent almost century of diplomatic unease between London and Washington, Anglo-American relations improved markedly between the end of the American Civil War and the outbreak of the First World War. Transatlantic travel by the upper middle and upper classes of both countries provided appreciation of the traditions, achievements, and ways of life of the other. Marriage between the daughters of wealthy American entrepreneurs and the impecunious sons of the British upper classes became common (Anonymous, 1890) – indeed, Winston Churchill, the British prime minister from 1940 to 1945 and joint-architect of the Relationship, came from such a marriage. Beyond these social ties, a range of artists, musicians, and writers also crossed the Atlantic to learn, paint, sketch, and draw inspiration from a different geography and a slightly dissimilar society with its own attainments and foibles. The works of William Shakespeare naturally underlay literature, drama, and some history in each country. American writers such as Mark Twain, who lived briefly in London and received an honorary Oxford doctorate in 1907, had a wide British audience (Baetzhold, 1970). From the other side of the Atlantic, Oscar Wilde visited the United States in 1882, where he saw a land of opportunity (Wilde, 1956).

Before 1914, increasing numbers of influential British and American politicians, academics, and others appreciated the obvious cultural, economic, and political connexions between the two countries. The Oxford Regis Professor of Civil Law (1873–1890) and Liberal cabinet minister (1892–1895), James Bryce, wrote cogently on America’s political system before being appointed ambassador to Washington (1907–1913) (Bryce, 1888). Maurice Low, long The Times’ Washington correspondent, sought to explain American ‘exceptionalism’ to both the British and American publics (Low, 1909–1911). And Esme Howard, who served under Bryce as counsellor and returned to Washington as ambassador in 1924, recorded:

The fact of the matter is that, unless our two countries should produce some remarkably stupid statesmen, the people inhabiting them are bound and obliged by the force of circumstances to learn that anything approaching serious conflict between them would be not only the most criminal and fratricidal proceeding, but also of such a nature that whatever the outcome, it could only result in such economic and financial loss as could never be compensated by the fruit of victory.

(McKercher 1989: 350–51)

Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican (president 1901–1909), and Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat (president 1913–1921), personified American anglophilia – although each sought to protect American national interests, which sometimes meant resisting what they saw as British inroads (Tilchin and Neu, 2006). Roosevelt believed strongly in pan-Anglo-Saxonism: that America and Britain had to work in tandem to ensure international security in their various spheres of influence. As he wrote a British friend when Germany threatened to build a blue-water navy: ‘I think I have become almost as anxious as you are to have the British fleet kept up to the highest point of efficiency’ and in its ‘present position of relative power…. It is a great guaranty for the peace of the world’ (Morison and Blum, 1952: 1159). Like Bryce, a leading academic before entering politics, Wilson was enamoured of law as the basis for effective and enlightened governance. In his work, he placed British common law and its impact on the evolution of liberal democratic values as crucial and, seeing inefficiencies in American governance, thought that a parliamentary system in the United States based on Britain’s parliamentary model would have greater value than the American congressional system. In an insightful analysis, he remarked: ‘The leaders of English public life have something besides weight of character, prestige of personal service and experience, and authority of individual opinion to exalt them above the anonymous Press. They have definite authority and power in the actual control of government’ (Wilson, 1885: 322).

Augmented by the Americans joining the Entente Powers during the First World War to fight Wilhelmine Germany and its allies, and despite America retreating into political isolationism after 1920, this transnationalism became stronger by the late 1930s. Admittedly, the 1920s and 1930s saw ambivalent political and economic relations between the two Powers, moving from disputes (over economic issues and the naval question) in the 1920s to co-operation (over economic issues and the naval question) in the 1930s (Cohrs, 2006). Nonetheless, James Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour and National Government prime minister (1924, 1929–1931, 1931–1935), stood as an unabashed ‘Atlanticist’ seeking to build on Anglo-American commonalities to better ensure international peace and security (MacDonald to Borah, 1929). Similarly, after resigning as foreign secretary in February 1938, the Conservative Anthony Eden looked on America as a means of underpinning Britain’s ability to confront the challenge mounted by both Nazi Germany and fascist Italy (Eden to Baldwin, 1938). Although not as pro-American in the interwar period as he later made out, Churchill waxed eloquent on the unity of the British and Americans as ‘English-speaking peoples’ by the late 1930s and after re-entering the Cabinet in September 1939 [Document 1]. In the United States, the secretary of state from 1929 to 1933, Henry Stimson, saw Anglo-American co-operation over arms limitation and economic diplomacy as decidedly important in ensuring international stability (Stimson diary 1930). His attitudes were shared by a range of equally influential and well-travelled American statesmen including amongst others Norman Davis, a senior arms negotiator after 1933 and president of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1936 to 1944; Thomas Lamont, a leading Wall Street banker with ties to both the Republican and Democratic parties; and Allen Dulles, a diplomat, international lawyer, and secretary of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1933 to 1944. Not every British and American leader shared these sentiments. Many, such as Neville Chamberlain, the British premier from 1937 to 1940, and William Borah, the powerful Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1925 to 1923, dissented (Kennedy, 2002). But by the late 1930s, leaders on both sides of the Atlantic seemed increasingly willing to co-operate with one another given the changing situation in Europe and the Far East fostered by Axis and Japanese aggressiveness.

Between 1919 and 1939, transnational links augmented the connectedness of the Relationship. Transatlantic travel resumed in 1919, and Britons and Americans visited each other’s countries in ever larger numbers. Educational and goodwill exchanges and organisations such as the Rhodes Trust, the Pilgrims Society, and the Council on Foreign Relations and its British sister, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, enhanced this process. Thus, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, important Britons and Americans experienced each other’s countries – Stimson, for instance, regularly spent time in Britain – and discussed and wrote about foreign policy, the international economy, and other issues of mutual concern, although not necessarily of shared national interest.

Along with popular writers lionised in the other’s country – for instance, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, George Bernard Shaw, and Virginia Woolf (Hutner, 2009) – the notion of a transnational culture came to the fore in the most popular medium, cinema, with the usual entertainments of comedy and drama. For instance, there was the American Thin Man series (beginning in 1934), comedies of manners centred on an upper class New York couple who solved murder mysteries, and the British Invitation to the Waltz (1935), a musical about British espionage and a love triangle during the Napoleonic Wars. But deeper and more complex motion pictures also crossed the Atlantic – such as the 1937 British Big Fella, starring the African American singer Paul Robeson, showing the nobility and integrity of Black workers. Two years later came Four Just Men, which explored some Great War veterans working against the enemies of the country. In the United States, by the late 1930s, Warner Brothers Studios produced a series of popular films starring Errol Flynn that showed the inherent sensibilities and strength of ‘England’ against dictatorial adversaries: The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939). Perhaps the zenith came with the 1939 American film Gone with the Wind, which had a star-studded Anglo-American cast: especially Leslie Howard and Vivien Leigh from Britain and Clark Gable and Olivia de Havilland from the United States.

The basis for a ‘special relationship’ – ‘the tendency, the inclination, and the desire to work together’ – existed by 1939 (Kimball, 2003: 213). The Second World War provided the catalyst, through the conscious efforts of Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt. Even before America entered the war in December 1941, working with Churchill, Roosevelt moved the neutral United States into Britain’s orbit. After December 1941, the two leaders and their governments worked closely to combine strategy, determine war aims, and, militarily, collaborate with Soviet Russia and their other allies to attain victory. As Churchill remarked in March 1946, six months after final Allied success:

Neither the sure prevention of war, nor the continuous rise of world organisation will be gained without what I have called the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples. This means a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States.

[Document 10]

To a degree, Churchill overstated the strength of the relationship that arose from the war and its continuing ability to ensure international peace and security – or, at least, peace and security as defined in London and Washington. The two Powers were then competing for advantage in a number of areas of the world – particularly the Middle East, over oil (Ashton, 2014). Moreover, a principal American war aim articulated by Roosevelt and his advisors after 1941 had been to decolonise the great European empires, create new regimes, and build a new international order based on more liberal trade – in which, of course, America would acquire significant advantage (Louis, 1977; Thorne, 1978). In early 1946, as South and East Asian nationalist movements sprang forth, Britain was restructuring its empire: moving to give India independence and maintain order in Palestine. The United States under Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, was making only limited efforts to preserve stability in Central Europe and Iran; how much it would do beyond these initiatives remained moot (Fawcett, 1992). Although the Special Relationship existed, its wartime basis – achieving Axis defeat – had disappeared by 1945. Would it continue?

Of course, it did so and strengthened. The reason lay in the deepening Cold War between America and its chief ally, Britain, on one side, and Soviet Russia on the other (Reynolds, 2013: Chapter 3; Woolner, 2013). As divided Germany became the main Cold War battlefield and East-West tensions arose in the next 15 years in China, Korea, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, Britain and America moved closer to meet perceived communist aggression. In this process, some American leaders forgot a lesson that their British confrères had grasped since at least the late eighteenth century, when Britain moved toward global Power status: pre-eminence does not mean an omnipotence (Brinkley, 1990). As Washington in Democratic or Republican guise came to understand, however, even superpowers needed allies; and for Cold War America – despite continuing Anglo-American rivalry over trade and international investment – the British stood as their chief and most trusted confederates. The wartime experience provided for continued strategic co-operation in Europe and the wider world; and although crises occasionally threatened the foundation of Anglo-American relations – the 1956 Suez Crisis, particularly (Nichols, 2011) – London and Washington shared a range of strategic interests that sustained the Relationship.

Even after the Cold War’s first phase ended in 1963, the Relationship proved essential to the two Powers. When the United States became mired in Vietnam (1963–1973), Britain proved helpful to the Relationship and its own interests in both Europe and the developing world (Ellis, 2004). Tied to the British musical invasion of the United States in 1964 with the Beatles and their brethren the Rolling Stones, The Who, and The Dave Clark Five, who followed the 1950s popularity in Britain of Elvis Presley and other American rock-and-rollers, a new era in Anglo-American transnationalism seemed to have begun (Harry, 2004). Despite Britain’s decision to withdraw militarily east of Suez in the late 1960s and turn to the EEC in the early 1970s, London and Washington found common ground to work together for agreed strategic ends. In all of these issues, whilst the United States remained the leading Power in the relationship, Britain retained its position as the chief American ally.

When the Cold War returned with a vengeance in the latter half of the 1970s with Russian adventurism in Africa and Afghanistan, the Relationship responded. In the 1980s, it revived to levels not enjoyed since the Churchill-Roosevelt partnership. Margaret Thatcher in Britain (1979–1990) and Ronald Reagan in America (1981–1989) produced an unambiguous transatlantic nexus looking to achieve a strategic victory over Soviet Russia and its empire – through economic means and a military build-up the Russians could not equal (Cooper, 2012). And when Reagan and Thatcher departed the political scene at the end of the 1980s, their successors, John Major (1990–1997) and George H.W. Bush (1989–1993), continued the process that by 1991 saw the end of Soviet Russia (Craddock, 1997; Maynard, 2008).

By the mid-1990s, as crises erupted in the Balkans and as former Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe re-established themselves as sovereign political and economic entities, a different generation of Anglo-American leaders were confronting a new international order that had arrived in significant part by Anglo-American efforts. However, whilst Major and his Labour successor Tony Blair (1997–2007) still saw the Relationship as a core element of British foreign policy, President Bill Clinton (1993–2001) and his successors George W. Bush (2001–2009) and Barack Obama (2009– 2017), did not view America in the same light. With a restructured Balkans, a united Germany, and an expanded NATO, Europe received a new life. Other regions of instability appeared, however – primarily the Middle East and South Asia (Riedel, 2010). China, a revived Russia, and other Powers emerged as America’s political and economic rivals. America would meet these problems on its own; the Relationship unravelled.

George W. Bush’s election as president in 2000 proved crucial to the Relationship. Embracing American ‘exceptionalism’, he populated his Administration with neoconservatives who never learnt the lesson that pre-eminence does not mean omnipotence; like those in the previous administration, they began their tenure determined to go their own way in foreign and defence policy and pursue alone what they perceived as American strategic interests (Daalder and Lindsay, 2003). Less than a year later, however, America suffered terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Finding allies became a priority once again, and America found support from Britain for wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan (Auerswald and Saideman, 2014; Nau, 2008). This Anglo-American co-operation in the Middle East and South Asia frayed the Relationship, however. The British public turned against both Bush and the Iraq intervention because the casus belli – Baghdad’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – never existed; Washington had manipulated the evidence. The transatlantic nexus in international security issues touching both Powers diminished. After 2009, as Obama’s foreign policy focus moved away from Europe, and a succession of British governments – led by Gordon Brown (2007–2010) and David Cameron (2010–2016) – were forced to concentrate on domestic policy, the Relationship evaporated.

Nonetheless, for almost 50 years, the Anglo-American relationship was integral to the Western alliance that arose during the Second World War and served the interests of both Powers during the Cold War. Social, cultural, and philosophical links between the two English-speaking peoples remained important and strengthened the Relationship’s diplomatic and military dimensions. Guided and used by British and American leaders for purely pragmatic reasons, the ‘special’ diplomatic and military relationship emerged in a wartime context of expediency and realpolitik. After 1945, recognition of its diplomatic and military utility by leaders in both states sustained it. Quite simply, working together offered the best means to protect and extend their perceived national interests and, thereby, better ensure international stability.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Chronology
• Who’s who
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Maps
• PART I Prologue
• PART II Britain, America, and the origins of the ‘Special Relationship’
• PART III Cold War, limited war, and the ‘Special Relationship’, 1945–2015
• PART IV Epilogue
• PART V Documents
• Further reading
• References
• Index