The Wider Causes

The summary of specific conflicts between Britain and the U.S. is expressed in specific causes. But the range of opposition is so wide as to suggest that more general causes of U.S.-British conflict are also driving the two nations apart.

The widening split is not a "conflict of interest." It is not essentially a struggle for commercial or other material advantages nor is it a struggle for "power" as such. In the Far East, neither nation has a big economic stake. In fact, the U.S. could wish the British stake in Pacific Asia were heavier; that might bring British policy down out of the Nehrunian clouds. British suspicion to the contrary, the U.S. Government has no desire to replace British Middle East commercial interest with American.

If the U.S. and Britain are not rivals for money or power, what are they in conflict about? Ideology? The British say they haven't any ideology. The Americans say the British have, too, an ideology, and further, that the Americans are proud and grateful to share it with them. This foolish argument is hardly the basis for widespread conflict. What are the other possibilities?

The Doctrinaire Left. The Eisenhower Administration thinks of its foreign policy as progressive in that it seeks to thwart the Communist drive by expanding the political freedom and the economic life of peoples everywhere. This aim might be expected to appeal especially to the Socialists, who heavily influence British thought.

But the Socialists reject it on the ground of Socialist dogma: capitalist nations cannot be progressive; the U.S. is capitalist: therefore, the U.S. is an anti-social exploiter, Q.E.D. British Socialists have a special resentment against American capitalism: it works. A decaying American capitalism could be treated with the tolerance and condescension that is the hallmark of the Fabian spirit. But neither Fabius nor Sidney Webb would know what to do with a capitalist enemy that really achieves its ends. The success of American capitalism in raising American living standards can neither be believed nor forgiven. It can only be evaded by talking of "the American treasure house of resources" (as if mass-produced automobiles came out of mines) or by ascribing U.S. success to the New Deal.

The Muted Right. The Eisenhower Administration is also profoundly and explicitly conservative, and it rises specifically to the defense of ancient verities. But this awakens no more friendly response from British conservatives than American progressivism evokes from the left. With the conservatives, the trouble is not dogma but politico-sclerosis.

The two main camps of the Tory Party are the Socialists-who-won't-go-upstairs and the Colonel Blimps. The former have the usual Socialist view of the U.S. and the Colonels are of even less help. They resent the fact that the Americans have taken over the power if not the glory that was the Empire's. They wanted to settle Mossadegh with gunboats and Naguib with the Hussars.

But nostalgia for the brave old days is not conservatism. It is the conservative's business to find how unchanging principles apply to the ever-changing facts of life, not to deny that the facts have changed. British conservatism today rarely speaks in terms of principle; consequently, the British right is scarcely heard in public debate, leaving the field to the anti-American leftists, from Attlee to Bevan to Driberg.

Experience. The great British century between Waterloo and Sarajevo influences British ideas of how foreign relations should be conducted today.

Until the Kaiser's power rose, there was in all those happy decades no nation that could challenge Britain on a world scale, none with a half or a quarter of Britain's power. The only challenges were local, and could be met by specific transitory alliances based on the most direct and obvious self-interest of the parties. In such situations, diplomatic haggling becomes the central political art.

The U.S. experience at leadership, short as it is, has been spent on the problem of establishing international order. That problem requires more than skill at handling local situations. It demands some attention to the moral principles underlying political and commercial order. In their day, the British could take the acceptance of these principles for granted; they were violated--but they were not denied, ridiculed and systematically undermined by any great world power.

To replace the Royal Navy, which alone could keep any threat from becoming lethal to Britain, the U.S. has had to organize the world network of alliances to meet a world threat. This network has to be explicitly related to a moral purpose because it needs to be wider and last longer than an alliance based upon direct, obvious self-interest in a transitory local situation. While the U.S. was pouring $34 billion into Europe, it had a long-range self interest (in the sense that all moral acts have self-interest at bottom). But the self-interest of U.S. aid to Europe was very different from the direct self-interest of the 19th century diplomatic bazaar in which Britain, France and Belgium divided the continent of Africa.

The British scorn and profess to fear the American tendency toward moral preachment in politics. An American answer is that the job in hand requires, among other things, moral preachment. The enemy has attacked on moral ground, has in fact made his deepest breakthrough there. That hole cannot be ignored, it has to be plugged while efforts to meet Communism's military and political pressure are in train.

By good luck or providence, the key formative experience of the U.S. past gives it some qualification for the job. The writing of the U.S. Constitution by men of conservative principle who were also hardheaded politicians and traders was an exercise in the application of moral philosophy to the facts of life. Then and since then Americans have dealt in terms of their Constitution with the conditions needed for political freedom, for federation, for economic progress. In short, they have dealt closely, consciously and explicitly for nearly 170 years with what turned out to be the central international problems of the 20th century.

This gives no guarantee that Americans will do well. But at least they were subjected to the appropriate curriculum.

Knowledge. The Americans, say the British, do not know the world. Indeed, they did not--and some appalling blunders resulted. U.S. education is ill-suited for foreign affairs, 19th century style. The educated Briton is reared for debate and negotiation as the Spartan for the spear. A good British Foreign Office man can, by effortless intuition, absorb the essence of a political crisis from a bubble of cocktail conversation. Americans will never be good at that. They will set up a million-dollar study project to find out what a Briton would learn by asking a girl to ask a man who knew. But in their ponderous way the Americans are learning, and it may be that in this important matter of knowing the world the British are slipping.

British China policy, for example, is mainly the product of pure ignorance. When the Communists were beating Chiang and the U.S. was in the throes of an intense but inconclusive debate over what to do about it, the British were not looking or listening. A few weeks ago a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, digging for the roots of U.S. policy, talked to some American farmers, found they disapproved of Chinese Communists on moral grounds. A thought struck the Guardian man. If these moralistic Americans, he wrote, could be told that Chiang Kai-shek was corrupt, they might take a more reasonable view. The news the Guardian man missed: the charges against Chiang are not news to any American able to read or listen to the radio. The Americans have long since put Chiang in perspective and have gone on from there to pay reasonably close attention to Chinese Communism in action. Nothing that they might believe about Chiang is likely to change their moral judgment of the Chinese Communists.

Responsibility. Perhaps the main cause of U.S.-British conflict is that the responsibilities of the two nations are so different. If the U.S. sank below the sea tomorrow, the free world's defense against Communism would be impossible. But the British, being: at least the heirs, are not daunted by the impossible. They would take on the leadership of the free world. Their horizon would expand beyond Europe. They would see that the Middle East needed support more than arm-twisting. They would see China not with detachment but with lively sensibility. As for the world entire, the great globe itself, they would talk less of balancing the unbalanceable and more of rolling back the intolerable. They would discover the practical demand for moral principle in politics and supply it from an ample hoard in their own past. Milton's name would ring out, and Hampden's. The responsibility that now shapes U.S. policy would fashion theirs into its weaker twin.

The Dismal Prospect

But it would be desirable to bring Britain nearer this state of mind by means less drastic than the total disappearance of the U.S. What are the chances?

Not, it would seem, good. British and U.S. policies were close when Truman and Acheson were going from fire to fire--from Azerbaijan to Greece to Berlin. Slowly the U.S. began to see its larger responsibility, to understand that the threat was global, that Europe had to be protected in Asia, and Asia in Europe. Some long-range fire prevention was needed and perhaps some punishment of firebugs. The easiest way for Britain and the U.S. to get together is for Americans to forget this lesson and relapse into the illusions of 1946. That price is too high. British cooperation is important, but a clear and effective U.S. policy is essential.

Analyses of U.S.-British conflict usually end with a tight smile and a hopeful reminder that fundamentally, and when the chips are down, the British and Americans will stand shoulder to shoulder. This is nobly true. But at what point does the fundamental agreement start getting operational? Twice the two nations have stood apart until war was well along. Both times war could have been stopped by firm action in an early season. Does British-U.S. cooperation have to wait for the Big Bang again? Nowadays, those famous chips are made out of uranium.

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