Sense of Change

Without the animosity that marked the anti-Americanism of a few weeks ago, British commentators probed what seemed to them a new direction in U.S. policy. In its bluntest terms, British opinion suspected that the old Anglo-U.S. alliance would not be quite the same again, and that for some time past it had not been quite what it seemed.

The most cited text for their new reading came from Vice President Nixon's remarks, right after the U.S. voted against Britain and France in the U.N. General Assembly on the issue of Egypt: "For the first time in history, we have shown independence of Anglo-French policies toward Asia and Africa which seemed to us to reflect the colonial tradition. That declaration of independence has had an electrifying effect throughout the world." Britons saw the idea confirmed last week as India's Premier Jawaharlal Nehru emerged from intimate conference with President Eisenhower wreathed in smiles and declaring that U.S. policy is "not as rigid as I thought."

After Suez. Not all Britons objected. Many recognized that in the Arab countries, Britain and France are currently so discredited that only the U.S. can save positions essential to all of them (a quite different thesis from the angry Tory backbench contention that U.S. interests are trying to drive the British out of the Middle East). They understood that the alliance stands as firm as ever in the geographical limits of its primary purpose--the defense of Europe--and that Britain remains the U.S.'s closest friend by blood, interests and sentiment. This fact was underlined last week when the U.S.Export-Import Bank granted Britain a $500 million loan (at 4 1/2% interest) to help Britain through its post-Suez crisis.

But Suez dramatized what had long been an unadmitted fact: that the Anglo-American alliance is not, as it was often assumed to be, something that reflects a common policy around the world. No joint policy existed for the Middle East. No joint policy exists in the Far East, where the two powers disagree over the recognition of Red China. The U.S., in helping emergent peoples in Asia and North Africa, had often found its achievements compromised by the U.S. association with the colonial powers. This stigma might not have been crippling if the U.S., Britain and France had hammered out a joint approach that the Asian-African world could accept. They had not.

Friendly Warnings. From bitter experience, some British voices were raised in gloomy warning against the new turn of events. Lord Vansittart, prewar Permanent Under Secretary of the Foreign Office, warned Eisenhower against too much reliance on Nehru--"an arch-opponent of the Baghdad Pact, at the moment when the President has gone farthest to bless it," and a "friend of Communist China." And Britain's grand old League of Nations advocate, 90-year-old Scholar Gilbert Murray, warned against too deep a dependence on U.N., which he said is menaced by the "recent universal clamor for equality and the 'anti-West' enthusiasm of nearly all Asia and Africa." The old League of Nations covenant, said Murray, "belonged to the age that still dared to say that unequal things were unequal. If we continue moving in the equalitarian direction that is now fashionable, there is real danger that not merely the British Empire but the whole Western or Christian civilization will become of less and less account."

Break Away. The U.S. would have to be more explicit than it had been in the past, to make clear that it is not changing principle and abandoning friends, but merely seeking to escape involvements with friends--old or new--in places where such commitments are not in the U.S. interest. The question was posed most sharply last week by France's Premier Guy Mollet, who said that in all the recent difficulties the Atlantic partnership itself had not been thrown open to question. But, he went on, "there is no half-alliance." France, said Mollet, seeks a common front everywhere and in all circumstances, and therefore if the U.S. wants France as an ally in Europe, it has to be its ally in Algeria. This idea is precisely what the U.S. is trying to break away from. In places where the U.S. finds French policy misguided and is unable to change it, the U.S. will no longer by its unhappy silence be left to imply endorsement.

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