John Dumbrell, A Special Relationship: Anglo-American Relations in the Cold War and After, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 2001; pp. vii + 258; ISBN 0 333 62250 2 Jonathan Hollowell (ed.), Twentieth Century Anglo-American Relations, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2001; pp. x + 206; ISBN 0 333 80404 X Matthew Jones, Conflict and Confrontation in South East Asia, 1961–1965: Britain, the United States, Indonesia and the Creation of Malaysia, Cam- bridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002; pp. xxi + 325; ISBN 0 521 80111 7 John T. McNay, Acheson and Empire: The British Accent in American Foreign Policy, Columbia, MO, University of Missouri Press, 2001, pp. x + 219; ISBN 0 8262 1344 8

Writing in the early 1990s, the former British Foreign Office official turned historian, John Dickie, felt able to title his study of Anglo-American relations ‘Special No More’.1 The implication of the title was clear. A bilateral relation- ship whose closeness had been forged by the need to confront common enemies during the second world war and the Cold War had lost its raison d’être. In the post-Cold War world, the Anglo-American relationship, as aptly defined by Alex Danchev in his important contribution to the historiography of the field, could be called ‘terminal’.2

Whilst pronouncing the end of history in one form or another in the immediate post-Cold War years was fashionable, it now appears that both the Anglo-American relationship itself, and historians’ fascination with it, have proved more enduring than this ‘terminal’ school of thought might suggest. Indeed, in terms of high politics, it is arguable that no previous British Prime Minister, with the possible exception of Churchill, would have gone so far as Tony Blair, who, in his presentation of the British dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to the House of Commons on 24 September 2002, described his attachment to what he called the ‘American relationship’ as a fundamental ‘article of faith’:

1 John Dickie, ‘Special’ No More: Anglo-American Relations: Rhetoric and Reality (London 1994). 2 Alex Danchev, ‘Special Pleading’ in Melvyn Stokes and Katherine Burk, The United States and the European Alliance since 1945 (Oxford 1999).

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I believed this before I became Prime Minister, but I believe it even more strongly — in fact, very strongly; it is an article of faith with me — that the American relationship and our ability to partner America in these difficult issues is of fundamental importance, not just to this country but to the wider world.3

If the Anglo-American relationship has proved to be far from terminal in the hands of post-Cold War British politicians, what of its treatment by historians? Again, the opening-up of new archival sources in former Eastern Bloc countries after the end of the Cold War seemed likely for a short while to condemn the study of Anglo-American relations, during the Cold War at any rate, to the status of an intellectual backwater. With some notable exceptions,4

the early 1990s did not yield the same quantity or quality of scholarship on Anglo-American relations as had the late 1970s and early 1980s.5 Part of the explanation for this probably lies in the archival release policies operated in Britain and the USA. So, historians writing in the late 1970s and early 1980s could access official documentation for the second world war and the early Cold War, periods in which Anglo-American relations were arguably simply more interesting and important than the late 1950s and early 1960s, the offi- cial papers for which were opened during the 1990s. If the Anglo-American historians of the second world war and early Cold War were analysing one of the engines of international relations, those working on the late 1950s and 1960s seemed to be studying what became increasingly the Penny-Farthing relationship. The big wheel of American power drove the smaller wheel of British dependence.

In fact, such a characterization of the challenges involved in studying the changing relationship between Britain and America during the post-second world war era is too limited. While the Penny-Farthing analogy has a certain appeal in terms of analysing the power relationship between the two countries, when one turns to the more subtle problems posed by analysing the flow of influence, it is incomplete. Certainly, it depicts the ten to one ratio which crops up again and again in Anglo-American defence relations during the early 1960s,6 but it does not explain why President Kennedy bothered to consult

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3 Hansard, column 21, 24 September 2002, http://www.parliament.the-stationary-office.co.uk. 4 For significant works on Anglo-American relations published during the early 1990s see, for example, W. Scott Lucas, Divided We Stand: Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis (London 1991); Ian Clark, Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship: Britain’s Deterrent and America, 1957–62 (Oxford 1994). 5 For defining works on Anglo-American relations published during the late 1970s and early 1980s see, for example, David Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance 1937–41: A Study in Competitive Co-operation (London 1981); Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan, 1941–45 (Oxford 1979); Wm. Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonisation of the British Empire 1941–45 (Oxford 1977). 6 To cite a few examples, total US defence spending, which stood at $52.2 billion in 1963, was ten times the size of that of the UK, which was $5.2 billion in the same year (Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London 1988), 384). Similarly, the US strategic bomber force during the Cuban Missile Crisis numbered 1450 aircraft as against the total of 140 aircraft which

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Prime Minister Macmillan every evening during the Cuban Missile Crisis,7 or how Macmillan was able successfully to press his case in Washington for a resumption of negotiations over a nuclear test ban treaty in the spring of 1963.8

What the Penny-Farthing analogy does point us towards, though, is the need for a new periodization of Anglo-American relations covering the whole of the era from the inception of the wartime relationship through to the beginning of the twenty-first century. In essence, what we might postulate is four different Anglo-American relationships, linked together by certain common bonds of interest, ideology and culture, but differentiated by changes in the respective international roles of the two countries and their changing perceptions of threat. The most noteworthy feature of the wartime relationship from 1941 to 1945 was the way in which differences in interests around the globe were largely overcome in the face of the unifying Axis threat. Not only that, but, until early 1944 at least, the relationship was one of partnership in which London gained a significant say in the conduct of the war. With the end of the war, there was something approaching a break in Anglo-American relations. Lend-lease was abruptly terminated and Washington drove a hard bargain over the negotiation of a new loan to Britain. The change in personnel at the top in both countries, in particular after the election of a Labour government in the United Kingdom, made for more distant and suspicious high-level rela- tions. Nuclear co-operation was terminated, and America embarked on the hasty withdrawal of its forces from Europe. All in all, during the latter months of 1945, and for much of 1946, there could be no certainty in London about the continuation of an Anglo-American relationship along anything approach- ing wartime lines.

The change in perception of the Soviet threat in Washington during the latter months of 1946 and early 1947 radically altered the picture. In quick succession thereafter came an American rhetorical, then financial, then security commitment to the waging of the Cold War in the shape of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty. These commitments incidentally served to revive the Anglo-American relationship, even though they did not fully restore the wartime level of partnership. Still, the persistence of Britain’s worldwide role, and her relative economic and political importance during the late 1940s and 1950s, made the Anglo- American alliance the core of the western alliance.

It was the change in Britain’s international role during the 1960s, on the back of the dismantling of the African empire, the abandonment of East of

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Britain could muster (Len Scott, Macmillan, Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Basingstoke 1999), 190).

7 Ernest May and Philip Zelikow have gone so far as to describe Macmillan as a ‘de facto mem- ber of Kennedy’s ExComm’ (The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (London 1997), 692) . 8 For an excellent recent analysis of Anglo-American relations over the Test Ban see Kendrick Oliver, Kennedy, Macmillan and the Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 1961–63 (London 1998).

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Suez, and a succession of economic shocks, that ushered in the third phase of the Anglo-American relationship. Although it is contentious to pinpoint a particular juncture as marking this transition, the winter of 1962–3, which witnessed the failure of Britain’s first EEC application, disputes with Washing- ton over the Skybolt Crisis, the dénouement of the Congo Crisis, the Yemeni Civil War and the Cuban trade embargo does seem to have crystallized the question of Britain’s changing international role.9 Certainly, former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson thought so, choosing December 1962 as the month to pronounce that Britain had lost an empire and not yet found a role. From the early 1960s until the end of the Cold War, although the Anglo- American relationship remained an important component of the western alliance, Britain’s shrinking international role meant that her interests did not intersect with those of the USA at so many points around the globe. Although Anglo-American diplomatic, defence and intelligence relations remained close, Britain simply did not loom so large in American thinking as she had in the wartime and immediate postwar years.

With the end of the Cold War, a new phase in Anglo-American relations was ushered in. Part of the reason for this shift lay once again in the changing international roles of the two powers, although this time the change concerned more the USA than it did Britain. The collapse of the Soviet challenge to US hegemony inevitably had an impact on Anglo-American relations, with the British government more aware than ever of the disparity in power between the two countries and correspondingly even more keen than before to prove itself a valuable ally where circumstances afforded such an opportunity. While the disappearance of the Soviet threat removed the raison d’être of the Cold War relationship, the uncertainties posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the emergence of an Islamist terrorist threat in the 1990s and 2000s provided a new glue for the relationship. Personality too played its part here, with the Manichean rhetoric of British Prime Minister Tony Blair finding a particularly receptive audience in the USA after Septem- ber 11, 2001.

It is interesting, then, in view of the periodization of Anglo-American rela- tions offered above, that John Dumbrell chooses to begin his survey, A Special Relationship: Anglo-American Relations in the Cold War and After, in the early 1960s. Certainly, his approach is novel, since previous surveys have chosen a different periodization, with most covering either Anglo-American relations in the twentieth century, or Anglo-American relations since 1945.10

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9 For a fuller version of this argument see Nigel Ashton, Kennedy, Macmillan and the Cold War: The Irony of Interdependence (Basingstoke 2002). 10 For accounts that cover twentieth-century relations, see David Dimbleby and David Reynolds, An Ocean Apart (London 1988), a source which also offers some introductory material on relations during the nineteenth century; Ritchie Ovendale, Twentieth Century Anglo-American Relations (London 1998), and Alan Dobson, Anglo-American Relations in the Twentieth Century (London 1995). For accounts covering relations since 1945 see Christopher Bartlett, ‘The Special Relationship’: A Political History of Anglo-American Relations since 1945

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Dumbrell offers two main justifications for his approach. Firstly, that ‘the post-1960 era constitutes a distinct phase of the “special relationship”’, and secondly that this phase ‘in comparison to the well researched period of 1941– 60, has perhaps not received its fair share of scholarly attention’ (1). The for- mer is the stronger of these two justifications. If one accepts the argument about a shift in Anglo-American relations in the early 1960s postulated above, then Dumbrell’s periodization makes thematic sense. His second contention, that the post-1960 period is under-researched when compared to the years 1941–60, would, of course, be backed up by any bibliographical search. However, I have already outlined the probable reasons for this. A combination of the relative significance of the wartime and immediate postwar alliance, together with the availability of official archival sources, should suffice to explain this imbalance.

The point about the relative significance of the 1941–60 period versus post- 1960 is one that might, indeed, be turned round and levelled as a criticism of Dumbrell’s approach. It can be argued that by devoting only one introductory chapter to the years leading up to 1960, he is presenting a lop-sided picture of Anglo-American relations. He may be according too much weight to a period in which the relationship was declining in importance. Or, to put it another way, he may be in danger metaphorically of eating the vegetables and leaving the meat.

For fear of seeming to be dishing out a roasting here let me hasten to qualify the above point. What Dumbrell does cover, he covers very effectively. Moreover, his approach allows him to bring out a number of themes in Anglo- American relations which might have been lost had he weighted the survey more heavily towards earlier decades. Chief among these themes is that of the role of Anglo-American relations in the Irish question. Here is an area crying out for further research. As Dumbrell shows, for much of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the US approach to the Irish question operated along two distinct tracks. The State Department saw the overriding US interest as being the main- tenance of strong relations with Britain, relations which might be adversely affected if the USA exerted too much pressure over the internal affairs of Northern Ireland. Successive administrations took the same view, even while Presidents such as John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan continued to make play of their own Irishness when it suited their domestic political interests.

In Congress, and from certain sections of the US media, meanwhile, another track developed, which involved intermittent pressure for US intervention over the Irish question. The key players during the 1970s and 1980s were the so- called ‘four horsemen’: Governor Hugh Carey, Senator Edward Kennedy, House Speaker ‘Tip’ O’Neill and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The outbreak of the ‘Troubles’ at the end of the 1960s, and the deterioration of the situation in the province during the early 1970s, provided the essential

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(London 1992), and Robert Hathaway, Great Britain and the United States: Special Relations since World War II (Boston 1990).

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backdrop to the efforts of the ‘four horsemen’ to persuade successive adminis- trations to intervene with the British government over Northern Ireland.

As Dumbrell’s references reveal, this is an area in which there has been scant research to date. Beyond assorted memoirs, newspaper articles and scattered references in texts addressing the Troubles themselves, there is little available to help piece together an account of Anglo-American relations over the ques- tion. To this extent, Dumbrell’s chapter on the issue is groundbreaking, and helps to highlight a number of areas for further research. For instance, he cites the report of the US Consul-General in Belfast, Neil McManus, in October 1968, that the disturbances involved only a ‘few IRA or Communist types’ (200). It would be interesting to see a more systematic piece of work analysing US diplomatic reporting of the unfolding Troubles to discover whether this hint of a Cold War dimension to State Department thinking was more preva- lent. Regarding Presidential attitudes to the question, Dumbrell notes that during the early 1970s, ‘Nixon was unresponsive’ to pressure for intervention (201). It is probable that scope for several doctorates lies behind these three words.

If there is a criticism to be made of Dumbrell’s book, it is that it has only limited utility for anyone wanting to teach a survey course in Anglo-American relations. While his periodization is thematically challenging, it would be unworkable to begin such a course in 1960. Students need a thorough ground- ing in the creation of the wartime alliance, and its revival during the early Cold War, before they can make much sense of Anglo-American relations during the later Cold War and after. Still, as a study of the contemporary ‘Penny- Farthing’ Anglo-American relationship, Dumbrell’s book is groundbreaking.

Discussion of the Irish question in Anglo-American relations provides a neat link to the work of John T. McNay on Dean Acheson’s conduct of US foreign policy in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Certainly, in a key chapter of his study McNay makes a trenchant critique of Acheson’s failure to seize the opportunity provided by attempts to open the way to the Republic of Ireland’s membership of NATO in 1949, to intervene with the British government over the Irish question. As far as McNay is concerned, Acheson’s handling of this and other ‘colonial’ questions shows that he was not the realist portrayed by most scholars, but an indefatigable sympathizer of British imperialism. Wherever and whenever the interests of the British Empire clashed with those of indigenous nationalists, Acheson was conditioned by his upbringing and ingrained personal sympathies to support the former, McNay argues.

While McNay’s work makes a useful contribution to scholarship on Acheson’s early life and background, he stretches his thesis too far when trying to prove Acheson’s blinkered sympathy for British imperialism. The chapter on the ‘Ulster Connection’ is particularly naïve and tendentious. In the naïve category comes his contention that ‘after initial bursts of anger and resent- ment, the British would therefore likely have accommodated themselves to US pressure on Ireland’ (91). In the tendentious category comes his claim that ‘Acheson’s support for the British in Ulster thus ensured the loss of Ireland as

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a strategic asset for NATO without any counterbalancing gain for anyone except British imperialists and Ulster Unionists narrowly defined’ (92). There is, in fact, no need to depart from the theory of Acheson the realist in explain- ing his handling of the feelers put out by the Irish Foreign Minister, Sean MacBride, in April 1949 over a possible quid pro quo for Irish membership of NATO. Acheson no doubt saw this as a piece of opportunism designed to advance the interests of the Irish Republic. As such, his calculation that a greater US interest lay in not imperilling the Anglo-American alliance was all too realistic in the circumstances of 1949.

If McNay’s study addresses that phase of the early Cold War when the British world role continued to ensure that Anglo-American relations loomed relatively large in US foreign policy, Matthew Jones’s study, Conflict and Confrontation in South East Asia, 1961–1965: Britain, the United States, Indonesia and the Creation of Malaysia, straddles the period in which this review has postulated a transition in Anglo-American relations. Certainly, there was considerable concern expressed in Washington over the direction of British policy in relation to the creation of a ‘Greater’ Malaysia during the final months of the Kennedy administration. As in other parts of the world, notably the Middle East and Africa, Kennedy administration officials were preoccupied with the question of how to win the forces of indigenous nation- alism over to the western camp in the Cold War. The trenchant opposition of the Indonesian leader, Sukarno, to British plans for Malaysia, which became clear as the planned date for Malaysian independence on 31 August 1963 approached, led to what Jones terms sharp Anglo-American disagreement. Washington favoured a political settlement to the dispute with Indonesia, while in London policy-makers resisted the idea of making concessions to Sukarno, a man viewed as an erratic and dangerous dictator.

Under Johnson, these disagreements gradually disappeared from view. British backing for the US position in Vietnam was rewarded with the un- spoken quid pro quo of a tougher US attitude towards Sukarno. Indeed, the anti-western position that Sukarno adopted during 1964–5 led the Johnson administration to reverse the course of its predecessor, and actually to put pressure on the British to maintain their military commitment to Malaysia in the wake of Singapore’s departure from the federation in August 1965. The US approach involved the dangling of the carrot of economic aid to support the pound sterling should the Wilson government promise to maintain its overseas commitments, particularly East of Suez. The carrot could equally well become a stick, should Britain fail to stand firm. It is this explicit coupling of the question of financial aid to the direction of British policy on the part of Washington that helps serve to differentiate the final phase of the Indonesian confrontation from most earlier episodes in Anglo-American relations.11

Although the British need for American money was far from being a new phenomenon in the postwar years, the way in which Johnson administration

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11 The Suez Crisis of 1956 is the most notable exception to this observation.

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officials brought home their dependence to British leaders seems indicative of a new emphasis in the relationship. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy’s report to Johnson of a conversation between Under-Secretary of State George Ball and Prime Minister Harold Wilson was indicative of this tone: Ball had ‘really put it to the British on Singapore and our support of the pound. . . it took two talks for Wilson to agree the association between our defense of the pound and their overseas commitments’ (290).

In the end, it was only to be dramatic political change in Indonesia, in the shape of Sukarno’s effective overthrow in early October 1965, that finally let the British off the hook of a military commitment that had involved the main- tenance of 68,000 service personnel in the south-east Asian theatre. By the summer of 1966 the confrontation was over and the British were able to scale down their forces in the region. Although pressure from Washington for Britain to maintain her commitments East of Suez continued into 1967, the USA’s own financial problems by this stage meant that the Johnson adminis- tration abandoned the idea of any further unilateral guarantee for sterling. When the final British decision to abandon East of Suez came in January 1968, Johnson had neither a financial stick to wave nor carrot to dangle in his attempts to persuade Wilson to reverse the decision.

In the preface to his book, Jones quotes with approval John Darwin’s observation that the Malaysian–Indonesian confrontation constituted a ‘bizarre finale’ to the British imperial role in Asia. Certainly, the remarkable build-up of forces, followed by the equally precipitous withdrawal of the British presence, conjured up the impression of a chaotic and unplanned end of empire. The same was true of the unwinding of the British commitment in the Arabian Peninsula. Perhaps this impression of chaotic scuttle did as much to damage Anglo-American relations in the mid-1960s as did the underlying factor of British economic weakness. Certainly, by May 1967, the US ambassador in London, David Bruce, could be found telling Secretary of State Dean Rusk that the ‘so-called Anglo-American special relationship’ was ‘little more than sentimental terminology’, while a month later the Prime Minister’s Principal Private Secretary, Sir Oliver Wright, found an ‘odd mixture of indig- nation, incomprehension and resignation’ in Washington in face of the British retreat (292–3).

Ironically, in view of the close linkage Jones identifies between the con- frontations in Malaysia and Vietnam in the mid-1960s, the USA was to per- form its own version of chaotic scuttle in south-east Asia a decade later. Whether this brought any greater retrospective understanding in Washington of the pressures which had led to the earlier unravelling of the British position is a moot point.

The question of a transition in Anglo-American relations in the 1960s is a theme which is also addressed by one of the contributors to the volume Twentieth Century Anglo-American Relations edited by Jonathan Hollowell. Sylvia Ellis’s view of the period is clear from the emphasis in the title of her con- tribution: ‘Lyndon Johnson, Harold Wilson and the Vietnam War: A Not so

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Special Relationship?’. In Ellis’s view, the personal relationship between Wilson and Johnson was poor, and this contributed to the difficulties they experienced in handling relations over the three key issues of their years in office: Vietnam, the defence of sterling and the British withdrawal from East of Suez. In contrast to Jones, Ellis sees significant Anglo-American discord over Vietnam. In particular, she cites a phone conversation between Wilson and Johnson in February 1965 during which Wilson’s attempts to mediate over the Vietnam question were met with blank rebuff by LBJ: ‘I won’t tell you how to run Malaysia and you don’t tell us how to run Vietnam’ (195). As far as Ellis is concerned, the bad blood engendered by this exchange lingered with LBJ and affected his subsequent handling of relations with Wilson. All in all, Ellis sees the mid-1960s as a period of ‘serious readjustment’ in Anglo-American rela- tions, during which difficult questions about the US role in Vietnam and the British world role intersected with poor relations at the top (201).

Of the other contributions to the Hollowell volume, Steven Fielding’s analy- sis of the Labour Party’s Revisionists and the imaging of America during the first two decades of the Cold War provides an important insight into one strand of thinking within what for the bulk of the period surveyed was the main opposition party in Britain. Jussi Hanhimaki, in his piece on the impact of McCarthyism on Anglo-American relations in the early 1950s, shows the other side of the coin, providing an insight into the longer-term roots of anti- American sentiment in Britain. Overall, the Hollowell volume is of a con- sistently high standard and provides a range of insights into different aspects of Anglo-American relations across the twentieth century, although with a particular emphasis on the post-1945 period.

To the extent that historians cannot avoid to some degree writing from the perspective of the present, as illustrated by the emergence of the ‘terminal’ school of thought on Anglo-American relations after the end of the Cold War, the time now seems ripe for a return to a historiography which emphasizes the surprisingly enduring quality of the Anglo-American relationship. A semantic debate about whether this constitutes a ‘special’ relationship seems a somewhat sterile and limited way of approaching the question. If we can get beyond this terminology, a more pluralist interpretation of the Anglo-American alliance may emerge, that acknowledges its ability to adapt to shifting international cir- cumstances, to changing interests and emerging threats. It may well be that common national interests remain at the heart of this, but it would be a surprise if the roles of common values, ideas, language and culture were not also acknowledged.

Nigel J. Ashton is Senior Lecturer in International History at the London School of

Economics and Political Science. His publications include Eisenhower, Macmillan and the Problem of Nasser (Basingstoke 1996) and

Kennedy, Macmillan and the Cold War (Basingstoke 2002). He is currently working on a biography of King Hussein of Jordan.

Ashton: Anglo-American Relations from World War to Cold War 125

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