Quote:
Amid all this talk of the 'Special Relationship' and of Britain's failure to have any impact on the current attempts to bandage together another short-term stand-off in the Middle East, I find myself wondering why so many British people still imagine that America is our fond friend and perpetual ally.
I have lived in the USA and loved it. I like Americans. I am glad of the help the USA have sometimes given us, and not resentful about the times when they have pursued their own interests at our expense. But in two years in Washington DC I found absolutely no evidence of a 'special relationship' between our countries, and never met an American who had heard of it. Great powers always look after themselves first. We did it when we could, and would again if we had the chance.
But I really get tired of the sentimental assumption that we are bound together, and especially of the idea that America 'saved us' in World War Two and we are therefore permanently morally indebted so that we must support them in all they do. What saving there was, was (quite reasonably) self-interested and limited to ensure that we would never again be a diplomatic, military or economic rival. Soviet Russia also received a great deal of American support, and never showed a flicker of gratitude for it ( or for the help we gave them, as I should know, since my father had to slog between Scapa Flow and Murmansk within range of German aircraft and U-boats in 1943 and 1944, convoying aid through freezing, dangerous seas to an ungrateful Comrade Stalin).
So, in an attempt to undermine this silly, soppy belief, here is an account of the British-American War that was never quite fought, though we came surprisingly close to it many times. The 1812-1815 war doesn't really count, since neither side was ready, and neither side really had its heart in the business either. Britain was still busy fighting Bonaparte's France, while American commercial interests were angrily opposed to the cost, and the loss of trade.
But it is worth remembering that the US national anthem is an anti-British hymn dating from this half-forgotten time. It is an account, in verse, of the Royal Navy's unsuccessful bombardment of Baltimore, Maryland. The 'Star-Spangled banner' still waves proudly despite having been ripped and torn by British bullets. The landing of British marines is described as "their foul footsteps' pollution".
The young US Navy did remarkably well in that conflict, defeating the hitherto unbeaten British on too many occasions. A superb description of the terrible duel off Boston between HMS Shannon and USS Chesapeake (in which the Royal Navy recovered its honour) is to be found in Patrick O'Brian's "Fortune of War", one of his captivating series of historical novels on the Napoleonic War at sea. I doubt if Hollywood will ever make a movie of that, and in fact Hollywood altered the plot of his 'Far Side of the World', in the rather poor film of that name, so that an Anglo-American battle was replaced by a historically impossible Anglo-French one.
On land the honours were more even. Visitors to Niagara Falls, on the Canadian side, can also see a surprising monument, taller than Nelson's Column, just along the Niagara River at Queenston Heights. This commemorates the British General Isaac Brock who died while defeating an attempted American invasion of Canada at this spot. Brock had earlier captured Detroit from the USA. Imagine what would have happened to the car business, or the music trade, if we hadn't given it back later.
Most people have some vague idea that British troops burned the White House and the Capitol in Washington (they did, in reprisal for an American raid on what is now Toronto), but few now have any idea of how extensive this conflict was, or how bloody. Its last gasp was at the extreme opposite end of the country, the pointless Battle of New Orleans, fought after a peace treaty had already been signed but the generals did not know it.
That fierce little war was a sort of re-run of the original breach between Britain and America, now laughed over but very savage at the time. Many people in the American colonies did not support the revolt against King George, and these loyalists were cruelly treated after independence, sometimes murdered and in most cases forced from their homes. They went, mostly, to Canada to start new lives. Some of their descendants, rather like the Arabs driven from Israel in 1948, still keep the keys or deeds to the houses from which their forefathers were driven.
The two countries were at each other's throats many times in the 19th century. Powerful forces in Washington wanted to annexe Canada and much British diplomacy was needed to prevent this. A dispute over the frontier in the far North-West almost led to gunfire in the 1850s. And Britain came close to intervening openly on the side of the Confederacy in the American Civil War. A British shipyard built the Confederate raider CSS Alabama, which did terrible damage to the North's shipping. The victorious North did not forget, and sued Britain for the then enormous sum of £3 million in compensation. There was real resentment and anger over this. Senator Charles Sumner, Chairman of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee, said Britain's breach of neutrality was so serious that it had doubled the length of the war, and that Britain ought to hand over Canada to the USA as redress.
The idea that the two great English-speaking powers are eternal friends and allies is quite a new one. British diplomats in Washington (notably Cecil Spring Rice, author of 'I vow to thee, my country") worked night and day to try to get America to intervene in World War One, and Britain later paid the price when President Woodrow Wilson insisted on the right to decide the peace terms, often in ways which did not suit Britain at all, upsetting cosy secret deals we had made in our old-fashioned way.
The Washington Naval Treaty, more or less forced on Britain by the US in 1921, effectively ended Britain's days as the world's greatest sea-power. The Americans made it clear that they could and would outbuild us if we did not agree to stop launching new capital ships. (We fought World War two with ancient or underpowered warships as a result, one reason for the disaster when the Bismarck sank the beautiful but poorly armoured HMS Hood). It also ended the Anglo-Japanese alliance, which had long irritated Washington. Who knows how differently the world would now be arranged, if the British and the Japanese had remained allies and we had never lost Singapore?
Round about this time, American pressure also helped to push Britain into an unwelcome surrender to Irish Republicanism.
Between the wars The USA also looked unsympathetically on the British Empire, and on its special trading arrangements, viewing it as an obstacle and a rival. American 'anti-colonialism' (which conveniently forgets that the continental USA is itself a land empire obtained by conquest or by purchase of the conquests of others), plus Irish-American dislike of Britain, kept relations fairly cool. It was precisely because of this that King George VI visited the USA in June 1939, to try to warm up a frigid relationship as war approached.
Franklin Roosevelt did not help Britain in 1939 out of sentimentality. The Lend-Lease package was an act of hard self-interest, designed to keep Britain in the war and to keep her still-powerful fleet out of the hands of the Germans. The scheme was ended abruptly in September 1945, leaving many goods still in transit. Britain expects to pay off the debt for this aid in December of this year (2006). If Britain had fallen, it is conceivable that the Third Reich would have been able to combine the British and French navies with its own into a major challenge for control of the Atlantic, and eventually the Pacific too. Had Hitler then gone on to defeat the USSR, the USA would have faced a world power quite capable of threatening it on two flanks. Alaska, remember, almost touches Siberia, and there are old Russian settlements even now in California. In those circumstances, isolation would not have been safe or wise for the USA.
Winston Churchill understood this perfectly well, and blatantly used the threat of the Royal Navy falling into Hitler's hands to bargain for help.
The USA did not exactly rush wholeheartedly to Britain's aid. Millions of German-Americans, and plenty of Irish-Americans, with significant votes in important states, were far from sympathetic. Many people still believe that the USA declared war on Nazi Germany. But this never happened. Hitler declared war on the USA, in obedience to his pact with Japan, soon after Pearl Harbor. America, again quite reasonably, fought a cynical and self-interested war, letting Britain and the USSR take most of the burden of the fight against Hitler, while it concentrated on the great sea-battles and land-battles ( largely unknown in Britain) which ensured the defeat of Japan. This is not to deny the valour of the American servicemen who fought in Europe, which was great, simply to point out that they were fighting in their own interests, not in response to some sort of international blood tie. Interestingly, much less is said about the tremendous ( and far more selfless) Canadian contribution in 1939-45, especially at sea.
The great power summit in Teheran in 1943, where Roosevelt snubbed Churchill and sucked up to Stalin, was a warning - which Churchill heeded - that Britain's usefulness to the USA was declining. The two men, Churchill and Roosevelt are supposed to have been great friends. But there is evidence that this was not so, and Churchill, a frequent traveller to the USA, significantly did not attend Roosevelt's funeral in 1945.
After the war, with lend-lease aid cut off abruptly within weeks of Japan's surrender, Britain had to plead with the USA for help - and got it once again, including generous Marshall Aid (much of it unwisely squandered on a Welfare State we couldn't afford), but at a price. The pound sterling had to be devalued, the Empire had to open its markets up to US trade. And it was quite clear that the British Empire had to come to an end as well, not least because under these conditions we simply could not afford to maintain it. The scuttle from India, and the scuttle from Palestine, both happened because we could no longer afford to be an imperial or colonial power.
Our conflict with Iran, over the price we paid for Iranian oil, also arose out of national near-bankruptcy which rather suited the booming USA . This led to the disastrous CIA-MI6 coup against the Iranian leader Mossadeq, which has poisoned relations between the west and Iran ever since.
It is worth remembering that for some years after 1945 the US State Department regarded Britain, not the USSR, as America's principal rival in the world. Churchill, seeing this, sought to alert America to the Soviet threat so as to rekindle the 1939-45 alliance, a great success for as long as the Cold War lasted, but only so long as we behaved ourselves as the Americans thought we should.
And then of course there was Suez. I don't think this was America's fault. I think it was the fault of British politicians who hadn't bothered to understand the post-Teheran world order.
It was an adventure embarked on by a silly, weak, Prime Minister, anxious to prove he was a major world figure, who mistook an Arab demagogue for a re-incarnated Fascist Dictator (remind you of anyone?). In this, Anthony Eden was encouraged by Harold Macmillan, another lightweight who entirely misunderstood President Eisenhower, having believed the wartime alliance was a deep friendship. "Ike will lie doggo", Macmillan wrongly predicted when ministers discussed the likely American reaction to the Suez plan. Macmillan, as Chancellor, later had to tell the same ministers that furious and effective American financial pressure threatened to make us bankrupt unless we abandoned the Suez operation he himself had keenly supported. How did this man become Prime Minister?
Since then, America has put unrelenting pressure on Britain to integrate with the EU, a fact that many neo-conservative Eurosceptics find it difficult to cope with. It has shown little understanding of our historic differences with the Continent and our desire for national sovereignty.
And I was present during the tense months in Washington DC when the supposedly mighty British Embassy was repeatedly humiliated by President Bill Clinton and his staff, who decided to give respectability and political backing to Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams, to pay off domestic political debts which they saw as far more important than any obligations to Britain. Clinton's aides ( as one of them told me) viewed Britain as a sort of Yugoslavia, a backward country where they were entitled to intervene. This intervention led directly to Britain's greatest diplomatic and political humiliation since Suez, the surrender to the IRA at Easter 1998. Antony Blair got away with this because the British media fell for the ludicrous spin that it was a victory for peace and goodwill, and mostly didn't read the agreement and still haven't. It was a grovelling, one-sided capitulation. Would an enemy have treated us any worse than this old friend?
I repeat, I love America, think we have much to learn from her, am endlessly glad that she exists, I like Americans and enjoy many aspects of American culture. My heart always lifts when I arrive there and sinks when I have to leave again. But I do not regard her as a reliable ally of Britain. And why should I expect to? It was the great British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, who pointed out that great powers had "no eternal friends, only eternal interests".
