Faced with this situation, Ambassador Aldrich had a unique opportunity and he took it. To my personal knowledge I can tell you that he played a remarkable and indeed an historic role during those anxious weeks. We owe him a debt which we cannot easily repay, and I like to think that his countrymen will feel that they should be equally grateful for what he has done. This is not the time to reveal the whole story, but I would say this . . . it is largely because of what he did during this period that I look forward with such confidence to complete and successful re-establishment of our relations upon the old level.
One should mention three ironic footnotes of the Suez affair. The first was a pathetic letter from Churchill to Eisenhower, penned by the old man on November 23, 1956:
There is not much left for me to do in this world, and I have neither the wish nor the strength to be involved in the present political stress and turmoil. But I do believe with unfaltering conviction that the theme of the Anglo-American alliance is more important today than at any time since the war. . . . There seems to be growing misunderstanding and frustration on both sides of the Atlantic. If they be allowed to develop, the skies will darken indeed and it is the Soviet Union that will ride the storm. We should leave it to the historians to argue the rights and wrongs of all that has happened during the past years. If we do not take immediate action in harmony, it is no exaggeration to say that we must expect to see the Middle East and the North African coastline under Soviet control and Western Europe placed at the mercy of the Russians.
This Burnhamesque rant, with mere alarmism substituted for globalism, was a sad terminus for a man who had disputed the merits of 1898 with Mark Twain, had exposed the flank of the Lusitania, had bent every nerve and sinew to engage the United States in international disputes on the Anglo-Saxon side, and had laid down the moral and rhetorical grammar of the Cold War. The squalor and pettiness of the Suez War were out of proportion to his missive, which fell on deaf ears. Three days after it was written, Herbert Hoover, Jr., commented laconically to Eisenhower:
It might be necessary for us to approach the British and say that it looks as though they are through in the Middle East and ask if they want us to try to pick up their commitments.
Eisenhower thought this a little brusque. He relaxed the Lodge policy at the UN and obligingly came up with the oil shipments and dollar aid that were to make Macmillan’s post-Suez life so surprisingly easy. Only after a decent interval did Hoover’s thought become the received opinion. Indeed, within a few years Eden was able to console himself that the United States had inherited his mantle:
Our intervention at least closed the chapter of complacency about the situation in the Middle East. It led to the Eisenhower Doctrine and from that to Anglo-American intervention in the following summer in Jordan and then Lebanon.
This typically wishful and self-justifying conclusion is to some extent shared by a later generation of American power brokers. Henry Kissinger, in his book Observations, wrote that he now felt that the United States should have supported the British over Suez. It is difficult to imagine him holding this opinion at the time, whatever the later rewards of it may be in adding to his reputation for “toughness” and loyalty to allies. The Suez War enabled Eisenhower to make the idea of receivership popular not just in the United States but also in Britain, where it came to all but a diehard minority as a welcome if shamefaced relief. It established the Grosvenor Square embassy at the center of London policy making in a way that not even 1941-45 had done. It placed the United States in a position where it could and did build a “special relationship” with Israel while still retaining a certain credit with the Arab League. It positioned American power to succeed British sovereignty in Jordan, Egypt, and the Persian Gulf, and to enhance the standing it had won in Iran in 1953, while still appearing in the international community to be in harmony with the values of the United Nations.
However, the United States refused to learn for itself the lesson it had helped teach the British. Dulles and Eisenhower were right about Suez, but Eden’s misgivings were rather more than vindicated in the case of Vietnam. The mere fact that both governments had employed the consecrated rhetoric of Churchillism and appeasement against one another was proof of the failure of receivership, and of the survival of more traditional jealousies over “spheres of influence.”
The process now became one of ad hoc succession rather than transition. In early 1964 there was a replay of the origins of the Truman Doctrine, when another British diplomat had himself driven round, this time to the Defense Department in Washington, and announced that Her Majesty’s government could no longer discharge its treaty obligations in Cyprus unaided. Thus began the long and unsavory association of the United States with the island’s intransigent problems. In this, as in most other cases, the Americans inherited British habits and tactics, and very often old British clients, too. One of the mutations involved via the British connection has been the adapting of classic imperial styles for modern, allegedly nonimperial purposes,
In a striking essay, “Imperialism Without Splendor,” published in 1982, Fouad Ajami discussed the way in which European concepts of rule and order had been transmitted imperfectly into American conduct. The Pax Britannica, he wrote (employing yet another familiar Roman echo), at least “had its stylists, its romantics, its visionaries.” Ajami, a Shia Muslim Lebanese with no reason to love the Western dominion in the Arab world, singled out T. E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, and H. St. John Philby as instances of those who accepted the “burden” (another felicitous echo) of “encountering the lives of others, of travelling into their poetry and language, of getting under their skin.” In contrast, wrote Ajami,
Pax Americana must be judged a dry, uninspiring affair. It has been a quarter of a century since the Americans replaced the Europeans in the Middle East as a result of the Suez War—long enough to establish a tradition, a discourse, a literature showing flashes of brilliance and yes, eccentricity. But none of this has come to pass.
When he wrote this, the most miserable phase of the American engagement with Lebanon was still in the future, and the most calamitous of all its encounters in the region—the entanglement with the Pahlavi dynasty in Iran—was in the recent past. Even so, Ajami perhaps failed to allow for the extreme American reluctance to be seen as a colonial power. The entire enterprise, after all, was supposed to be “value-free”; to be based upon the provision of weapons, neutral advisers and technicians, and the building blocks of centrist political institutions. Not enough, there amid the air conditioning and the commercial attachés, to thrill the blood or to evoke the high romantic note, hit by Jan Morris’s Farewell the Trumpets, with which Ajami began.
Very often—usually in the aftermath of some reverse or embarrassment overseas—democratic America conducts an inquest. As the Owl of Minerva flaps her wings, congressmen and academics and “country experts” are all commissioned to ask how it started. Whose idea was Vietnam to begin with? Who lost China? Why does Libya matter to us? Should we have known about Shia Islam? Why has the Gulf turned unstable? Where and what is Grenada? These, and many questions like them, are all part of the permanent passing parade in Washington. Meanwhile, American soldiers and officials, convinced of their own impartiality, attempt to compose differences between Jews and Arabs. Denounced as the deadly foe of Islam by Libyans and Iranians, they can also be found in the streets of Peshawar supporting a Muslim crusade in neighboring Afghanistan.
In almost every case, the original commitment arises out of one or another consequence of “receivership.” This perception is often occluded because of the American anticolonial inheritance, which meant a shaky dependence upon client regimes rather than upon the historically British method of direct rule. But without the inheritance of British direct rule, the connection would usually not have been made in the first place.
In several cases, inheritance came as the result of a self-consciously anticolonial strategy. With Libya, for example, the United States sternly o
pposed postwar British plans for the partition of the country (the addiction is an incorrigible one) between its two provinces of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania. American influence was exerted to have Libya given independence as a unified state. A Foreign Office minute from Hector McNeil, Ernest Bevin’s deputy in 1949, stressed that if Libya with its huge military installations was to be kept in the British sphere, this could only be done on an Anglo-American basis. “Our need is great: our case is not good. We must therefore be as naive as possible,” he wrote. The British Chiefs of Staff were even more candid in their assessment, written later in the same year:
Today, we are still a world power, shouldering many and heavy responsibilities. We believe the privileged position that we, in contrast to the other European nations, enjoy with the United States and the attention that she now pays to our strategic and other opinions, and to our requirements, is directly due to our hold on the Middle East and all that this involves. [Italics mine.]
Though there were differences about partition versus federation for this former Italian colony (only the radical Arab nationalists wanted a strong unitary state and nobody consulted them), the aim of both London and Washington was the same—a large military base in the country. To that extent, when there was a quarrel between the British and Americans in the spring of 1951, both parties had right on their side. Andrew Lynch, the U.S. Consul General in Tripoli, accused Roger Allen, head of the Africa Department of the Foreign Office, of wishing to subject Libya to “the dead hand of the sterling area.” Allen replied that Lynch was a typical American “imperialist,” trying to suborn the colony by means of the almighty dollar. It took some time for this dispute to be composed, with Libya admitted to the British sterling area and extensive American bases constructed at Wheelus Field. Three years after independence, a U.S.-Libya agreement signed in 1954 established the United States as the principal aid donor, at a figure which dwarfed the British contribution. After the British had been humbled at Suez, this left the United States in a position of unchallenged primacy, though dependent on the political clientele around King Idris, who had been the mainstay of the British presence. As a result, when Libya underwent a revolution in 1967 it was principally against the United States and its bases that the rancor of Arab nationalism in the country was directed.
The same unevenness of purpose and mutual dislike were evident in what Julian Amery, in his obituary for Harold Macmillan, called “the last Anglo-American war.” This now forgotten but significant episode occurred in October 1955. It arose because the Saudi Arabians, secure in the knowledge of American military and commercial indulgence, had occupied the important Buraimi oasis. In the British view, this belonged to the Sultan of Muscat, a princeling to whom they had a long-standing obligation. In due course, the Sultan’s troops retook the oasis under the command of British officers, putting American-backed Saudi forces to flight. This was to the enormous displeasure and surprise of John Foster Dulles and Aramco. At one level, a skirmish between British-protected feudalism and American-sponsored multinational capitalism was an instance of mere jostling at the borders. But Sir Evelyn Shuck-burgh, private secretary to Sir Anthony Eden and head of Middle Eastern Affairs at the Foreign Office, did not choose to regard it in that light. He made an entry in his diary for November 22, 1955, which, while not in the least perspicacious about the British position in the Arab world, was quite prescient about the American one:
The fact is that the American oil men have gone into Saudi Arabia with this vast enterprise which utterly submerged the old economy of the country, without assuming any responsibility for the political effects. It is as if the East India Company had regarded themselves as “just neutrals.”
Here, perhaps, is the clue to Fouad Ajami’s lament about an “imperialism without splendor.” As a matter of commerce and strategy and anti-Communism and counterrevolution, it borrowed directly from its British antecedent. But it could not, for cultural and historic reasons, pretend to be a mission civilisatrice. Sir Evelyn’s tone of distaste, his reserve about the vulgar mass and scale of American undertakings, his disdain at the reliance upon sheer cash, his loftiness about the brash interloper, can still be heard in the voices of some British mandarins to this day, at least when they imagine themselves to be among friends.
In other cases, where British withdrawal had been more precipitate, American receivership was correspondingly more smooth. A locus classicus here is the case of Pakistan. Until the partition of the subcontinent at independence, the British governor of the North-West Frontier had been Sir Olaf Caroe, a specialist in what might be called Tory geopolitics. Having administered the uttermost point of the Raj, he was anxious that his expertise did not go to waste. In March 1949, he wrote a lengthy “Mr. X” essay in The Round Table (which still called itself “a comprehensive review of imperial politics”). The magazine, which breathed with the collective efforts of Rhodes, Milner, and Lothian, proved too small a forum for Sir Olaf’s grand design, and the article was expanded into a seminal book, wonderfully entitled Wells of Power. It was addressed directly to “the Americans,” “as America with her new vision joins a partner full of garnered knowledge but overcome for a little time with weariness.”
The proposal was for a “Northern Screen,” to include and bolster loyalist Pakistan and to exclude India. The theory was of “a great oval or ellipse” extending from the oil sheikhdoms of the Gulf to the borders of Afghanistan. As Sir Olaf was later to write:
I went on a tour of the US for the British Foreign Office in 1952 and had talks with State Department officials and others on these lines, and perhaps some of the exchanges we had were not without effect. Indeed, I have more than once ventured to flatter myself that J. F. Dulles’ phrase “the Northern Tier” and his association of the US with the “Baghdad” countries in Asia were influenced by the thinking in Wells of Power. In that book I called those countries “the Northern Screen”—the same idea really.
The American decision to equip the Pakistanis with a large armory, and to take over the British-trained Punjabi military elite, was taken very soon afterward, and implemented by Major General George Olmsted, director of the Pentagon’s Office of Military Assistance. (General Olmsted was later to become the registered Washington lobbyist for General Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic; another instance of indirect rule.) Sir Olaf Caroe may or may not have sincerely believed that British “weariness” was something that would last only “for a little time.” As one of the last great servants of the King-Emperor, however, he evidently saw it as his duty to pass the torch and found a hand ready to receive it. Forty years after the publication of his Round Table essay, anonymous United States “advisers” were playing “the Great Game” in Kandahar, Peshawar, and Jalalabad, where once Lord Roberts and General Elphinstone had carried the flag and the saber. The American version of the game has, as Ajami might point out, yet to produce its Kim or even its G. A. Henty.
American empire, indeed, tends to define itself in terms of strategic jargon rather than grand design and noble mission. “Free World” rhetoric gives way to talk of “the backyard” of Central America and the Caribbean, “the arc of crisis” in the Middle East and northern Asia, “the southern flank” of NATO and the Mediterranean, “the northern tier” of what was once CENTO, and numerous other analogies of the far-flung, such as “choke points,” “arteries,” and “lifelines.” The most famous of these—the “dominoes” of Southeast Asia—derives from the period of Anglo-American jostling for influence in China and Burma and was actually originated as a term by “Wild Bill” Donovan. In each case, the debased globalist rhetoric has a British imperial origin.
But as the domino period came to an end, there was a brief moment of Lawrence in the embers of empire. The British writer James Fenton, observing the 1975 sack of the American embassy in Saigon, picked up “a framed quotation from Lawrence of Arabia, which read, ‘Better to let them do it imperfectly than to do it perfectly yourself, for it is their country, their war, an
d your time is short.’ ”
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Discordant Intimacy
Walter Lippmann, that ineffable comforter of the Establishment, was well ahead of his time, and well behind it, too, when he wrote in The New Republic of December 9, 1916, that the emotion felt by America for France was “the free friendship men give to those whom they meet only in their leisure,” while with the British “we have today the discordant intimacy of business partners and family ties.” Immediately ahead lay the famous cry of General Pershing as he landed in France: “Lafayette, we are here!”—while only a little further ahead lay the revulsion from Britain and British imperialism that was to follow the duplicity of “the old country’s” foreign policy. This revulsion was not to evaporate entirely until the final displacement of British by American power.
For all that, “discordant intimacy” is a useful term for the special relationship. It helps to explain the different forces and classes in England which have, at different times, complemented the ebb and flow of Anglophobia and Anglophilia in America by contrasting attitudes toward the new cousin.
Since in the present day the “special relationship” is so much a matter of elite cooperation and of the invocation of tribal properties such as kinship and tongue, it is at least worth recalling that English affection for the American republic used to be a question of democracy and liberty. Henry Adams noticed this during his time in England when the very idea of the United States was threatened. By that time, Sir Robert Peel—founder of the Conservative Party— had already plundered Tocqueville for his indictment of the horrid “tyranny of the majority” that was supposed to reign in the lawless and uncouth America. His cast of mind transmitted itself through Tory Britain down to Lady Palmerston’s 1858 declaration: “We are fast merging into Democracy and Americanism. Sir Hamilton Seymour teaches his children to speak thro’ their noses as that is what he thinks they must all come to.” Every “fastidious” British objection to America is contained in that one drawling sentence, capturing the association between vulgarity as defined by Arnold and ochlocracy as understood by the Duke of Wellington in his long struggle against “Reform.”
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