Speaker – Derek Leebaert<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The British Empire remained a superpower at least until 1957. But the re-
elected Eisenhower administration then proclaimed \u2018a declaration of
independence\u2019 from British authority. The years in between are freighted with
myths: Britain\u2019s \u2018withdrawal from the Mediterranean\u2019; the influence of George
Kennan\u2019s view of Britain within the U.S. government; and Britain and the
beginning of the war in Vietnam. Knowing what actually occurred is vital to
understanding questions of Britain and the United States in the postwar era,
in Middle East destabilization, in the history of the rise and decline of
superpowers\u2014and, not least, Brexit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Derek Leebaert\u2019s books include Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American
Foreign Policy from Korea to Afghanistan (2010); To Dare and to Conquer:
Special Operations and the Destiny of Nations from Achilles to Al Qaeda
(2006); and The Fifty-Year Wound: How America\u2019s Cold War Victory Shapes Our
World (2002). He is a former Smithsonian Fellow; a founding editor of
International Security, and a founder of the National Museum of the U.S. Army.
He is a partner in the global management consulting firm MAP AG (Zurich).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Speaker – Derek Leebaert The British Empire remained a superpower at least until 1957. But the re-elected Eisenhower administration then proclaimed \u2018a declaration ofindependence\u2019 from British authority. The years in between are freighted withmyths: Britain\u2019s \u2018withdrawal from the Mediterranean\u2019; the influence of GeorgeKennan\u2019s view of Britain within the U.S. government; and Britain and thebeginning of […]","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2019\/02\/19-02-15-British-Studies-Lecture-Series_2.mp3","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"61.8M","filesize_raw":"64800128","date_recorded":"15-02-2019","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":""},"tags":[115,113,21,109,39,40,108,111,114,112,106,110],"categories":[],"series":[2],"class_list":{"0":"post-102","1":"podcast","2":"type-podcast","3":"status-publish","5":"tag-1945-1957","6":"tag-afghanistan","7":"tag-america","8":"tag-british-empire","9":"tag-british-studes","10":"tag-british-studies-lecture-series","11":"tag-derek-leebaert","12":"tag-foreign-policy","13":"tag-global-management","14":"tag-korea","15":"tag-mediterranean","16":"tag-superpower","17":"series-bsls","18":"entry"},"acf":{"related_episodes":"","hosts":[{"ID":949,"post_author":"10","post_date":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_date_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content":"\n
Wm. Roger Louis is head of the British Studies Lecture Series. He is an American historian and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin<\/a>. Louis is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford History of the British Empire<\/a><\/em>, a former president of the American Historical Association<\/a> (AHA), a former chairman of the U.S. Department of State's Historical Advisory Committee, and a founding director of the AHA's National History Center in Washington, D. C.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Wm. Roger Louis","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"wm-roger-louis","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_modified_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=949","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":[{"ID":902,"post_author":"40","post_date":"2020-06-24 17:28:36","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-24 17:28:36","post_content":"\n Derek Leebaert\u2019s books include Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American I notice that Professor Weinberg has been following the news. So perhaps you can<\/p>\n fill us in on the national emergency. No. I’m reading a 19th<\/p>\n century Italian novel, but I can fill you in on the plague and the alarm.<\/p>\n OK. We have two guests this afternoon. Our principal speakers, Derek Liebert,<\/p>\n but we also have David Whately from U.T. Arlington. He is the author of the book<\/p>\n on Eisenhower, Churchill, Eden and the Cold War. And David, we’re very glad<\/p>\n that you could drive down from Arlington this morning to be with us this afternoon.<\/p>\n Derek Liebert has written several books<\/p>\n about the bureaucracies in Britain and the United States and<\/p>\n above all, on the problem of the Cold War. His<\/p>\n books include From Korea to Afghanistan,<\/p>\n Special Operations and the Destiny of Nations<\/p>\n and How America’s Cold War Victory Shapes Our World.<\/p>\n And the most recent book, America Confronts the British<\/p>\n Superpower. Derek, we’re very glad to have you with us, sir.<\/p>\n For your loss. It’s an honor to be invited<\/p>\n to talk at the preeminent center of British studies,<\/p>\n and what I propose to talk about over the next 40 minutes is<\/p>\n less history per say than teasing out as we<\/p>\n go along how this story pertains to today.<\/p>\n The last book that Professor Lewis referred to is titled Grand Improvisation.<\/p>\n America Confronts the British Superpower. Nineteen forty five to fifty seven.<\/p>\n And therein are explicit lessons for today, because unless<\/p>\n one understands this story and the context, it makes it pretty<\/p>\n hard to fully grasp America’s insularity that we’re seeing once<\/p>\n more in our retreat from alliance systems.<\/p>\n It makes it tricky as well to understand the British perspective<\/p>\n on European unity and federation or indeed events<\/p>\n in the Middle East. It also, unless<\/p>\n we take a closer look, it’s hard to understand the preeminent players<\/p>\n of those dozen years, say, after World War 2, starting<\/p>\n with Churchill, disliked as biographers always do. Churchill’s<\/p>\n return to power in October fifty one and his second time<\/p>\n at Downing Street until April 1955 just glosses over<\/p>\n what, say, one of his successors, Harold Macmillan, saw as the<\/p>\n most dramatic time of Churchill’s life and arguably the most articulate<\/p>\n with the most riveting of speeches. But biographers such as a recent thousand-page<\/p>\n biography would devote 30 pages to Churchill again as prime<\/p>\n minister. It also means that we’re unfamiliar<\/p>\n with some of the Titanic one time figures of American history<\/p>\n figures who, after World War Two, stood against the sky and are now completely<\/p>\n forgotten by Treasury Secretary John Westway Snyder, who is easily the<\/p>\n most powerful secretary of the Treasury in U.S. history, which I’ll refer to as<\/p>\n we proceed. My purpose also is<\/p>\n to correct many, many of the myths that surround<\/p>\n those dozen years after World War 2 and that keep on echoing through the decades<\/p>\n through today until they even get into the history textbooks to<\/p>\n further mislead notions about the Truman Doctrine of 1947<\/p>\n that are demonstrably incorrect, or about how America initially<\/p>\n got entangled in Vietnam in the early nineteen fifties.<\/p>\n Or, for instance, how the US abetted<\/p>\n what Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion on New Year’s Eve nineteen<\/p>\n forty nine saw as a declaration of war by the British Empire against<\/p>\n Israel. How all of this has been lost and forgotten and is highly worth<\/p>\n revisiting for current purposes. Most of all, I want to debunk<\/p>\n one of the most vexing myths of the 20th century that<\/p>\n strong words shape affairs today. And this is the myth. It’s universally<\/p>\n believed that after World War Two, Britain was so dispirited,<\/p>\n worn down, financially weak that it didn’t have the gumption<\/p>\n and the spirit to maintain its global role, and that the U.S., as<\/p>\n the new superpower, arrived and assumed<\/p>\n various worldwide responsibilities. That’s quite, quite the contrary<\/p>\n of what happened has I will argue. Indeed, the<\/p>\n term superpower was coined in 1944 by a professor at Columbia<\/p>\n University and the British Empire. And Commonwealth was the archetypical<\/p>\n superpower, all the more so after World War Two ended. Of course,<\/p>\n the US had an atomic monopoly. Of course we had unsurpassed industrial waste.<\/p>\n Soviet Russia, for its part, was the greatest unitary land powered history with<\/p>\n the mightiest, mightiest army that ever existed. But by the definitions<\/p>\n of a superpower, which. Means global deployment, network of alliances,<\/p>\n ability to project power into every corner of the planet. A 10 tacular intelligence<\/p>\n apparatus worldwide. There was for a number of years after<\/p>\n World War Two. Only one superpower, the US, came rather late<\/p>\n into the game. If we look at nineteen forty five<\/p>\n as Churchill is prime minister, until that summer<\/p>\n he’s elected. He’s ousted from power ignominiously to<\/p>\n the surprise of many. And into office come the Labor<\/p>\n Party. Bully boys. These are tough guys. These are<\/p>\n men who had grown up in anything but a school of moderation,<\/p>\n whereas Churchill and FDR could talk with some sympathy about Stalin<\/p>\n and Stalinism. That wasn’t remotely the case with the tough guys of the British<\/p>\n Labor Party. And the story through nineteen forty six nineteen<\/p>\n forty seven is very much the most form of no formidable of British Foreign Secretary<\/p>\n Ernest Bevin, the son of a 40 year old washer woman. He never knew who his<\/p>\n father was. Rose to probably be the foremost foreign<\/p>\n secretary in British history about how Devon very<\/p>\n much stood up to Stalinism and as we’ll also see,<\/p>\n wrote a great deal of U.S. policy standing up during the Berlin blockade of 1948.<\/p>\n And not least, entering NATO. The British were<\/p>\n not bankrupt, as Max Hastings and other historians would argue.<\/p>\n In 1945 are in dire financial straits. But bankruptcy is a<\/p>\n unambiguous word. It doesn’t lend itself to<\/p>\n squishiness. The British were not bankrupt. They were in financial currency<\/p>\n exchange predicaments. The Americans<\/p>\n didn’t regard the British as bankrupt at all. We believed they were going to be quite the contender<\/p>\n in the post war world. Britain’s two great trading<\/p>\n rivals had been wiped off the map. Japan and Germany.<\/p>\n Britain was expected to recover fast, especially with the<\/p>\n help of a US loan, a one time loan as it was supposed to be,<\/p>\n and let it not be forgotten. The British had the commanding heights of the industries<\/p>\n of the future that would be Jet Aviation Lifesciences<\/p>\n and very quickly atomic civil civilian power.<\/p>\n They also had a sprawling empire, quarter<\/p>\n of the globe, 600 million people. The U.S.,<\/p>\n which traditionally has lived behind its ocean<\/p>\n moats and high tariffs, came very slowly to<\/p>\n an understanding that there was an Anglo-Saxon colossus on the planet<\/p>\n that hadn’t the slightest interest in stepping aside.<\/p>\n A one time loan for British recovery was made in December<\/p>\n nineteen forty five. It nearly didn’t get<\/p>\n ratified by or approved by Congress because of events in the Middle East and Palestine.<\/p>\n It was a near run thing. The British were then expected to get into gear real<\/p>\n fast and assume a role perhaps<\/p>\n as global peacekeepers, as partners. It all remained unclear.<\/p>\n Maybe FDR type decolonization was to be preferred.<\/p>\n What got into focus in nineteen forty seven, however, was Americans<\/p>\n becoming more and more fearful of Stalinism and the British in<\/p>\n early nineteen forty seven Buffalo Wing. The Americans ever more into<\/p>\n a global role. The British and nine<\/p>\n teen. Forty seven February March. The great Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin announced<\/p>\n that Oh, we are going to leave Greece, which had been a longtime British<\/p>\n political military interest. They implied they would leave the eastern Mediterranean as well.<\/p>\n I would argue that the weight of evidence, the British had no such intention. Proof is that<\/p>\n they escalated during that time. The Americans, however, we got the bit<\/p>\n in our teeth. We appropriated massive amounts of money. The Truman Doctrine is a<\/p>\n blank check essentially to counter terrorism and terrorist activities anywhere<\/p>\n in the world and move relatively fast. We did it to<\/p>\n global political military engagements greatest by<\/p>\n end of forty seven were again in financial straits. The US helped bail them<\/p>\n out. Recovery was always believed was going to be right around the corner.<\/p>\n The inflection point, as they say in business, occurred in nineteen forty eight. That’s<\/p>\n where the Americans got truly, truly scared. Ten years<\/p>\n after Munich, the Czech coup of March<\/p>\n nineteen forty eight. When the last parliamentary<\/p>\n system in Eastern Europe was crushed by the Stalinists. And then, of course,<\/p>\n the Berlin blockade, it was at that point that U.S. ambivalence<\/p>\n toward the British Empire and Commonwealth and what they brought to the table ended pretty<\/p>\n deep. Quickly we realized that we wanted big<\/p>\n mediating bodies between ourselves and the rest of the messy world. Perhaps the British<\/p>\n Empire. Hopefully the UN. It’s hard to see<\/p>\n the US thrusting out for power, certainly at that<\/p>\n time. The British also<\/p>\n had enormous displays of political military might.<\/p>\n For example, the 1948 Olympics were held in<\/p>\n London, not in Baltimore as some had thought, or in MMOs on which was<\/p>\n another contender. But George the six had quietly used his influence to make<\/p>\n sure that they would be in London, as had been planned before World War 2. It was a<\/p>\n marvelous spectacle. It was done to impress the world that London was not a<\/p>\n bombed out city, the biggest in the world, but that it was a vibrant,<\/p>\n exciting center of the planet. The Berlin blockade certainly got<\/p>\n U.S. attention, especially when Churchill that summer compared it to Munich<\/p>\n diffidence in going into the world. One, we expected the British to do half of<\/p>\n that storied era left in the Berlin airlift. They weren’t supposed<\/p>\n to carry half the tonnage. And the Americans also held back from<\/p>\n any single military commitment on the continent. For example,<\/p>\n had the Red Army blasted to the west toward the channel,<\/p>\n the shortest way would have been to go through the British occupation zone<\/p>\n of western Germany. The American military was under explicit orders. If the Red Army does<\/p>\n that, just stand down. Don’t do anything. Only respond if American troops<\/p>\n are attacked. That policy didn’t change until Truman had been safely<\/p>\n elected. That November of forty eight. So time and time again, we see<\/p>\n the U.S. standing back, certainly in Europe. What was<\/p>\n underway in the Middle East was an unusual tale because<\/p>\n that is the one area that the US did get engaged in in<\/p>\n the future of Palestine. It was<\/p>\n done because of American homeland passions, guilt about<\/p>\n the Holocaust. The uncertainty of the British military commitment.<\/p>\n And Israel, of course, declared its independence in May 1948.<\/p>\n And the Truman administration was the first to recognize an independent<\/p>\n Israel, utterly contrary to the advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and<\/p>\n to Secretary of State Marshall. That was a cynical move by<\/p>\n Harry Truman, who had no especially strong feelings about Israel. That is<\/p>\n demonstrated by what happened fast after Truman was elected in 48.<\/p>\n The British, as well as the Americans, had had enough of Zionist terror<\/p>\n that is shown in September and Zionist terrorists what it was called at the time by all concerned.<\/p>\n That was shown in September 1948, when Foreign<\/p>\n Secretary Ernest Bevin and Secretary of State George Marshall stood on the tarmac<\/p>\n at Orly Airport as the body of the U.N. peace negotiator<\/p>\n Count folk. Bernadette was taken off of the C-47. They agreed that enough<\/p>\n was enough. In the Middle East, war was raging between the<\/p>\n Arabs and the Israelis. The Israelis had the best of it, which was not a surprise<\/p>\n to many of the Americans, such as Undersecretary of State<\/p>\n Bob Lovett, who had predicted an easy Israeli victory given the weight of Israeli<\/p>\n manpower and technology. The Israelis go storming into<\/p>\n Egypt. The Egyptians had a defense relationship with the British.<\/p>\n What I referred to previously on New Year’s Eve, 1948<\/p>\n that has essentially been lost in the archives is the British gave<\/p>\n an ultimatum to Ben-Gurion leave Egypt immediately<\/p>\n or the worst will fall significantly.<\/p>\n That was handed to Ben-Gurion under Truman’s signature by the American<\/p>\n ambassador in Israel because the British didn’t recognize Israel. And Ben-Gurion’s<\/p>\n response was this is a declaration of war from the British Empire.<\/p>\n And of course, Israel left Egypt within the first week of January.<\/p>\n Nineteen forty nine. This is not an historical curiosity<\/p>\n because this information with deliberately leaked by Dwight Eisenhower on February 16th,<\/p>\n give up Egyptian territory. So as you can see, the world is in this kaleidoscopic<\/p>\n mess. By nineteen forty nine. Whether it’s Europe, the origins of NATO,<\/p>\n the US is pushed, pushed, pushed by the new allies to commit manpower<\/p>\n to Europe. Utterly contrary to what Congress had<\/p>\n pledged over and over, Congress was told there’ll be no American troops remaining in<\/p>\n Western Europe. The US had minimal competence and its ground forces<\/p>\n that were there. About twelve tanks in the US army were<\/p>\n capable of combat in nineteen forty nine. Remember as well that the British<\/p>\n were the slowest to demobilize after World War 2. The Americans.<\/p>\n The Russians demobilized real fast. The British much, much slower.<\/p>\n And what the press reported was a million<\/p>\n British imperial troops worldwide and about a thousand garrisons. That wasn’t<\/p>\n too far off as would be proved.<\/p>\n The British, of course, were in their currency, squeezes over and over again. However, British productivity<\/p>\n had boomed far beyond anyone’s imagination. After World War Two.<\/p>\n And let’s not forget what was happening on the US scene. This is constantly forgotten<\/p>\n by historians. Americans lived under the terrible, terrible shadow<\/p>\n of the depression. The Americans were utterly convinced,<\/p>\n except for a very few economists, that that depression would come<\/p>\n roaring back in 1946. Why? Because 10 million youngish<\/p>\n men were being demobilized because of a supposedly crippling<\/p>\n one hundred and twenty eight percent of GDP national debt, and because of<\/p>\n the complete cut down in government demand. It was certain the depression was going to come back<\/p>\n and the Republicans got elected to sweep the Congress in November.<\/p>\n Forty six. And you can see every decision<\/p>\n in U.S. foreign policy significantly for about the next 10 years<\/p>\n was influenced by fear of the renewed depression. Right. Until full. Fifty<\/p>\n four. Fifty five. China, of course, to look at another<\/p>\n part of the world, was supposedly being swallowed by Stalin<\/p>\n and our ally, John Kai shek, not to be<\/p>\n the last. Corruption, incompetence. His forces<\/p>\n were caving fast, and it looked as if all<\/p>\n of Sino Soviet communist expansion was swallowing up<\/p>\n much of the globe. To add to the horrors of 1948<\/p>\n was what was truly expected to be the worst economic smash up<\/p>\n by far of the twentieth century. It was barely averted in 1949.<\/p>\n That was the one example in U.S. history where the State Department was functionally taken over by<\/p>\n the Department of the Treasury to work out that crisis, which was avoided by a whisker.<\/p>\n So China is falling or being lost to the Russian.<\/p>\n The Russians then, to America’s universal horror, come up with an atomic bomb<\/p>\n in August nineteen forty nine. The British are in another currency<\/p>\n squeeze hand Washington again, as in forty<\/p>\n seven around the Truman Doctrine starts panicking. What does this mean? What<\/p>\n might become of the British Empire? What does this mean for America’s role in<\/p>\n the world? What was launched on September 1st? Nineteen forty nine, ten years<\/p>\n to the day after Hitler invaded Poland was one of the most consequential of National<\/p>\n Security Council reports and studies that<\/p>\n I think has been undertaken ever. And the purpose<\/p>\n was to understand the future of the British Empire and how it pertained<\/p>\n to American interests. It was an enormously ambitious study.<\/p>\n Ten months were devoted to it starting September 1st. Forty nine. By the time it<\/p>\n ended in July 1950, America would be<\/p>\n at war. It was an attempt to audit the empire, to quantify what were British<\/p>\n capabilities around the world and how did that play into U.S. interests.<\/p>\n It required top level studies by the Department of Defense, by Central Intelligence,<\/p>\n with involvement for Treasury. And the studies were coordinated<\/p>\n on the National Security Council staff at the White House NSA. Seventy five<\/p>\n ultimately had an anodyne title, British military<\/p>\n commitments, British military capabilities. But this is why<\/p>\n it is significant. The conclusion was that the<\/p>\n British Empire and Commonwealth hadn’t retreated one whit since 1945.<\/p>\n Nor would it be likely to retreat or be weakened in the foreseeable<\/p>\n future. Through the 1950s. And if it did so, that would<\/p>\n be seriously compromised to the US geopolitical<\/p>\n position. Because Americans, for reasons financial, technological<\/p>\n and experiential, were unable to fill the role that the British Empire still<\/p>\n possessed as peacekeepers. So you hear that. And you’d say, well, what about<\/p>\n the British getting out of Palestine and 47<\/p>\n giving independence to what became India and Pakistan? How could anyone<\/p>\n look at a portrait of the world mid-century point and say the British Empire hadn’t<\/p>\n retreated and might be as strong as ever? It’s, by the way, that was both<\/p>\n presented by the British and understood by the Americans.<\/p>\n The British, for example, had not left India and Pakistan. Quite<\/p>\n the contrary. The Foreign Office Secretary BEVAN was explicit about this. The<\/p>\n empire was now stronger than ever in the subcontinent. Why? Because why did into<\/p>\n its global, financial, political and military alliance system now was the<\/p>\n largest democracy in the world. India and the world’s largest Muslim<\/p>\n nation, Pakistan. Therefore, this made<\/p>\n the global entity of the empire and Commonwealth all the stronger.<\/p>\n So one finds titans of the U.S. Senate, like Robert Taft of Ohio,<\/p>\n easily the most powerful man on Capitol Hill, saying the British<\/p>\n haven’t become weakened. They are reorganizing. They are decentralizing<\/p>\n the whole entity with its million men. It’s who knows what in<\/p>\n reserve. It’s global deployments is as strong as ever. And<\/p>\n as the world is crumbling, or so it’s seen losing China. Soon,<\/p>\n Soviet Russian aggression in Korea. The empire is needed. The US can<\/p>\n do it. That is the mid century perspective.<\/p>\n That is essentially the summary of National Security Council report.<\/p>\n Seventy five that Truman received just within weeks<\/p>\n of Stalin launching the Korean War. There has been some ambiguity<\/p>\n among scholars about Soviet culpability. The question is open and shut. Stalin<\/p>\n had been preparing and pushing the North Korean attack<\/p>\n on the South since March 1949 with<\/p>\n enormous numbers of tons of petroleum logistical equipment.<\/p>\n Moving across Russia to prepare the invasion of<\/p>\n June 25th, nineteen fifty. The Americans<\/p>\n then had a disastrous experience<\/p>\n in Korea. The original mission, of course, was to rescue South Korea<\/p>\n from communist Stalinist aggression. We<\/p>\n nearly were kicked off the peninsula, but General MacArthur was<\/p>\n able to then rout the North Koreans in September 1950. Again,<\/p>\n the Americans got the bit between their teeth. Indeed, encouraged by the British, as<\/p>\n has been forgotten, and we charged into North Korea right up to the Chinese<\/p>\n border. What followed, as you know, is<\/p>\n the worst defeat in American history, certainly the longest military retreat ever<\/p>\n in our history. Korea. To this end, can be seen as<\/p>\n our first of quite a few failed wars in a row. Five thousand<\/p>\n Americans were killed to accomplish the<\/p>\n original mission of rescuing South Korea. A twenty eight<\/p>\n thousand were killed in the failed invasion of North Korea. To<\/p>\n that end, by the time the Korean armistice occurred in<\/p>\n July, fifty three. It was a sad<\/p>\n defeat for the United States. And one of the rallying points was never<\/p>\n again, never again would America find itself in such a position<\/p>\n in the Middle East is in various<\/p>\n forms of turmoil, certainly in Iran. Iranian<\/p>\n nationalists, patriots, however, want to defy them at the time.<\/p>\n Nationalized the Anglo Iranian oil company.<\/p>\n The British got all set to invade in summer. Nineteen<\/p>\n fifty one to invade Iran. The fact that the Russians<\/p>\n still had a friendship treaty with Iran and it made it abundantly clear<\/p>\n that the British entered Iran, the Russians would then intervene themselves, didn’t seem to hold back<\/p>\n the Labor government one whit. Again, these are tough<\/p>\n guys who knew communism and had fought the communists nearly in the streets<\/p>\n in the 20s and 30s and defending their labor unions. Let’s not also<\/p>\n overlook some of the provocative attempts of some of the toughest of these labor bully boys like<\/p>\n Nye BEVAN, who was touting preemptive war against the Soviets.<\/p>\n He suggested a British preemptive attack and<\/p>\n forty seven and then again in forty eight, with or without the Americans. But<\/p>\n the Russians could not be allowed to become too strong. The empire had to respond.<\/p>\n So the empire, which according to today’s historians and supposedly left to the<\/p>\n eastern Mediterranean in forty seven, hadn’t even begun to flex its muscles.<\/p>\n It assembled a seventy thousand man invasion force to make short work of Iraq.<\/p>\n This got the Americans attention real, real fast. And<\/p>\n cables from the White House state and the Spanish, especially the Joint Chiefs of Staff.<\/p>\n Stand down. Stand down. Prime Minister Clement Atlee of Britain had the sense<\/p>\n not to proceed, but by this time the Labor government was tired and weary.<\/p>\n And Churchill was circling in for the kill. And he was mocking<\/p>\n the Labor government for its kicked Spaniel diplomacy.<\/p>\n And he won. To no one’s surprise. In October<\/p>\n rough time. The notion of Churchill being a friend<\/p>\n of Franklin Roosevelt, or at least FDR being a friend of Churchill’s is fanciful.<\/p>\n Jon Meacham has written a book about the classic friendship of FDR and Churchill. There<\/p>\n was nothing remotely like that. Churchill was a romantic. He might have romanticized his ties<\/p>\n to FDR. Franklin Roosevelt did not have friends, male<\/p>\n male friends, anyway. And<\/p>\n Churchill returning to power was now under no constraint<\/p>\n to suck up to the Americans, as he had been compelled to do throughout World War Two.<\/p>\n There’s still so much about Churchill that hasn’t been understood. A lot of which is distilled into<\/p>\n his second time in power. Churchill was often<\/p>\n called in his own country a Yankee careerist because of course, he was half American<\/p>\n and he was a careerist. And when he came to power and the men<\/p>\n he brought to power had few doubts about<\/p>\n where the British Empire and Commonwealth stood in the world.<\/p>\n They realised, of course, its financial constraints.<\/p>\n They understood utterly its industrial advantages, especially in<\/p>\n jet aviation, which the Americans still had to license. They understood as<\/p>\n well that if the United States had any hope of ever attacking Russia<\/p>\n or counter Russia, it would have to be done off of British airfields because the B<\/p>\n thirty six bombers hadn’t been brought online yet.<\/p>\n Remember, we had atomic bombing airfields<\/p>\n in Britain since the Berlin blockade. In theory, we needed British permission<\/p>\n to attack the Soviet Union. Churchill began playing<\/p>\n hardball right away with the Americans. He implied that those bases<\/p>\n could be removed if he saw fit. He implied as well that if he got jerked around<\/p>\n too much by the Americans over Iran and over European Federation,<\/p>\n he might pull the British Commonwealth division out of Korea.<\/p>\n He spoke about the immense expenses that the British public was bearing<\/p>\n for the sake of defending American interests around the world. Malaya<\/p>\n specifically with its exports of tin and<\/p>\n rubber. The British position from the Labor government<\/p>\n to the Conservative government and foreign policy changed little.<\/p>\n The British argued tirelessly that the only<\/p>\n way to defend a colony of Malaya with its vital exports that were<\/p>\n needed not only for the health of the British economy, but for the European economy because of the British<\/p>\n went down, Europe with Western Europe was expected to go down. The only way Malaya could<\/p>\n be defended was along the Mekong and in Vietnam,<\/p>\n and the French couldn’t do it themselves. And the Americans have to become engaged, as<\/p>\n we did to write a book. As one prominent diplomatic<\/p>\n historian does about the origins of America’s war in Vietnam, embers of war,<\/p>\n and to neglect the role of the British, and especially that High Commissioner<\/p>\n Malcolm Macdonald in Southeast Asia. It’s like writing a book about<\/p>\n America’s war in the Pacific against Japan and not mentioning Malcolm meant<\/p>\n not mentioning General MacArthur.<\/p>\n Malcolm McDonald was the British High Commissioner in Southeast Asia.<\/p>\n He ruled out of the world’s largest naval facility<\/p>\n still, which was Singapore. It was that Asian equivalent<\/p>\n of Suez, which was military forces. Middle<\/p>\n East only Norfolk, Virginia, might have rivaled Singapore at that<\/p>\n time. Malcolm McDonald was easily the most<\/p>\n influential figure on U.S. foreign policy concerning Southeast Asia<\/p>\n from as soon as we got aware of Indo-China 46 right<\/p>\n through right until fifty five. Everybody in Washington<\/p>\n concerned with U.S. Asian policy<\/p>\n made their pilgrimage to Singapore to get briefed by McDonald.<\/p>\n Highly convincing. He was known as the wise man of Asia. So if you’re<\/p>\n a congressman, Jack Kennedy, if you’re a brand new<\/p>\n vise, President Richard Nixon, if you’re the publisher of The New York Times or<\/p>\n if you’re Harry Luce running the Time-Life Empire, you go to Singapore<\/p>\n and you get your briefing from Malcolm Macdonald. Malcolm Macdonald will helpfully<\/p>\n fly you over the Malay and jungle, although he stopped that practice when Adlai<\/p>\n Stevenson had a near-fatal helicopter crash. But it will always show you that<\/p>\n the only way to defend Malaya and all of Southeast Asia is to draw the<\/p>\n line in Vietnam, which means backing the French and where they are with you to.<\/p>\n Back the French.<\/p>\n The Middle East, of course, is in its septic.<\/p>\n Terror for terror and was<\/p>\n getting into messier predicaments by<\/p>\n was far more accommodating to British interests. It essentially served as the trigger man, as<\/p>\n one historian called it, for the British to get rid of the Mosaddeq government<\/p>\n in Israel and Palestine. Back and forth, threats,<\/p>\n violence. But the US, the Eisenhower administration<\/p>\n increasingly realized it couldn’t stay away. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was<\/p>\n the first secretary of state ever to go to the Middle East, which he did on May<\/p>\n that afternoon of May 11th, the afternoon of May 11th, Greenwich<\/p>\n Mean Time. Churchill stood up in parliament and he had two messages.<\/p>\n One, that the Americans were unhelpfully obstructionist in dealing with the Soviets.<\/p>\n Stalin having died in March. And two,<\/p>\n moreover, and this was his true point right at this minute as we speak here<\/p>\n in parliament paraphrased his eloquence. The American<\/p>\n secretary of state is right. Arriving in Cairo as I’m speaking<\/p>\n and we have special agreements with the Americans. And in a<\/p>\n nutshell, he insisted to the world, speaking in parliament as secretary of state, Dulles lands in Cairo<\/p>\n that the British and the Americans were totally aligned against the forces of Egyptian<\/p>\n nationalism, which was outrageously untrue.<\/p>\n But he wasn’t just misspeaking because as Douglas is trying to calm the waters<\/p>\n of Egyptian nationalists, in May 1953, a new<\/p>\n military junta had seized power the year before. Churchill sends<\/p>\n in a commando battalion to bulk up in Suez, which<\/p>\n by then had perhaps one hundred and sixty thousand fighting men<\/p>\n in support facilities. That was the British occupation against which the<\/p>\n Egyptian nationalists screamed.<\/p>\n By 1954, guerrilla war against the<\/p>\n British had pushed and gone a long way for a Suez deal for the<\/p>\n British to yield in Suez. And I won’t go into the Suez crisis itself, but<\/p>\n it is intertwined with relations deteriorating within Israel.<\/p>\n The Eisenhower administration had a particularly<\/p>\n clear cut approached at handling Israel. It was to take Israel before the<\/p>\n United Nations Security Council for sanctions for what Eisenhower called expansion<\/p>\n and violence. And Israel was condemned.<\/p>\n And the United Nations at UW urging first in March<\/p>\n to Suez and what we saw one<\/p>\n way or another, despite the threats now for sanctions against Israel as<\/p>\n it was terror and counter-terror across the borders, was<\/p>\n the Middle East turning ever more into a dangerous morass that we couldn’t stay away from?<\/p>\n Most of you all of you, I’m sure, are familiar with the Suez Crisis. Britain,<\/p>\n France and Israel collude to invade Egypt. The Americans, essentially, the Eisenhower<\/p>\n administration saw it as an attack on ourselves. We came down hard with threats and<\/p>\n sanctions. This led in late December,<\/p>\n early 57 to what Eisenhower, Secretary of State Dulles<\/p>\n and Richard Nixon together called the Declaration<\/p>\n of Independence from British Authority. And they called it a Declaration of Independence.<\/p>\n No longer would we be<\/p>\n deferential would we bite our tongues in dealing with<\/p>\n imperial foreign policy. The Declaration of Independence was<\/p>\n repeated at least twice and once by the Canadians. And<\/p>\n you could see official language in the US change overnight. Until then,<\/p>\n the Americans had spoken about the United States as a leader of the. Ringworld World<\/p>\n Eisenhower asserts this Declaration of Independence. And from here on in right through today, we are<\/p>\n the leader of the free world, the leader of the West. Looking back, Richard<\/p>\n Nixon would say it was only at this point that America asserted itself in<\/p>\n the world as leader of the West. The story, in conclusion,<\/p>\n doesn’t end with Suez, but I end it with Sputnik because the spook<\/p>\n nick success in October 57 was, of course, an ICBM<\/p>\n competition between the Americans and the Russians. And the Russians<\/p>\n showed that they had the most effective satellite and ICBM combination first.<\/p>\n It wasn’t just the shock of being able to launch a satellite around<\/p>\n the world. It was that America’s launches on live TV kept on failing and failing for months<\/p>\n as our ICBM blew up. And it led to a great sense of vulnerability<\/p>\n in the US. The combination of this feeling of exposure<\/p>\n to thermonuclear disintegration, plus this declaration of independence from the British Empire,<\/p>\n really now let the Americans move forth very much on<\/p>\n their own, asserting their primacy by now,<\/p>\n by any definition, we were a superpower that was no longer a concern with having British air bases<\/p>\n or not. Giant forest, all class aircraft carriers were being deployed. US had more<\/p>\n bases worldwide. We clearly were playing to our<\/p>\n strengths mass producing everything from military hardware to thermonuclear<\/p>\n warheads. The end point comments where U.S. foreign<\/p>\n policy, I would argue, truly changed in the early sixties. That magnetic young senator from Massachusetts<\/p>\n who spoke of a world half slave, half free, who spoke of the red tide<\/p>\n coming in under the Eisenhower administration, who mocked that five starred<\/p>\n golf playing general camping out in the White House. This was all the excitement<\/p>\n of emergency and foreign policy henceforth would bring<\/p>\n in academics. Year by year, professional foreign service officers<\/p>\n would be marginalized by the appointees of the political spoils system as it is today.<\/p>\n And this infatuation with emergency, with excitement,<\/p>\n with America, its role in the world<\/p>\n full of the belief that everybody truly wants to be like us, that we could manage<\/p>\n the planet as well as we manage our multi-trillion dollar domestic economy,<\/p>\n that there is very little need to do our homework, that interventions in Vietnam<\/p>\n or Iraq would be a cinch. All of these are the delusions and excitements with which we live today.<\/p>\n And that is why it is worth going back and reexamining the sources<\/p>\n of how we got to where we are.<\/p>\n"},"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2017\/09\/british-studies.png","download_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-download\/102\/britain-as-a-superpower-1945-1957.mp3","player_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-player\/102\/britain-as-a-superpower-1945-1957.mp3","audio_player":"
Foreign Policy from Korea to Afghanistan (2010); To Dare and to Conquer:
Special Operations and the Destiny of Nations from Achilles to Al Qaeda
(2006); and The Fifty-Year Wound: How America\u2019s Cold War Victory Shapes Our
World (2002). He is a former Smithsonian Fellow; a founding editor of
International Security, and a founder of the National Museum of the U.S. Army.
He is a partner in the global management consulting firm MAP AG (Zurich).<\/p>\n","post_title":"Derek Leebaert","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"derek-leebaert","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-06-24 17:28:36","post_modified_gmt":"2020-06-24 17:28:36","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=902","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"transcript":"