Roosevelt never responded to this point, and his evasion seems highly significant. The president identified a powerful US interest in Britain’s continued resistance, and displayed extraordinary energy and imagination to make public and congressional opinion recognise this; but not in Britain’s post-war solvency. American policy throughout the war emphasised the importance of strengthening the US postwar competitive trading position vis a vis its ally, and indeed the terms of Lend-Lease imposed harsh constraints on- for instance- British civil aviation. The US was unflinching in shaping policy to do as little as possible to assist the preservation of the British Empire, a purpose which it deplored, with special emphasis on India. Growing awareness of this caused Churchill much dismay, though his belief never wavered that fostering the American alliance was a core purpose to which all else must be subordinated.
He was assuredly right. An important element in the greatness of his wartime leadership was his understanding of the supreme importance of embracing the United States, in contrast to the stunning condescension displayed by most of his contemporaries among the British ruling caste. Compare Churchill’s wisdom with the remark of Lord Halifax, who became Britain’s Washington ambassador in December 1940: ‘I have never liked Americans, except odd ones. In the mass I have always found them dreadful’. Lord Linlithgow, then Viceroy of India, wrote to Halifax to commiserate with him on his posting: ‘The heavy labour of toadying to your pack of pole-squatting parvenus ! What a country, and what savages those who inhabit it !’.
As for popular sentiment on both sides of the Atlantic, a not untypical poll in July 1942 invited Americans to say which nation they thought was trying hardest to win the war. A loyal 37% answered, the US; 30% named Russia, 14% China, 13% offered no opinion. Just 6% identified the British as most convincing triers. Conversely, a 1942 Gallup Poll asked British people which ally was making the greatest contribution. Some 50% answered ‘Russia’; 43% ‘Britain’; 5% ‘China’; and just 3% ‘the United States’. In their hearts, British people knew that they could accomplish little alone, that only American resources were making possible Axis defeat. But it was sometimes hard to feel gratitude, amid British consciousness that the struggle was reducing their own nation to penury, while America grew relentlessly in wealth and might.
Now, my point in all this is emphatically not to suggest that the wartime Anglo-American relationship was a sham or a failure. On the contrary, at an operational level it proved the most successful military alliance in history. Professor Harry Nicholas has written that what was attained was ‘a much higher degree of cooperation and unforced fusion than had ever before existed between two sovereign states’. It is merely that we are foolish to idealise it, to fail to recognise that it rested, and always will, not upon sentiment but upon perceptions of respective national interest. It represented a partnership committed to a certain purpose- in the 1940s, defeat of the Axis- rather than a marriage of minds between peoples or governments, such as never could and never can be attainable. With the coming of the Cold War after 1945, the same remained true. The United States and Britain became the foremost players in the NATO alliance, a huge success story in shielding Western Europe against the Soviet Union. Close military and intelligence collaboration was superbly sustained through more than 40 years, and the latter especially continues to the present day. But meanwhile, on many other bilateral issues tensions and differences persisted between Washington and London, as they must. What matters, to justify the continuance of this like any other alliance, is to identify a relatively narrow range of big things about which the two countries can agree, acknowledging that on many others, they will not. This seems as true in 2011 as it was in 1945.
The phrase ‘special relationship’ always seems a rather pathetic British conceit, which American presidents indulge as a courtesy, knowing that some of our politicians attribute to it totemic significance. It implies that we hope, or even expect, to receive breaks from Washington which other nations do not. Yet only in very rare cases does anglophilia influence US behaviour. A conspicuous example was the military assistance rendered to Britain during the Falklands war, thanks to the personal enthusiasm of Caspar Weinburger, when much of the Reagan administration was sceptical about or even hostile to British purposes.
In the normal course of business between the two nations, even if a president feels disposed to act helpfully towards some British interest, Congress and the rambling diversity of US government can remain stubbornly unaccommodating. A senior member of the Foreign Office said to me in some exasperation late in 2003: ‘we have stuck out our necks a long way to support the United States in Iraq. This makes it pretty irksome that today, when there are twelve or fifteen important bilateral issues under negotiation between Britain and the US, on not one is the Administration helping us out’.
This should not be a source of surprise, though it always seems so in Downing Street. Tony Blair was naïve in believing that, by joining George Bush’s invasion of Iraq, he would gain leverage not only upon that operation, but also in inducing the Administration to exert more pressure on Israel for concessions to the Palestinians. The rule of the game, surely, is that Britain should wholeheartedly enter harness with the US in furtherance of any issue, operation or purpose which seems deserving of support. But it is woefully mistaken to join an American enterprise or back a US policy against British instincts or interests merely in hopes of gratitude or payback from Washington elsewhere, because this is unlikely to be forthcoming. Perhaps the wisest action of Harold Wilson’s otherwise undistinguished premiership was his refusal, in the face of immense American pressure, to commit British troops in Vietnam.