Grand Improvisation: America Confronts the British Superpower, 1945-1957, by Derek Leebaert. He writes,
Today it’s said habitually that “with the destruction at home in 1947, the British gave up trying to maintain a global empire” and that “a global political vacuum created by the collapse of the British empire” followed. . .people came to believe that some enormous transition had occurred years earlier, in 1947. It hadn’t. The events that transpired during these weeks, which surrounded the Truman Doctrine as well as the Marshall Plan, are very different from what historians believe.
His thesis seems to be that the diminution of Britain’s global role was less rapid and inevitable than we now take it to be. At the time, Britain still seemed formidable.
I think that I am well read on World War II and Vietnam. But this “in between” era is one with which I am less familiar. I believe that I am learning a lot.
My favorite elements of the book are his sketches of key officials, some well known and others less so. The story of Britain’s foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, a left-wing politician who nonetheless valued Britain’s imperial prestige and came to loathe Stalin’s aggression, is new and interesting to me.
President Eisenhower made a decision not to send its forces into Vietnam (then known as Indochina) in 1954. Leebaert’s account of this decision differs somewhat from that of David Halberstam. Halberstam has Eisenhower shrewdly accessing the opinion of anti-interventionists, including Congressional leaders and General Matt Ridgway. Leebaert has Eisenhower wanting to intervene, but finding little Congressional support (one crucial opponent was Senator Lyndon Johnson!) without any help from the British. The Eisenhower Administration ardently sought British help, but the Brits declined.
There was in interesting tie-in between Vietnam and Suez. Both the Americans and the British entertained the idea of the Brits helping America in Vietnam in exchange for the Americans taking sides with the British on Suez. Had that deal materialized, events would have played out differently in both places. But in the end, neither the Americans nor the British were willing to sacrifice what it saw as its interests in one area in order to get support from the other side elsewhere.
Sounds like an interesting book. Other reviews note that Leebaert works extensively with recently declassified documents. Something to be said for working with primary sources. People who knew Bevin have said Leebaert gets him right. Of course with Bill Kristol tweeting “Shouldn’t an important U.S. foreign policy goal of the next couple of decades be regime change in China?” perhaps an equally timely title from Leebaert might be his earlier Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy From Korea to Afghanistan.
My initial reaction to this book is Britain by 1945 was “all hat and no cattle”. Given the economic situation of Britain, which continued to go downhill after the period in question, any pretense of a British superpower would be viewed by the rest of the world as a joke. So irrespective of what leaders said or thought, it was over for Britain as a superpower by 1945.
I’ve read multiple times that the Suez crisis of 1956 marked the end of the British empire. They were still negotiating with Stalin as an equal in 1945. I’m open to suggestions otherwise.
Maybe the sinking of the Prince of Wales marked the end.
I always assumed the British Empire fell mostly because it did not improve the lives for the average British citizen after WW1 when it started collapsing. (It seems a lot quicker as WW2 was a huge blow to them.) And this is the reason why I don’t like the US heavy with military spending and invading other nations as it nothing for most average Americans.
For me the most interesting nation during this period is Japan as they truly did a develop an economic plan that challenged the Euro-US capitalism and showed the way for other Asian nations to grow during the Cold War. While the US was fighting a war in Vietnam, Japan was devleoping better manufacturing techniques.