The Predicament of American Foreign Policy

The Predicament of American Foreign Policy IMax Beloff To ask a citizen of the United Kingdom to interpret in the spring of 1957 tbe foreign policy of the United States to a Canadian audience is to confer a compliment but to take a risk. I can only justify the Editor's confidence by being perfectly frank in this article while admitting at the same time that any attempt at applying an historical perspective to a present predicament is necessarily a subjective one and that I am conscious that others of my compatriots equally or better qualified to treat this subject ntigbt handle it in a very different fashion.' If I place tbe duty to be frank as tbe first condition for writing on this subject it is not because I want to seize the occasion to envenom current controversies but because all our instincts, in Britain no less than in Canada, are in the other direction. So conscious bave we become of the importance of the North Atlantic alliance that it is easy to fall back after any crisis in its affairs upon the well-tried stock of "Pilgrim Dinner" platitudes of the "hands-across-the-sea" variety. Even at a scholarly level it is possible to write the history of Anglo-American relations from a teleological point of view as if an indissoluble North Atlantic partnersbip were the necessary and permanent outcome of the whole long development since the American Revolution? Indeed this is the normal attitude of most of those British scholars and intellectualsand their number is growing-who make tbe United States their special subject of study. And their instinctive sympathy with the American point of view and their consequent tendency to equate that point of view with Britain's own best interests may make them good interpreters of the United States to Britain, but certainly makes them dangerous when they act as interpreters of the British scene to Americans or Canadians. It must be stated quite clearly that the actions of President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles over the past year have gone far to undo the good in the sphere of Anglo-American relations 418 MAXBELOFF that was done by President Roosevelt and perhaps still more by President Truman. Whatever gestures may be made, Englishmen will not easily forget that the self-styled champions of the world against Communism made common cause with the Russians against us at the United Nations, or the fact that it was almost certainly the threats against us that made us call off the Suez operation, or the indifference to our national needs and those of our French allies that these actions showed. As far as the future is concerned all this may be more important for British than for American policy. Britain's decision to continue trying to be a "nuclear Power," which could be criticized on many grounds, is substantially a vote of no-confidence in the automatic working of the North Atlantic alliance, a refusal to believe that British and American interests are so identical that a total merger of forces is possible. It is not a nostalgia for our position as a World Power that moves us, but rather a feeling that it is not possible to take it for granted that the British and American view of the nature and direction of a major threat will always and necessarily coincide. And yet as the Bermuda agreement has shown, we are in fact assuming that normally the North Atlantic alliance will operate and that in vital respects we can accept dependence. For such sentiments, and the drawing of such consequences from them, need not of course prove permanent. Indeed a view of the future based upon the inevitability of Anglo-American divergences would be no more justified historically than one based upon the idea, already criticized, that they must inevitably find themselves in ever increasing agreement. On the contrary, the proper way to regard the history of foreign policy is as a series of choices, each of which is no doubt conditioned to some extent by the choices that have been made in the past, but is nonetheless a free choice within the...