Britain and America after World War II: Bilateral Relations and the Beginnings of the Cold War by Richard Wevill (review)

The uncertain half decade that immediately followed the end of World War II remains a subject of intense interest to Cold War and international historians, as well as to those who study British foreign policy. Victory in the war seemed to keep alive Britain’s great-power status, ensuring its leading diplomatic role and its international responsibilities alongside those of the Big Two—the United States and the Soviet Union—even as the bipolar Cold War power structure took firmer shape. The issues confronting British decision-makers by 1945 were vast, grave, and multidimensional, touching on territorial as well as ideological divisions. British policymakers were concerned not only about how to forge a viable postwar peace over Germany but also how to manage imperial and defense questions of the greatest magnitude; and they were also constantly mindful of the pressing need for economic recovery and social reconstruction at home. This was despite the collapse of parts of the British Empire and fears of national bankruptcy and financial disaster at home.

Many in Whitehall thought the answer to at least some of these pressing policy decisions lay in the United States. This bilateral dimension of the postwar world is the starting point for Richard Wevill’s research. He seeks to place these substantive policy issues into a micro-study of the British embassy in Washington in the latter half of the 1940s. The book uses case-study analyses of the American Loan, nuclear energy collaboration, the Palestine question, and the Marshall Plan to determine what impact, if any, the embassy had on foreign policy outcomes.

The book gives an effective and intriguing insight into how the embassy worked when its diplomats were dealing with these issues. The reader learns how individual diplomats could really make a difference and how difficult the relationships could be on a day-to-day basis between Whitehall, government ministers, and Britain’s most important embassy. However, Wevill’s difficulty is that each of his chosen cases requires considerable background information for the reader (and he has chosen some of the most complex policy questions). He also includes a long chapter on the embassy and on how we should understand diplomacy and diplomatic procedures. The detail of the analysis may cause the reader to miss some of the dramas of these years: bankruptcy in 1945–1946, the dangerous and deadly eruption of the Palestine crisis, the potential strategic game-changer of Marshall Plan aid proposals, as well as the cutting edge modernization and technological issues relating to nuclear weapons issues.

Even so, Wevill’s work is firmly grounded in archival research and also brings a political science analysis of systems and of diplomacy to take forward our understanding of the period. This research was presumably a doctorate in its first iteration, but it is none the worse for that. However, the book would have benefited from more judgmental assessments. It would then also have added more directly to our understanding of the beginnings of the Cold War. Indeed, the reader could have been further informed about the still live issues relating to Britain’s relative decline and its international status as well as the wartime and postwar Anglo-American ties and connections that permeated so many British foreign policymakers’ assumptions and strategic thinking for the rest of the Cold War, and beyond.