PRO-AMERICAN
TWO major truths about American foreign relations have become plain in the course of this year. The first is that there is a gap between the foreign policies of the present United States Government and those of the other Western Powers. The second is that the international prestige of the United States has greatly, declined. The connection between the two truths is very easy to see, for it is still essential, if the Western world is to follow an American lead and respect an American Government, that it should agree with American policies. What is more difficult to understand, is the attitude of many people • in this country to the new problems of co- operation with which we are thus presented. In many quarters, and particularly on the left, there seems to be something like rejoicing that Anglo-American relations are not so good as they once were. Or if rejoicing is too strong a word, there is at least a feeling of something like self-congratulation that prophecies of American intransigence, isolationism and reaction seem to have been fulfilled. Real differences of policy have thus been made rather more difficult to resolve, because they have come up against the mental resistance of people here in Britain who do not really want to resolve them—who have got into the.habit of assuming that the Americans are always wrong. Anti-Americanism, which has never died out in this country however great the American contribution to the common. Western cause of peace and prosperity, is in danger of becoming something more than a device of Communists or a foible of the woolly-minded. It is standing in the way of the sane development of Western foreign policy.
Therefore it must be swept out of the way as soon as possible. Whether anti-Americanism, as a generalised habit, springs from personal prejudice, Communist propaganda, the muddle- headedness of fellow travellers, or the occasional desperation of the Parliamentary Opposition in seeking for some sort of stick with which to beat the Government it is dangerous and Wrong. There are, and there probably always will be, plenty of individual issues on which we can disagree with American foreign policy, but there are no good reasons for dropping the attempt to settle the disagreements. Recently in Europe there has been opposition to the apparently unthinking attachment of Mr. Dulles to the particular device of a European Defence Community even after its inventors, the French, have come to doubt its value; to the stubborn determination of the United States Government not to go as far as Sir Winston Churchill went on May 11th in the advocacy of a new approach to the Russians; and to the rigidity of American Far Eastern policy. But that does not mean that we should despair of the Americans and look for new allies. It does not even mean that in all of these particulars the Americans are not able to make adjustments. It means, first of all, that we have failed to understand some parts of the policy of a Power with which We are, and must continue to be, in friendly relations.
The trouble with the fashionable anti-Americanism is that it is so utterly wrong and foolish, and at the same time has become so deeply ingrained a habit, that it is almost impossible to attack it without descending to crude over-simplifications. It is necessary to say that the Americans are good and the Russians bad, that the Americans are our friends and the Russians our enemies, that the man who prefers Communist Russians to anti-Communist Americans is a fool or a rogue, and to postpone all the qualifications and explanations which are necessary to proper discourse on international relations. In exactly the same way in the great wave of pro-Russian feeling at the end of the war it was necessary to stop, to Point out the advocates of an alliance with Russia that the Plain facts did not justify such a course, that it was the Russians who were behaving unreasonably, that it was Mr. Molotov who was saying no. The time seems to have come round again for pushing large and simple facts under the noses of the wilfully short-sighted. It can at least be said for most Americans that they do not forget the simple practical and moral basis of policy even though they may make foolish and dangerous mistakes in their attempt to apply it. The trouble with our own pseudo-intellectual anti-Americans is that they have obscured a number of broad and simple facts with a collection of stupid prejudices: There is a considerable danger of decline into a helpless attitude of hoping for the best where Russian foreign policy is concerned—of assuming, in the face of most of the available facts, that the Communist leaders are really a collection of good-hearted fellows who happen to look sinister and dangerous and who denounce and imprison and liquidate each other more in sorrow than in anger. It would no doubt infuriate dur present-day pro-Russians to tell them that they are behaving towards Mr. Male nkov in rather the same way as Neville Chamberlain behaved towards Hitler, until the truth killed his hopes. But it is true just the same. They are well on the way to the new appeasement. Yet the fact, remains that all the post-war successes of the free world against Communist aggression—in the Ber:in blockade, on the northern frontier of Greece and in Korea—have been scored by the very opposite of appeasement. Firmness has paid every time. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation had its origin in the belief that firmness pays. And yet what seems to be most strongly objected to, where Americans are concerned, is that they go on thinking that firmness will continue to pay. But we have no real evidence that they are wrong. All we have is an undermining of sane policy by the insidious prejudice whose short name is anti-Americanism. .
But short names do not settle questions of international relations. Anti-Americanism is not enough, but neither is pro-Americanism. Fro-Americanism is only the sensible start- ing point. After that comes the working out of the details of understanding. The friends of the United States, as well as its enemies, are justified in criticising President Eisenhower for taking so much time to formulate the new foreign policy which he promised the electors last November. He may have his difficulties, but he should look to them himself. We can- not do it for him. In the same way, the friends as well as the enemies of the United States can condemn the hideous results of McCarthyism and continue to express the hope that the President will take stronger measures to root out this menace. Yet even here have we struck the right balance in attaching so much importance to these American shortcomings while ignoring the corresponding and much worse manifesta- tions of the same vices in Russia ? If we must complain of political persecution or of obscurity and procrastination in the definition of foreign policies, must it always be the Americans of Whom we complain ? Does anybody here think that these things are more tolerable in Russia because they have gone on longer and struck much deeper ? A lot of ignorance and fear no doubt gets into American foreign and domestic policies by one means or another. But at least there is a lively hope among the American people themselves that they will get rid of these things. We would be much better advised to support . that hope than to follow the disingenuous prophets of despair.
There is more hope in the world at this moment than at any other time since the war. There is even the hope that the Soviet Union may adopt a genuinely peaceful foreign policy. It has not grown brighter recently, but a case can be made out for hanging on a little longer, perhaps until the end of this year, before moving the Atlantic alliance from the pose of suspended animation in which it now finds itself. But if Mr. Malenkov does not by then produce more con- vincing evidence of a change of heart, we shall be forced by events, as well as by common sense, to realise all over again that the only sane British foreign policy has as its cornerstone the alliance with the United States. We know exactly what we must do. We know that the Americans are willing to go on with the policy of the Atlantic alliance, and that the more they can rely on the sympathy and determination of their allies the more willing they will be to go on with it and the more resources they will put into it. We know that the intentions of NATO are defensive and peaceful. We can be reasonably sure that an increase in Western armed strength will diminish rather than increase any Russian tendency to take direct risks--despite the gloomy pedlars of the patent untruth that one day " the guns will go off of themselves." The basic assumption in Berlin, in Greece and in Korea was that the Russians did not want to fight—only that they wanted to win. That assumption was justified every time. But a second assumption is almost equally important. It is that if the West grows weaker the Russian tendency to aggression will increase. The assumption is clearly fundamental to American foreign policy. We ourselves pay lip-service to it. No international conference of the Western Powers is allowed to go by without a repetition of phrases to the effect that the strength of the West must be maintained. It happens that the phrases are true. It also happens that Americans, for all their faults, really believe that they are true. And that in itself is a reason for being pro-American.
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