The strength of weakness

J. Enoch Powell

Allies: America, Europe and Japan since the War Richard J. Barnet (Cape £16)

The United States was placed by its unconditional victory over Germany and Japan in an impossible situation. The

story of how the Americans attempted to comprehend and cope with this un- manageable destiny is a vast and gripping episode in human history. After almost 40 years, the shape of its successive stages can be retrospectively discerned. The present

time, when the American nuclear-based alliance is disintegrating and the American economic hegemony is no more than a memory, was the God-sent moment to at- tempt to tell that tale. Huge and powerful still, but purposeless and ineffectual, the United States lies wallowing, like some dismasted man-of-war, in the trough of world events. How it came to that condi- tion, how it was fated to come to that con- dition, is enthrallingly narrated in Richard Barnet's Allies.

He had to solve the problem of recognis- ing adequately the peculiar differences bet- ween the nations which America had defeated or rescued, without losing the underlying unity of theme, which is provid- ed by America itself. In fact, the European, the German and the Japanese sections of his book could be re-assembled at will to form three self-contained and magisterial treatises. Nevertheless, the great in- stabilities can be followed through the book like leitmotifs through a music drama.

The crudest and most potent factor of all was nuclear military power. Almost from the start a curse has attached to it, which, as soon as the United States lost their nuclear monopoly, entailed upon them as the possessors and past users a kind of madness. It was the Greek tragic progres- sion from Koros (excess of resources) through Hybris (overconfidence) to Ate (self-destruction). An America with a monopoly of nuclear weapons could credibly impose its protection on other nations and attach conditions to that pro- tection; but from the moment that the War- saw Pact and Nato both disposed of vastly, if not suicidally, overhitting weaponry, America's allies would begin simultaneous- ly to doubt and to fear its protection. The alliance, which had been founded on the nuclear hypothesis, lost conviction when that hypothesis was no longer sustainable; and with that conviction was lost America's power to dominate her allies and control their policies.

The attempt to rescue the nuclear link by deploying weapons whose use would not be tantamount to American suicide — Cruise and Pershing — had the opposite effect: the allies lost conviction not only in America's will to defend them but in America's un- willingness to make them a sacrifice. It was not accidental that the deployment of Cruise produced an anti-American reaction quite new in its depth and extent.

Another leitmotif in the 40 post-war years is the strength of weakness. The very debility of a devastated Germany and a devastated Japan gave them a hold over their victors. Adenauer's Germany could blackmail the American alliance into rearm- ing it by parading its vulnerability to Com- munist — or alternatively Soviet — aggres- sion. Japan had to be kitted out, if it was not to remain a deadweight on the United States, with the modern equipment of a state which could play free-enterprise capitalism off against those who believed they invented it. Japan too derived from the nuclear event a blackmail power which enabled it to rearm and to repossess ter- ritories. Thus the old story of 'captive Greece' which 'led the victor captive' was replayed — only this time it was not the culture of the vanquished but the victor's own power which overcame him.

A third leitmotif was the conspicuous failure of the United States to exert non- nuclear strength. First in South East Asia between 1960 and 1979 and then in the Mid- dle East in the 1970s and 1980s, America demonstrated self-punishingly that, in theatres where it would not or could not use its nuclear strength, its non-nuclear feet consisted of clay. The demoralisation of the American armed forces which followed was all too perceptible wherever around the world they were stationed.

The military catastrophe in Vietnam and

'I expect it'll be an unemployed sausage stuffer, an unemployed chicken plucker

the fiasco in the Levant stemmed arguablY from the nuclear source itself. The inter- continental nuclear-warheaded ballistic missile beguiled the United States into fall- ing for the false cliche that distance has been annihilated. As a result, American military power was committed under condi- tions where it was predictably doomed to fail. The sense of being called by destiny —

and the Communist threat — to step into the empty shoes of the European empires

prevented Americans from reckoning with the facts of geography, if not of ethnography. At long range, the nuclear Nemesis wreaked its havoc in Tehran and Beirut. In Mr Barnet's presentation, Britain is not treated as an actor in the drama on the same plane as Japan, Germany or France: to a British reader its absentee status Is painfully perceptible. The reason, however, goes far beyond presentation. The whole

movement of the narrative leaves behind a Britain which under whichever PallY

government has remained, as if still living In

the immediate postwar decades, 3 prisoner of beliefs about the United States which might have been valid in the 1950's but which America's other partners and former partners have long ago outgrown' We seem to be left alone in our acceptance of the indispensability of the American nuclear alliance, of the unchallengeable economic hegemony of the United States,. of the simplistic American perceptions 01 political and military realities in the Old and New Worlds. In short, Britain emerges as the only surviving satellite. In these days it is salutary to be reMinded, how much Britain's submission to the EEL' has owed to American conceptions of by-

gone years. European unity was seen froth Washington as the American prescription, 'part missionary zeal for spreading the

American success story to Europe, Part atavistic fear that, unless reformed, the

warring continent would once again disturb

America's peace' (Barnet). 'There Is a possibility of developing enormous em°-

tional drive in Western Europe behind !be, supranational idea of European uruty. wrote (wrongly) a State Department official

in 1947. Beyond Europe, Britain has re: mained tied, in a way no other nation, no even West Germany, has been, to American line long after events passed It with the result that the 'special relationship (if that was what we meant it to be) has reduced rather than enhanced British I:

fluence upon the United States. The presen' prime minister is not unfairly described by Barnet as 'sharing Ronald Reagan's world

view to a remarkable extent'. All the Inor` uncomfortable was the revulsion which she shared in 1982 against America's attempt to cut off trade between its European allt and Soviet Russia while continuing to sell Russia grain. It is as if Britain, alone among_ the victors and vanquished of World Wa" II, is sitting staring at a radar screen from which the United States has disappeared. Barnet's Allies offers a handbook f.°_

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