Blood, Class and Empire

by Christopher Hitchens

  Of the numerous questions arising from this reply, such as the utility or principle of bombing the center of Tripoli in order to avenge a Berlin discotheque, the most salient was asked by David Steel of the Liberal Party: “Did this not,” he asked, “mean that the bases were purely American, to be used as President Reagan might direct?”

  Mrs. Thatcher had in fact—perhaps inadvertently—run into the deliberate and inevitable ambiguities of the 1948 “modus vivendi.” Only three years earlier, discussing the installation of Cruise and Pershing missiles, she had confidently proclaimed:

  The arrangements we have made for the new missiles are the same as those of long ago between Mr. Churchill and Mr. Truman. They are arrangements for joint decision—not merely joint consultation—but joint decision. I am satisfied that these arrangements would be effective. A joint decision on the use of the bases or the missiles would of course be dual control.

  This “of course” is exactly what the American side has always striven to avoid. Here again we return to Dean Acheson, whose horror at the naïveté of Truman was well recorded in his memoirs. At the White House meeting in 1950, with the Korean War at its ominous stage of escalation, he discovered that Attlee was trying to “lead Truman onto the flypaper” and exploit the latent but purposely obscure phrasing of the modus vivendi:

  They had, said the President cheerfully, been discussing the atomic weapon and agreed that neither of us would use these weapons without prior consultation with the other. No one spoke.

  Acheson meant “modus vivendi” to mean just what it means in the dictionary: “arrangements between disputants pending settlement of debate, arrangements between people(s) who agree to differ.” The phrase had been initially put forward by a State Department functionary named Edmund A. Gullion. According to R. G. Hewlett and F. Duncan in their account Atomic Shield: “His British and Canadian colleagues demurred, for the term was most often used to describe the relations between adversaries driven by circumstances to get along together.” This was Captain Mandrake bleating. Who was going to believe that Britain would declare nuclear war on the U.S.S.R. all by herself? Hewlett and Duncan add dryly: “To himself Gullion thought modus vivendi accurate.”

  By the time Acheson had done with it—”unachieving” Attlee’s momentary coup—the understanding was back where it started, except that by then the military bases in Britain were well established. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal had stated the advantages of these in his July 15, 1948, “Summary of Considerations to Send B-29S to England”:

  1.It would be an action which would underline to the American people how seriously the government of the United States views the current sequence of events.

  2.It would give the Air Force experience in this kind of operation; it would accustom the British to the necessary habits and routines that go into the accommodation of an alien, even though an allied, power.

  3.We have the opportunity now of sending these planes, and once sent they would become somewhat of an accepted fixture, whereas a deterioration of the situation in Europe might lead to a condition of mind under which the British would be compelled to reverse their present attitude. [Italics mine.]

  Forrestal was later asked to resign and committed suicide after a severe breakdown, in the course of which he imagined himself to be followed everywhere by Soviet moles. But his reasoning in 1948 was lucid enough to give birth to an unwritten understanding which the majority of British generals and politicians still regard as sacrosanct. Some concessions are made to local feeling—the USAF bases are signposted as RAF in order to please Captain Mandrake—but the tradition of American personnel being immune from the English courts is as strong as it was when Orwell was writing. In 1979, for example, at St. Mawgan in Cornwall, a U.S. marine killed a local youth while driving and the U.S. Navy succeeded in stopping the inquest. After six months it conducted its own court-martial and fined the offender one dollar.

  There is something almost perfectly emblematic of the “special relationship” in the idea of the modus vivendi; a hypocritical and unequal agreement which is both covert and uncodified. The British, of course, delight to conduct foreign policy in this way. It reminds their civil servants and diplomats of the highly convenient and untestable “unwritten Constitution.” The American official side also often prefers, for purposes of possible congressional scrutiny, to keep things as “informal” as possible. Dean Acheson records that in 1950, the same year that he “unachieved” Attlee’s diplomacy, he discovered a State Department and Foreign Office paper that discussed the “special relationship” in cold print.

  It was not the origin that bothered me, but the fact that the wretched paper existed ... Of course a unique relation existed between Britain and America—our common language and history insured that. But unique did not mean affectionate. We had fought England as an enemy as often as we had fought by her side as an ally. . . . Before Pearl Harbor . . . sentiment was reserved for our “oldest ally,” France.

  Acheson also worried that the paper, if leaked, could expose him to charges of being “the tool of a foreign power”:

  So all copies of the paper that could be found were collected and burned, and my colleagues, after a thorough dressing-down for their naivete, were urged to channel their sentimental impulses into a forthcoming speech of mine before the Society of Pilgrims, which by tradition was granted dispensation for expressions of this sort.

  Thus Acheson, a man accused by Senator McCarthy of being a “stuffy, striped-pants, stuffed-shirt, pseudo-Englishman” (which indeed he looked); a man who was once mistaken for Sir Anthony Eden and did not feel insulted; a man who was of recent English stock. A man, furthermore, who had argued with Roosevelt to forgive Britain the 1914-18 war debt, and who had been prominent in the “destroyers for bases” deal in 1940 that in some ways pre-figured the “nuclear bases for shared nuclear expertise” deal of 1948. Acheson was crucial in the “receivership” of the Empire and in the promulgation of the Truman Doctrine. (At that stage he even told Ambassador Oliver Franks that “the old Kipling approach did not work”—and in relation to Iran, too!) In the 1960s he made a famously stinging speech about how Great Britain had “lost an Empire and not yet found a role.” He ended his days as a Washington lobbyist for white Rhodesia, thus perfectly taking on the original coloring of an imperialism he had worked both to sustain and to supersede.

  His accurate mention of France as America’s oldest ally recalls an initial detail and irony of this chapter. After the war, Britain never repaid her debt to the French heavy-water scientists and, indeed, swore not to share any of the fruits of her later collusion with America. General de Gaulle, who returned to the presidency of France one mondi before Harold Macmillan wheedled a fresh nuclear “understanding” out of President Eisenhower in 1958, never forgot or forgave this slight. It added greatly to the sum of Britain’s difficulties when, very belatedly, Britain made an application to join the European Community, which, hitherto secure in the “special relationship,” it had scorned.

  De Gaulle’s first act on returning to the Elysée in 1958 was to summon General Laurie Norstad, the American officer who commanded NATO forces between 1956 and 1963. According to Jean Lacouture’s masterly biography of de Gaulle, he asked Norstad how many American weapons were on French soil and where they were stationed. “Mon général,” replied Norstad, “I cannot tell you that unless we are alone.” De Gaulle asked his staff to leave the room, whereupon Norstad said, with some evidence of pudeur, what he could not decently say without humiliating his host before witnesses. In other words, he confessed that he was not allowed to tell de Gaulle the answer, nor was de Gaulle “cleared” to hear it. “Well, mon général,” said de Gaulle by way of reply, “that is the last time, and mark it well, that a French leader will ever hear such an answer.”

  Margaret Thatcher is adored by many of her supporters for a willingness to stand up to foreigners where British interests are said to be concerned, but it would be quite impossible for
her to employ such tones in addressing even a junior American defense official. The Trident decision, one of the most unpopular and certainly the most expensive of her first decade in office, committed the United Kingdom to an infinity of outlay to “modernize” an American-designed system in order to baptize it as British. This decision was taken in effect before she assumed the reins of office, by a series of purchases and commitments which tied British procurement and deployment to the Pentagon. In 1980 it was revealed that the British fleet of four Polaris submarines could not keep up even the credibility of a continuous two-vessel patrol. Refits and other exigencies meant that for as long as two months out of every twelve, the British strike force consisted of one superannuated submarine, cruising the depths like a forlorn cetacean and praying that the day for which it was allegedly designed might never come. Not even a multiple-warhead capacity, cloaked in official secrecy, could make this seem like the rule of Britannia. The “modernization” of the Mandrake fleet, it was argued by even the centrist opposition party, would come, if it came at all, just in time for complete obsolescence.

  Thus, although the very idea of “massive retaliation” had grown out of the British nuclear White Paper of 1957, and although the idea of a permanent NATO army of the Rhine was also conceived by Churchill as a means of yoking America to Western Europe, the practice of the relationship grew steadily more paltry than the theory. Increasingly, the British defense chiefs were reduced to those handy “islands” so casually mentioned by Frank Wisner. The British evacuated the wretched inhabitants of Diego Garcia and dumped them in Mauritius in order to clear the way for immense Anglo-American installations on the newly desolate island. They opened the “sovereign bases” in Cyprus for the purpose of manned U-2 flights over the Middle East and, after the “loss” of Iran, the Soviet Union. They even turned their own island into a facility for the United States.

  The ironic repayment for this island-donating strategy came in 1982, when to the annoyance of much of official Washington the Thatcher government insisted on a fight with Argentina over the Falklands. When compelled to choose between its Latin and its Atlantic ally, the Reagan administration had little option. It was supported, in its slightly reluctant choice, by an American opinion which decisively sided with the London view of the war. Opinion polls found that Americans of German and Scandinavian and even Italian descent preferred the Anglo-Saxon to the Hispanic world-view. General Vernon Walters, the leading exponent of the military junta solution to Latin American questions and the most experienced warrior in the administration, conceded that “the atavistic business of blood and language” had been essential in determining American partiality.

  Yet again, in other words, it was post-imperial patterns which imposed themselves. For the British, it was instinctive and automatic to seek the role of closest cousin, and to mortgage such portions of colonial real estate as remained to the maintenance of a vicarious “seat at the top table.” This revealing expression, so redolent of the class system which made it sound natural, supplies the clue to the military half.

  Unlike de Gaulle, who went on to show reasoned and important and even prescient dissent about Vietnam, NATO, and dollar inflation, the British exchanged a veto for a ditto. The rewards, even counting the political triumph of the Falklands, were not overly impressive. One year after the Union Jack had been rehoisted over Port Stanley, the BBC invited a series of past and present American statesmen to comment on Prime Minister Thatcher’s assertion that command of U.S. bases and missiles in Britain was exerted by “dual control.” The reply, whedier from Robert McNamara, James Schlesinger, Paul Warnke, or Lucius Battle, was the same. Final authority rested and had always rested in Washington.

  Leave the penultimate word to Professor Margaret Gowing, official historian of the British Atomic Energy Authority and chief chronicler of the British “independent deterrent”:

  For Britain the symbol of Empire has gone but the symbol of the national nuclear deterrent remains.

  Leave the very last word to Sir Arthur Hockaday, Deputy Under Secretary at the Ministry of Defense, who was asked in 1987 whether Britain had the serious intention of penetrating Moscow’s antiballistic missile (ABM) defenses with her own personal warheads. With perfect gravity, Sir Arthur gave the reply that, after all, the Russians “regarded Moscow as the Jewel in their Crown.” The lust for imperial image in that choice of phrase was merely comical in the British case, but also expressed the less comical fact that Britain, by a combination of early technical and innovative primacy and later political and military dependency, had done much to pass imperial schemes even into the thermonuclear epoch.

  Conclusion

  When Walter Annenberg grandly commissioned the English historian Michael Grant to elucidate the possible analogies between the fall of Rome and the crisis of the modern Anglo-American system, Grant came up with thirteen “similarities.” Perhaps in deference to his patron, he gave little or no consideration to the one analysis that, at the close of the Vietnam War, might have been said to stare him in the face. In the judgment of many reflective historians, Rome as a republic was quite simply corroded by Rome as an empire. Whether demonstrable or not, this hypothesis surely deserved to be tested against the historic experience of Britain and the United States.

  Britain, of course, had few strictly “republican” virtues to transmit to America. (It still doesn’t; preferring to trade on the arcana of an ancien régime and the related mysteries of post-imperialism.) Such republican and democratic instincts as did manage to cross the Atlantic from east to west did so as contraband: the astonishing and germinal moral energy of Thomas Paine; the Welsh coal miners who fled their grim valleys and whose sad place names still dot the map of Pennsylvania, to which they brought a tradition of industry and organization. But these are preeminently not the sorts of image that leap to mind when the word “Brit” is uttered in today’s America.

  And in searching for the explanation, one is returned again and again to the kind of relationship that has existed between the two states and systems. America, founded in self-conscious opposition to the backward, imperial, complacent, hierarchic English, counterposed a certain utopianism of its own to the solid virtues of kingship, social predestination, conquest, and dominion. The luminous documents composed by the Founders and ratified as law in the Greek-named city of Philadelphia all show, in the sort of English that has quite disappeared from official usage, an educated disrespect for standing armies, hereditary privilege, state surveillance of the citizenry, “foreign entanglements,” monarchism, and the rest of it.

  But, as I have tried to suggest, all these elements of pre-1776 antiquity have been reimported into America via the very connection that 1776 was intended to dissolve. It might well be argued that the United States would have chosen empire over republic in any case, taking its precedents and promptings from itself or elsewhere, but in point of fact the real connection was almost always the English one. (Even the original sin of slavery came from that quarter, though it’s not the fault of Thomas Paine of Thetford that it was not choked off in 1776.) American rediscovery of the intoxications of a “natural” aristocracy, of an “expansionist” credo, of an affection for the marks and baubles of caste—all this was conveyed from England as directly as the chests of tea that had once ended up in Boston Harbor. And every time that the United States has been on the verge of a decision: to annex the Spanish Empire, to go to war in Europe, to announce the Soviet Union as the official enemy, to acquire new and weighty “burdens” in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, to embark upon nuclear weapons research, to establish a national nexus of intelligence gathering, there has been a deceptively languid English adviser at the elbow, urging yes in tones that neither hector nor beseech but are always somehow beguiling.

  The resulting joint mythology has at some points been semi-institutionalized, in the nuclear, military, and naval symbiosis, in the Rhodes Scholarships, in the joint-stock aspect of Wall Street and the City of London, and through an u
nwritten but well-observed partnership in diplomacy. More important, though, are perhaps the long rhythms and the latent connections, the unquantifiable and instinctive loyalties that go to make up texture and personality. God or the devil is in the details, according to ancient report, and it is in the wrinkles and crevices of the “special relationship” that much of its fascination is to be found.

  The literary glass, for example, always returns contradictory reflections but is essential in giving a true register. To take only the matter of empire, where Kipling himself made such a self-conscious effort to make the precepts of his own poetry come true, one can find that changes in the temperature of Anglo-Americanism were often prefigured, recorded, and synthesized by novelists and essayists, with more prescience and insight than by politicians and diplomats. (There are spectacular exceptions to this, as when Dickens wrote as if the United States were basically a joke in poor taste. But even so, when Martin Chuzzlewit flings ripostes about slavery at Americans who jeer at monarchy or empire, Dickens is on to something even if Chuzzlewit is not.)

  It did take some time before English writers decided to take America seriously, and one of the first to do so was a man who had no “bloodline” in the Anglo-Saxon sense. Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, published in 1904 when joint Anglo-American hegemony looked like a safe bet, registered the favorable wind but also caught other gusts and currents. In his Central American republic of Costaguana, a rather scrupulous and traditional English trader of good family named Charles Gould finds that his colonial holdings are potentially a burden to him. He is wrenched between noblesse oblige and the effete patterns of inheritance, and the nuisance of responsibility. But if Gould is ambivalent, his American rescuer and nemesis is not. In California sits the great figure of Holroyd, ready to buy up any exhausted concession or interest if the time is ripe. Of this man Conrad writes that “his massive profile was the profile of a Caesar’s head on an old Roman coin.” Borrowing from the oldest image of empire for this purpose, Conrad updates Holroyd as a domineering turn-of-the-century WASP robber baron by giving him “the temperament of a Puritan and an insatiable imagination of conquest.” Treating Gould not at all like a Greek, he instructs him brusquely in the realities of Costaguana: