National Affairs: A BRITISH VIEW OF U.S. POLICY

The widening rift between Britain and the U.S. is caused largely by the pressure of British public opinion on Her Majesty's Government. There is anti-U.S. feeling in both parties, but most of it is generated on the left, among journalists and intellectuals who consider themselves antiCommunist, and many of whom are Christian socialists. To exhibit to Americans the nature and depth of this British view, TIME asked Tom Driberg, Labor M.P. for Maldon and an influential Christian socialist, to say why his kind of Briton dislikes U.S. policy. Driberg's response:

MANY Europeans and Asians mistrust the tendency to dragoon the whole world into two big-power blocs, each professing the noblest intentions and emitting, alternately, highfalutin slogans about democracy and Tarzanlike boasts of invincible might. We have seen this tendency in American and Soviet policy alike. We believe that it is wrong in itself, and likelier to lead to war than to peace.

Many of us also feel impatient when, like kids after a street fight, each side accuses the other of having started it. Did the Russians start it in Czechoslovakia in 1948? Or the French in Indo-China in 1945? Or the British in Greece in 1944? Any competent attorney could make a case either way. Blaming the other fellow is sterile diplomacy: it is more important to make a new start. (Hopes of such a new start are slightly stronger after some of the recent speeches of Mr. John Foster Dulles.)

This is not the neutralism of cowards or mugwumps. It is an assertion of the right of civilized and free men to reject doctrinaire absolutism, to judge issues on their merits, and to put forward constructive alternatives. Nehru in Asia and the democratic socialists of Britain and Western Europe may be more useful as intermediaries than as crusaders. After all, we agree on some issues with either side: with the Russians, we reject what seems to us the jungle philosophy of big-business capitalism; we stress political liberties as strongly as the Americans do—or did before the era of McCarthy.

Idealism & Trade. Laborite Britain was not neutralist on Korea. We jumped in to back the American initiative—admittedly with far smaller forces. We know how grievous American casualties in Korea have been; they could have been less grievous if General MacArthur had not raced north to the Yalu frontier and provoked the Chinese into crossing it. This was, in our view, the point at which the concept of the police action to deter aggression lost its validity.

America's China policy seems to us neither idealistic nor realistic. How can there be idealism in friendship with a regime (Chiang Kai-shek's) which corruptly squandered the billions of dollars generously given to it? What realism is there in refusing to understand that such a regime can never regain power in China? That China's actual, effective government is the Communist government in Peking? And that the more vigorously Peking is boycotted by the West the more closely Peking will be tied up with Moscow?

Americans sometimes say that Britain recognizes Peking only because of British imperialist and business interests in Hong Kong. In India and Burma the Labor government showed we were abandoning Britain's traditional imperialism. This was morally right and politically sound.