ALLIANCES: Sense of Change

Without the animosity that marked the anti-Americanism of a few weeks ago, British commentators probed what seemed to them a new direction in U.S. policy. In its bluntest terms, British opinion suspected that the old Anglo-U.S. alliance would not be quite the same again, and that for some time past it had not been quite what it seemed.

The most cited text for their new reading came from Vice President Nixon's remarks, right after the U.S. voted against Britain and France in the U.N. General Assembly on the issue of Egypt: "For the first time in history, we have shown independence of Anglo-French policies toward Asia and Africa which seemed to us to reflect the colonial tradition. That declaration of independence has had an electrifying effect throughout the world." Britons saw the idea confirmed last week as India's Premier Jawaharlal Nehru emerged from intimate conference with President Eisenhower wreathed in smiles and declaring that U.S. policy is "not as rigid as I thought."

After Suez. Not all Britons objected. Many recognized that in the Arab countries, Britain and France are currently so discredited that only the U.S. can save positions essential to all of them (a quite different thesis from the angry Tory backbench contention that U.S. interests are trying to drive the British out of the Middle East). They understood that the alliance stands as firm as ever in the geographical limits of its primary purpose—the defense of Europe—and that Britain remains the U.S.'s closest friend by blood, interests and sentiment. This fact was underlined last week when the U.S.Export-Import Bank granted Britain a $500 million loan (at 4½% interest) to help Britain through its post-Suez crisis.

But Suez dramatized what had long been an unadmitted fact: that the Anglo-American alliance is not, as it was often assumed to be, something that reflects a common policy around the world. No joint policy existed for the Middle East. No joint policy exists in the Far East, where the two powers disagree over the recognition of Red China. The U.S., in helping emergent peoples in Asia and North Africa, had often found its achievements compromised by the U.S. association with the colonial powers. This stigma might not have been crippling if the U.S., Britain and France had hammered out a joint approach that the Asian-African world could accept. They had not.