This is a fascinating review of Douglas Hurd's superb book of British foreign policy over the last few centuries,exploding the myth of Britain's "special relationship" with the US,where from Churchillian times,Britain was always treated as a vassal state,like a good ally "argues and obeyed" its superior master! Some interesting gems revealed now are that there was actually NO threat whatsoever from Stalin's Russia after WW2 ,revealed now in released papers,and a false threat scenario was developed to form NATO.The same strategy was used to invade Iraq and oust Saddam and gain control of his oil.
It is particularly complusary reading for all those who want to ask what the "strategic relationship" is between India and the US and what we are to expect from this.I give below a few extracts to show the lies and chicanery used by the US to fool the world into accepting a neo-imperialist agenda since WW2 to invade and steal the wealth of many nations,a policy still being used today.Whether India under "Constable Singh" will avoid becoming another US patsy and rent-boy like Pak is open to Q.We cannot afford to have enslaved our foreign and defence policy,just as Britain was and has discovered under Cameron and co. who are loosening their "special" ties.
"Choose your Weapons:The British Foreign Secretary,200 years of Argument,Success and failure".Author Dounglas Hurd.
Britain sold itself short. It had a store of wisdom on foreign policy unmatched in the U.S. Read the speeches on foreign affairs in the House of Commons in the 19th century and you will realise the striking contemporary relevance of much that was said – morality and foreign policy, regime change, intervention in other countries and the futility of parliamentary resolutions on foreign policy.
"For the novice British diplomat it comes as a shock to discover that most Americans, whether Republican or Democrat, sophisticate or redneck, believe that their country's actions in the world are intrinsically virtuous; and more fool those countries that do not recognise this.”
Book Review,NOT QUITE SPECIAL
http://frontlineonnet.com/fl2717/storie ... 708300.htm
Britain's new leaders have begun to question the country's supposed “special relationship” with the United States.
Not quite special
A.G. NOORANI
Britain's new leaders have begun to question the country's supposed “special relationship” with the United States.
“GREAT BRITAIN has lost an Empire and not yet found a role,” Dean Acheson said in a speech on December 6, 1972. The British rightly resented this insolent pronouncement by an overrated United States Secretary of State. If John F. Kennedy had listened to him during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a nuclear catastrophe would have followed. When he was in office, the United Kingdom supported him on all major issues, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, Korea and the rest. The remark rankled because it revealed a certain disdain for The Most Faithful Ally a la the Nizam of Hyderabad for the British. Like beauty “the special relationship” between the U.S. and the U.K. resided only in the eyes of the beholder, the desperate Brits. Their Prime Minister's recent visit to the U.S. was heralded by the BBC proclaiming it, accurately, as reflecting a “necessary” relationship, not a “special” one – which never existed. It is amazing how, unlike Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill subordinated himself to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The change has not come all of a sudden. Con Coughlin, executive editor of the Daily Telegraph wrote recently: “The radical reappraisal of British foreign policy undertaken by Prime Minister David Cameron's new coalition government has raised serious questions about the future of Britain's historic alliance with Washington. It has also provoked deep divisions among senior ministers over how long British troops will remain committed to combat operations in Afghanistan” ( Wall Street Journal, July 9, 2010). The British have come to realise that American assessments on world affairs are not gospel. Tony Blair, immortalised in Geoffrey Whatcroft's mini classic Yo! Blair is a figure of fun not unmixed with contempt. What is he doing in West Asia as an envoy? Nothing. The job is meant to save his self-esteem or what is left of it.
During the election campaign, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said on April 22: “If Britain wants to prepare for the future and not be imprisoned by the past, if we want to understand these future challenges of the world and understand how to play an effective role in shaping the world according to our values and interests, we are going to have to release ourselves from the historic spell of default Atlanticism.” He acknowledged that there had been very profound differences between Britain and the U.S., particularly on the issue of the “George Bush-Dick Cheney orchestrated war on terror”.
.... a report by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by the Labour Member of Parliament Mike Gape, poured scorn on the notion of a “special relationship”. It noted: “The perception that the British government was a subservient ‘poodle' to the U.S. administration leading up to the period of the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath is widespread both among the British public and overseas. This perception, whatever its relation to reality, is deeply damaging to the reputation and interests of the U.K.”
It added that the idea of a special relationship, envisaged by Churchill and Roosevelt in the Second World War, is dead. “The use of the phrase ‘special' in its historical sense to describe the totality of the ever-evolving U.K.-U.S. relationship is potentially misleading, and we recommend that its use should be avoided. The overuse of the phrase by some politicians and many in the media serves simultaneously to devalue its meaning and to raise unrealistic expectations about the benefits the relationship can deliver to the U.K.” It urged the government to be “less deferential and more willing to say ‘no' to the U.S.… We recommend that the government should establish a comprehensive review of the current arrangements governing U.S. military use of facilities within the U.K. and in British overseas territories” (Hasan Suroor's report in The Hindu; April 1, 2010).
Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden complained in 1954: “They like to give orders, and if they are not obeyed at once they become huffy.” His Suez adventure reflected a quest for independence but in a singularly destructive manner. It harmed Britain.
Macmillan differed. He was an unrepentant believer in “interdependence”. But, in time, Macmillan came to share Eden's scepticism of reliance on the Americans.
“Ultimately, both leaders concluded, for different reasons, that the American proxy was not the solution to Britain's long-term economic and foreign policy problems and that the Anglo-American relationship could not alone be relied upon to uphold Britain's world position” ( The Foreign Office and British Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century edited by Gaynar Johnson; Routledge; £164).
The views Christopher Meyer, the feisty British Ambassador to the U.S. (1997-2003), on that relationship are refreshingly frank: “When ambassador in Washington, I would not allow the phrase ‘special relationship' inside the embassy. I was worried that my staff would approach their work with a set of delusions: that Britain's relations with the U.S. were different in kind from those with any other country; that the Americans would therefore grant us special benefits, unavailable to other nations; and that as a result, developing a relationship with the U.S. of advantage to Britain would require less effort than with other governments. I wanted our diplomats to take nothing for granted.
“At the right moment there is no substitute for being as tough and direct in negotiation as the Americans are invariably with us. Americans have a striking ability to compartmentalise their sincere affection for Britain from their single-minded pursuit of national interest” ( DC Confidential; Weidenfeld & Nicolson; pages 56-60).
To most Indian writers all this is irrelevant. As one Secretary-General of the Ministry of External Affairs wrote: “A Foreign Office is essentially a custodian of precedents. We had no precedents to fall back upon, because India had no foreign policy of her own until she became independent. We did not even have a section for historical research until I created one.… Our policy therefore necessarily rested on the intuition of one man, who was Foreign Minister – Jawaharlal Nehru. Fortunately his intuition was based on knowledge.…” Indian “experts” on foreign policy are either Nehru-baiters in the name of realpolitik or his self-appointed defenders. The rich record of diplomacy they disdain to consult. This book will go a long way to instruct them.
In 1919, the U.S. withdrew after helping the Allies with the war. In 1945, it stayed on to expand into a global empire. Stalin's Russia provided both an excuse and a justification. In 1944 in Moscow, Churchill concluded the Percentages Agreement with Stalin. The U.S. sabotaged it. Churchill testified that Stalin kept his word and kept his hands off Greece. Having lost 27 million lives in the war, Stalin was in no mood to trust anybody. He sought territorial gains from Hitler in 1940, from Churchill in 1941, and won them in 1944. Opposed by the U.S., he used brutal methods in Eastern Europe. Three decades later, when Kissinger was Secretary of State, State Department Counselor Helmut Sonnenfeldt propounded a doctrine which bore his name. It came close to the 1944 accord. NATO was built on a false fear that Stalin wanted to conquer Western Europe. The archives opened in recent years expose the falsehood. Stalin had no such design. NATO was built on a myth. The authors share it even now. After the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S. expanded NATO's sway eastward.
Gorbachev's gestures of conciliation in 1989-1990 and Vladimir Putin's in 2001 were spurned.
The U.S. is not one to build a fair and just world order. Its power must be checked. Churchill sought to forge an accord with Stalin in 1950 but was opposed by Eden. De Gaulle relied on U.S. power but played an independent role in relations with the Soviet Union. Britain, alas, abdicated that role.
Now a new order must be built with the consent of Russia, China, India, Iran, Brazil and the European Union, that is, if it is able to speak with one voice to reclaim its self-respect and self-confidence. It will be a long haul. But the American century must end.
. I don''t think it''s a question that they don''t know what we''re doing.
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