Heir to the Empire

Derek Leebaert, Grand Improvisation: America Confronts the British Superpower, 1945-1957 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 624 pp., $34.99.

HOMAGE TO older generations has long provided an effective rhetorical trope for criticizing current leaders. Evoking past excellence highlights present ineptitude or profligacy. Just as journalists praised the “greatest generation” formed by World War II and the Depression during the 1980s as an implicit dig at self-indulgent baby boomers, so did the statesmen who led the United States through those struggles and then built a stable international order provide a counterpoint to President Donald Trump’s insistence on putting America first. A late-July advertisement in the New York Times, written and paid by foreign policy scholars, defended that legacy against Trump’s policies. Back in 2016, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former NATO Secretary General, invoked Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy in a book that urged Americans not to abandon the rule-based international order they had created.

Derek Leebaert will have none of this. In Grand Improvisation: America Confronts the British Superpower, 1945-1957, he challenges the conventional narrative of international politics after 1945. Rather than deploying its preponderance of power to guide the formation of a liberal order, he argues that the United States viewed its global role more ambivalently and with a greater sense of the constraints limiting actions. Harry Truman and his administration reacted to challenges on a case-by-case basis without a strategy for global leadership. Leebaert casts Great Britain as both a rival with a stronger position than standard accounts recognize and a partner whose global reach enabled the United States to lead from behind until the two powers broke in 1956. A decidedly revisionist narrative brings neglected figures to the forefront while critically reassessing others.

Leebaert has long been a scathing critic of American foreign policy. His other works argue that the Cold War promoted the dangerous conceit that the United States could manage problems in distant regions through a combination of technical expertise and overwhelming resources. “Emergency men,” Leebaert describes as clever, self-assured figures with a patina of expertise and determination to do something, grasped opportunities to put their theories into practice that ended in costly failures. A kind of magical thinking presumed that enough will and effort backed by the right tools could solve any problem. But that approach works against both clear thinking and the national interest. It nonetheless has shaped a dynamic into the post–Cold War era that Leebaert heartily deplores.

While “by far the world’s strongest nation, with an atomic monopoly and unprecedented industrial weight,” Leebaert describes the United States in 1954 as “a relatively distant superstate” that operated as a self-contained island power sheltered by two oceans and other favorable geography. The term superpower only entered into general use much later. Coined by a Columbia University academic to describe countries possessing “great power plus great mobility of power,” it described Britain as an empire with bases around the globe better than the United States in 1945. While painfully aware of weaknesses and vulnerabilities, British leaders had no intention of giving way beyond prudent retrenchment to put itself on a stronger footing. American leaders with ambitions of their own, including an open door for their businesses and an end to Britain’s system of imperial preference that secured a protected market, did not envision a military commitment in Europe or the global presence that came later with the Cold War.

Some influential Americans like John McCloy and Lewis Douglas sought to supplant Britain as a global power, but President Harry Truman’s administration had no plan to take that step and still less any public consensus for pursuing it. Ending the war and the immediate problems of its aftermath kept the new president busy enough. Roosevelt had excluded his vice president from policy decisions, leaving Truman with a steep learning curve along with the challenge of staffing a new administration with competent people he could trust. Perspectives matter. Memories of later prosperity eclipsed the immediate postwar reality of shortages and rationing in the United States, along with strikes prompted by a scissors effect of rising costs and falling wages. The economic concerns made leaders in Washington cautions as they grappled with growing challenges after World War II.

BRITAIN CERTAINLY faced dire straits with the end of Lend Lease aid from the United States after spending down much of their wealth during the war. The upper hand within the Western alliance had shifted from London to Washington even before D-Day. Manpower constraints had forced the British to break up formations during the last year of war to keep fighting divisions at strength. America expected them to split the cost of Western Germany’s occupation, and Japan’s surrender created a vacuum in Southeast Asia that Britain also had to fill. Moreover, the need to earn foreign currency by exports while minimizing imports lowered domestic consumption with an era of austerity that lasted through the decade. Ernest Bevin, the trade unionist who became foreign secretary in the Labour government elected in 1945, warned parliament in September that the war had left Britain far poorer than they knew.

An Anglo-American financial agreement signed the next year included a bridge loan to Britain that proved controversial in the United States. Its backers in Washington viewed the loan as measure to revive global trade and avoid a postwar slump while keeping British markets open to American trade and ending further requests for aid. John Maynard Keynes described refusing the money as opting for “starvation corner” with limits on purchasing vital raw materials along with food. The loan bought room to maneuver, Bevin thought, both economically and geopolitically. Interestingly, Keynes also noted that his American interlocutors often felt themselves outsmarted in these exchanges.

Skill and expertise—or at least the perception of it—bolstered Britain’s soft power, but the country also had economic strengths a dominant narrative of decline overlooks. Leebaert describes even informed Americans as uncertain of exactly where their wartime partners stood economically. Business interests saw a competitor more than a client. Empire, along with longstanding global financial ties that reached beyond it, provided market access and raw materials. British technology had been innovative enough for Washington to demand patent rights in return for wartime aid. Even under especially difficult conditions, industry had performed well during the war and promised to be competitive after adjusting to peace. Besides their plans for building a New Jerusalem in the form of a cradle to grave welfare state and preserving Britain’s geopolitical reach, Clement Attlee’s Labour government envisioned turning developments in aviation and other technologies to civilian use while promoting other industrial sectors.

Leebaert’s discussion on this point intersects with a longstanding debate over decline as a theme in British history with political implications since the 1970s. Germany and the United States outstripped Britain’s share of global manufacturing before World War I, leaving an economy increasingly reliant on finance and services with industry concentrated in less competitive sectors of shipbuilding, textiles and coal mining. Correlli Barnett framed an influential critique that stressed failure to emphasize science and technology, sustain quality production and promote effective business management. Hidebound tradition precluded the drive for national efficiency that military power and a competitive civilian economy required. Britain, Barnett argued, had failed the test of war and then spent peacetime decades falling behind in productivity and living standards.

Preoccupation with decline and the very real crises Britain faced through the 1970s obscured a more complicated story. Rather than seeing Britain’s decline, the postwar decades showed other countries catching up to its living standards and productivity. Leebaert stresses how British leaders, especially Winston Churchill, appreciated technological innovation and saw the advantages their country’s lead in key sectors could provide once the immediate financial crisis passed.

Moreover, Britain’s Victorian hegemony had been run on the cheap with sea power by leveraging control over strategic chokepoints and the financial infrastructure of global trade. Imperial strength, as Leebaert points out, had long been spread thinly and was largely a matter of bluff. Deft management could preserve a position whose advantages might underwrite economic recovery. Hence American concerns about being played by the British along with suspicions of their real strength. Far from supplanting their wartime ally, many in the United States feared being used to prop up its strength. Competition in some areas and cooperation in others defined Anglo-American relations with neither partner comfortable with too much reliance on the other.

Retrenchment and an economic crisis in 1947 sparked by coal shortages during the coldest winter in living memory prompted reports in the American press of the British Empire’s impending liquidation, but Leebaert describes threats of withdrawal from Greece as a bluff designed to secure American support against Soviet expansion. Leebaert highlights the part Treasury Secretary John Snyder played in the Truman’s administration’s foreign policy. Although George Marshall proposed the stabilization plan for Europe that bore his name, Snyder had a key role implementing it and making the commitment palatable for the American public. A close friend of Truman, he worked with Bevin and other foreign leaders to frame European needs in a coherent way for a package that could pass Congress. While Americans sought a unified Western Europe able to manage its own security that included Britain, Bevin and Atlee viewed their country’s position very differently. The former endorsed European unity as “a sprat to catch a mackerel,” as he phrased U.S. support. Averell Harriman later noted with exasperation how the British had thwarted Washington’s goal. His frustration underscores American caution about security commitments and Whitehall’s assertiveness in pursuing Britain’s priorities.

THE BERLIN Blockade catalyzed the direct commitment to European security the United States long resisted. Bevin had taken a harder line against the Soviets and many Americans responded suspiciously to Churchill’s warning of an iron curtain dividing Europe. Closing access to Berlin forced a decision as Britain started delivering supplies by air for it’s garrison, with General Lucius Clay soon following suit. Experience flying materiel over the Himalayas to China in World War II gave planners a model for resisting the blockade without breaking it by land. Supplying the city demonstrated impressive technological mastery while showing relative capacity within the alliance as Britain struggled to meet a much smaller quota than the United States. The North Atlantic Treaty that created NATO had replicated the wartime alliance with a peacetime deterrent as Washington recognized the need for allies to hold a line in Europe.

No such guarantee covered the Middle East. Americans remained cautious about picking up another burden its ally could handle with local knowledge and its own resources. Where Britain saw the region as key to European security as part of a larger imperial system extending to South Asia and Africa, Leebaert describes U.S. officials as separating their country’s interests there from Cold War planning. Concerns remained that London would leverage American support for its own purposes. A balance of payments crisis in 1949 put British capabilities in question while sparking a trade dispute and the pound sterling’s devaluation. While the danger—and commercial tensions—passed with an economic recovery in the 1950s, the situation raised questions about what British retreat from empire would mean for American policy abroad.

Washington took a very different approach from the start in East Asia, where the United States had long direct experience and played the dominant role in defeating Japan. British Commonwealth forces in Japan’s occupation mainly flew the flag to protect other regional interests, particularly in Malaya where rubber and tin earned valuable dollars. Managing Southeast Asia fell to Britain, which filled the vacuum left by Japan’s collapse in 1945 until other colonial powers could reoccupy their territories. France and the Netherlands found restoring their position difficult, with the latter soon driven out of Indonesia. Communist victory in China’s civil war fueled contentious debates in the United States over who bore responsibility and concerns in Washington about holding a defensive line against further challenges.

If what Leebaert calls the mental map of American policymakers saw the world region by region, British counterparts like Malcolm MacDonald drew those parts together. MacDonald, son of a former Labour prime minister, arrived in Singapore as governor general of that colony and Malaya in 1946 and became high commissioner for Southeast Asia two years later. Likening his position there with Douglas MacArthur’s in Japan, Leebaert also describes him as influencing American officials with major policy consequences. MacDonald, a modernizer who operated very differently from earlier colonial officials, faced an insurgency by ethnic Chinese in Malaya that grew into a conflict lasting nearly twelve years. He framed a struggle Britain ultimately won as one front in a larger coordinated effort that required a joint response. Those terms matched American concerns as Cold War spread to Asia.

The Korean War shocked American opinion and sharply reversed demobilization from World War II. It revealed American military weakness even as it forced a choice between firm response and a humiliating withdrawal. “Defense spending” Leebaert writes, “almost tripled as a percentage of America’s GDP between 1950 and 1953,” while the military draft “became a national fixture.” The escalation had lasting consequences. In the short term, British officials feared the United States would either overreact or withdraw entirely. Attlee’s government sent a smaller force to Korea than Truman sought, but he pointed out that sending more would leave other regions unguarded. Leebaert stresses the political backing London provided, notably Gladwyn Jebb’s response in the United Nations that television effectively publicized. Differences over policy in Asia did not prevent a partnership U.S. military officials valued.

Having taken a forward role in Europe and East Asia, Washington also faced calls for material support for British and French efforts in Southeast Asia. MacDonald misread circumstances there, but he shaped what became a common view that these conflicts were part of a larger Soviet plan. If the Vietminh won, Malaya would be the next to fall. These arguments drew the United States into support commitments, but pressure in Korea raised expectations in Washington that Britain would rearm. Another balance of payments crisis in 1951 showed limits that brought tension. What could be expected from Britain and how would it affect U.S. commitments?

The British struggled financially to maintain commitments they could not abandon without losing vital economic assets. Grappling with that dilemma in Egypt and Iran brought tensions that led to a break in 1954. American criticism frustrated British officials who thought their counterparts needed to take responsibility, but doing so meant a passive, supporting role that followed their own lead on policy. Highhanded treatment of sovereign governments and mishaps handling the response made Americans on the spot question the actions that followed. Fears of Communist inroads aroused concern about alienating public opinion by aiding Britain and the local elites that exploited their people on its behalf. Dwight Eisenhower’s public statement that the United States should back “legitimate aspirations” of Muslims reflected private concerns over being seen to back the wrong side in these disputes.

Washington followed Britain’s lead in Iran, albeit hesitantly, by aiding a coup against Mohammed Mosaddeq who had sought to renegotiate the terms on which the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company managed the petroleum industry. An American consortium broke the British monopoly and shared profits with Iran’s new government. Egypt offered a different story, where the allies differed on handling nationalists. As Truman’s successor at the White House, Eisenhower prioritized avoiding perceptions of collusion with the British Empire, even as Churchill, on his return as prime minister, sought closer relations in hopes of shifting burdens so Britain could sustain its global position at manageable cost. Leebaert stresses Eisenhower’s concern with U.S. public finances and the fragility of the country’s prosperity, which meant limiting military commitments. Allies would have to take up more of their own defense, while a “new look” strategy relied on nuclear technology as a substitute for costly conventional forces.

Eisenhower’s focus on balancing assets with liabilities in a way that limited exposure to risk as the Cold War shaped relations with Britain. Getting the United States on the wrong side of popular movements gave the Soviets opportunities beyond Europe that Eisenhower sought to minimize. Sticking up for Britain—indeed any pose beyond neutrality—in colonial disputes risked that outcome. Cooperation also generated friction that grew over the decade after 1945. Leebaert describes Britain as providing “the underlying service industries of American outreach: secret intelligence, often-useful diplomatic expertise, and, significantly, the ‘outposts’ of empire.” The sense that propping up that empire and backing, or at least acquiescing, in British priorities, however, aroused resentment heightened by public feeling that Americans generally carried an undue portion of its allies’ defense.

THE 1956 Suez Crisis marked a break in Anglo-American relations that showed these dynamics at work. Anthony Eden, who had succeeded Churchill as prime minister in 1955, framed the Suez Canal’s seizure by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalist government in Egypt as a reprise of the 1938 Munich Crisis. Mixing the analogy, the ailing Eden cast Nasser himself as a latter-day Mussolini. Overlooking longstanding tensions in Anglo-Egyptian relations, antagonism fueled by British high-handedness and details of the agreement governing the canal’s management, he chose to handle by force what could have been secured more easily by guile. A complex Anglo-French scheme involving collusion with Israel and complicated operations delayed quick action which might have produced a fait accompli on the ground. Mounting the attack in a U.S. election year without consultation and in the midst of a separate crisis in Hungary amounted to a direct provocation.

Eisenhower denounced the attack on Egypt and took the argument for a ceasefire to the United Nations General Assembly, where no veto could halt proceedings. Far from acquiescing, however angrily, the United States actively opposed Britain, with private economic pressure reinforcing public statements. Britain yielded to American demands for unconditional ceasefire and then withdrawal, forcing France and Israel to follow. Eden left office, with Harold Macmillan, a key figure in the maneuvering behind his ouster, taking a more emollient line with America as his replacement.

Leebaert claims Eisenhower saved Britain from disaster, and it merits noting that its earlier nineteenth-century protectorate followed a military intervention that had left Egypt without any force able to keep order. Having broken the Egyptian army and state, Britain had been left with the responsibility for the ruins. The prospect of a reprise in 1956 raised political-military questions of what could come next that Britain could not have resolved. A more dexterous approach from the start, however, would have secured interests without a confrontation and thereby avoided damaging not only British, but Western prestige in the Middle East. Setting Nasser up to score a propaganda win had larger consequences that roiled the region for decades to come.

Did Suez cut Britain down to size? It certainly showed the dangers of overreaching, along with underlying weaknesses that made postwar ambitions to sustain empire unsustainable. A loss of self-belief that emerged more forcefully in the 1960s fueled preoccupation with decline that still lingers. Despite undoubted strengths, Britain’s economy could not sustain the military effort it had upheld since World War I. Cuts and consolidations followed Suez to bring efforts more in line with resources, though British forces maintained a presence in the Middle East until the early 1970s and returned later on a smaller scale. Washington held the upper hand in relations, with growing U.S. assertiveness in regions where there had been little presence before. A carefully prepared speech by Richard Nixon in December 1965 marked a “declaration of independence” from British influence that the future president later called the moment where the United States took foreign policy leadership of the free world. The latter point became a theme for American newspapers and magazines from the 1950s onward.

A more significant turning point in Leebaert’s story came with the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957. Placing a satellite in orbit showed that the Soviets could marry nuclear weapons with rockets able to reach North America. It made the United States vulnerable to direct attack in way that it had never been before. Long-range aircraft now also had new capabilities. Besides setting the technological stakes for competition in strategic weapons at a level where only the two superpowers could compete—though Britain acquired an independent thermonuclear capability as a deterrent—the shift put America on the front line of any confrontation. Debate over a purported missile gap raised alarms during the 1960s presidential election and set an edge on the Cold War rivalry as the United States took a more forward role.

That role began under Eisenhower with interventions to shape distant regions with foreign aid, military assistance and nation building efforts that Americans hitherto avoided outside the Caribbean and Central America. Development assistance helped counter perceived Communist subversion while covert action could topple opponents and install allies. America stepped up to manage regions and their internal politics as the British increasingly stepped back. The restraint expressed by Eisenhower’s reluctance “to police the world” gave way to John F. Kennedy’s pledge to bear any burden and pay any price. An interventionist forward strategy that Walter McDougall aptly calls global meliorism became the new normal for the Cold War and beyond. National security justified an expanded defense structure guided by the “emergency men” Leebaert deplores, who lacked practical experience yet pushed aside professional diplomats and civil servants.

AMERICAN PRIMACY came from “a twisting sequence of ad hoc decisions hammered out under the stresses of sudden foreign urgencies and heavily politicized responses.” Two oceans and a continental span made the United States an island superstate rather than a superpower with global reach. A 1953 quip by the British diplomat Oliver Franks that Americans don’t do grand strategy gives Leebaert a shorthand to underline his emphasis on improvisation guided by a disinclination to lead for the decade after 1945. The liberal international system built by postwar wise men came much later in the late 1950s. “World order” expressed a much looser understanding of “constitutionalism, free trade, resistance to aggression, and, at the top, as much international cooperation as possible.” The institutional structure to uphold it built on an older, nineteenth-century legacy and came gradually in response to particular challenges until American primacy, coupled with economic recovery in Europe and Japan, gave it coherence.

Leebaert’s sprawling account puts a different spin on American and British history with an eye to current policy challenges. Besides showing the difficulties of managing empire—especially without professional diplomats and civil servants relying on practical experience rather than academic training—it makes a persuasive case for offshore balancing as a strategy. Besides incurring high costs, intervention demands skills and local knowledge while posing risks that outweigh likely rewards. Empire worked for Britain as a legacy from the nineteenth century, but it became hard to sustain, and decolonization showed that many of its benefits could be had without the burdens of direct rule.

Strengths in technology and manufacturing, along with the soft power wealth, culture and institutions provide, gave the U.S. advantages that enabled it to act where needed with local partners while stepping back when necessary. Many Americans recognized that fact and resisted a false choice between isolation and empire. Cold War pressures worked against a more pragmatic alternative, even if the language to articulate one had been at hand. Now that America and the world have emerged from a post–Cold War era of globalization characterized by muddle and improvisation, perhaps the time to draw on history and frame such a strategy for sustaining peace is at hand.

William Anthony Hay is an associate professor of history at Mississippi State University, specializing in British History, International Relations, and the Atlantic World over the eighteenth century. His latest book, published last April, is Lord Liverpool: A Political Life.

Image: Flickr / Liz Lawley