The years of transition: Anglo-American relatons 1961–1967

1990 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 239-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Dobson

The term ‘Special Relationship’ can give the false impression that Britain and the US have related to each other in an unchanging way since the forging of close bonds during World War II. If, like the present author, one chooses to use this terminology it is important to identify how the relationship has changed over the years.This article focuses on the period 1961–67, which was an important period of transition. In 1961, Suez notwithstanding, it was possible for British leaders to continue to think in terms of drawing on unique links with the US, some of which had been forged in World War II and still existed, others which had been developed in their common struggle against communism. By 1967 some of these links had been broken and others greatly weakened for a variety of reasons. Britain's relative world power had continued to decline, thus reducing her usefulness to the US; Britain began to look seriously to the EEC for its future and away from the US, which, for its part, was becoming increasingly preoccupied with Vietnam and the Far East in general; the economic structure Britain and the US had designed to manage the free world's. economy and in the direction of which they had cooperated extensively began to breakdown; and finally after the Kennedy–Macmillan friendship there was no really close relationship between British and American leaders until the mid-1970s. Before looking at this period of transition, however, it is necessary to review an earlier era when the Special Relationship was unquestioned.

1963 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-154
Author(s):  
Nicholas R. Clifford

Most of the scholarly works on British policy in the years preceding World War II have neglected events in the Far East in favor of those in Europe. Any study of recent British diplomacy is, of course, seriously hampered by the lack of Foreign Office documents and by the generally uninformative nature of British memoirs. Nevertheless, the sources which do exist give a picture which, while still incomplete, is interesting for its own sake in showing how the Chamberlain Government met the problems of the Pacific, and also for the light which it sheds on Anglo-American relations in this period. Perhaps nowhere else was there as much consistent misunderstanding and disappointment between London and Washington as over the questions raised by the Sino-Japanese War. The Manchurian episode had left a legacy of distrust between the two countries; just enough was known about the approaches made by the Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, to the Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, so that many on both sides of the Atlantic believed that Britain had rejected American offers for joint action against Japan in 1932, and that as a result nothing had prevented the Japanese advance. When Stimson's The Far Eastern Crisis appeared in 1936, it was read by many with more enthusiasm than accuracy, and seemed to confirm these views. In Britain it provided ammunition for the critics of the Government, while in the United States it increased the suspicions of those unwilling to trust Britain, and strengthened the trend to isolation.


Gesnerus ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 51 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 216-231
Author(s):  
Helmut Knolle

Poliomyelitis was considered a rare disease before it terrified Europe and North America with large-scale epidemics during the first half of the 20th century. In Africa and Asia the number of reported cases increased remarkably only after World War II. A. theory which is widely accepted today assumes that infection with poliovirus 1, 2 and 3 has always been globally endemic, but that the proportion of cases with residual paralysis has increased only since 1900 as a consequence of the rise of the mean age at infection. Sabin, however, initially was convinced that virus strains with enhanced neurotropism had caused the dramatic increase in paralytic poliomyelitis. Epidemic outbreaks in anglo-american troops in Malta and in the Far East during the war played a crucial role in the discussion . Later, also Sabin sustained the theory mentioned first, which gradually assumed the position of a dogma. The present paper deals with the question of how this dogma became dominant, in spite of the weakness of its epidemiological and virological foundation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 691-702
Author(s):  
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet

In 1946, the entertainer and activist Paul Robeson pondered America's intentions in Iran. In what was to become one of the first major crises of the Cold War, Iran was fighting a Soviet aggressor that did not want to leave. Robeson posed the question, “Is our State Department concerned with protecting the rights of Iran and the welfare of the Iranian people, or is it concerned with protecting Anglo-American oil in that country and the Middle East in general?” This was a loaded question. The US was pressuring the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops after its occupation of the country during World War II. Robeson wondered why America cared so much about Soviet forces in Iranian territory, when it made no mention of Anglo-American troops “in countries far removed from the United States or Great Britain.” An editorial writer for a Black journal in St. Louis posed a different variant of the question: Why did the American secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, concern himself with elections in Iran, Arabia or Azerbaijan and yet not “interfere in his home state, South Carolina, which has not had a free election since Reconstruction?”


2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (03) ◽  
pp. 476-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam R. Seipp

AbstractThis article examines debates over the requisitioning of real estate by the US Army during the decade after the end of World War II. Requisitioning quickly emerged as one of the most contentious issues in the relationship between German civilians and the American occupation. American policy changed several times as the physical presence of the occupiers shrank during the postwar period then expanded again after the outbreak of the Korean War. I show that requisitioning became a key site of contestation during the early years of the Federal Republic. The right to assert authority over real property served as a visible reminder of the persistent limits of German sovereignty. By pushing back against American requisitioning policy, Germans articulated an increasingly assertive claim to sovereign rights.


2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Hong Nguyen

This article argues that representations in popular culture of the Holocaust of World War II are being used to reframe issues of racism in the United States. It critically examines three major discourse formations: contemporary Western thought on fascism, critical scholarship on the US collective memory of the Holocaust, and popular culture’s use of the Holocaust for racial instruction. The Americanization and de-Judification of the Holocaust shows how fascist racism is constructed through institutional discourses and practices and functions as an archetype for understanding race and racism in the United States. Exploring the emergence of Holocaust references in US public culture following Barack Obama’s election, this article proposes that the analogy gains its efficacy because the Americanization of the Holocaust articulates the relationship between institutional practices and race for racist whites.


2007 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 115-124
Author(s):  
Sergey Radchenko

Andrei Ledovskii, a long-time Soviet diplomat with a particular expertise on East Asian affairs, and several other Russian specialists on Soviet policy in the Far East have published a massive collection of declassified documents about Soviet policy vis-à-vis China in the first five years after World War II. The authors seek to show that the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war was attributable to Soviet fraternal help, that Josif Stalin wholeheartedly embraced the Chinese Communists' struggle for power, and that the Sino-Soviet alliance from beginning to end enjoyed unstinting Soviet support. But in fact the documents reveal that Stalin's policy toward the Chinese Communists was opportunistic and utilitarian, that he refrained from decisively supporting the Communists in the Civil War until almost the end, and that all the talk of proletarian internationalism in the Sino-Soviet alliance was but a cloak for Soviet expansionist ambitions in East Asia.


Author(s):  
Dinh Thi Trinh

The outbreak and warfare activities of World War II unintendedly forced Australia to re-orient their security and defense thinking. Having realized that the British security environment and that of their own were far diverged from each other, Australia began to re-orient their priority in foreign policy from European issues to East Asian ones. For the Bristish, East Asia is the Far East but in Australia’s new perspective it is the Near North; thus, the security matters in East Asia are closely linked with Australian national interests. Australian independent diplomacy has been shaped during the course following their re-orienting foreign and security thinking to East Asia. This paper examines the re-orienting of Australia’s strategic thinking from Europecentered problems to Asia-centered ones as well as changing orientation towards ‘Asia’ and ‘Asian engagement’. It also argues that since it had formed, Australia’s Asia-oriented foreign policy, despite minor constraints, has been continuously developed until today.


Author(s):  
Edith Olmsted

Helen Hall (1892–1982) was a Henry Street Settlement house leader, social reformer, and consumer advocate. She served with the American Red Cross in France during and after World War I and in the Far East during World War II.


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