 Hi, welcome. My name is David Sturman. I'm a senior policy analyst here at New America. We're here today to talk about the competition between Britain and the US and the transition of superpower with Derek Liebert, whose new book, Grand Improvisation, looks at the conventional wisdom that the British Empire and superpower collapsed immediately after World War II. And instead suggests that it actually took until 1957 for the US to really replace Britain as a superpower, as a global superpower. Derek Liebert is, of course, the author of the book we're here to discuss, as well as multiple other books on Cold War history and the myths of American foreign policy. There's more on him on the event page. So with that, I'll turn it over to him to talk about the book. What I wanted to spend 20 minutes discussing is the most consequential myth of the 20th century for today. Because if we believe that the British Empire, the greatest empire in history, was dispirited and vanished right after World War II, and that America became a superpower thereafter, so promptly, we'd have to believe in a lot of other myths that have shaped our world today. We'd have to believe, for example, that the British intended to leave Greece in 1947, which ushered in the Truman doctrine against terrorist activities, rather than that we got bluffed into it and the British instead escalated in Greece in 1947. We'd have to believe in 1949 that the United States was not working hand and glove with the British Empire when it declared war on Israel in January 49, which is how David Ben-Gurion reacted to the British ultimatum that was delivered under Harry Truman's signature. We'd have to completely overlook, as well, one of the most consequential NSC documents ever written, which is NSC 75 in July 1950. The better known NSC 68 is simply a spinoff thereof. And we'd have to overlook the fact that right into the mid-'80s, the Army of the Rhine was the most powerful force in Western Europe. And ultimately, we'd have to look, or we'd have to forget about, as it has indeed been forgotten about what Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon, and Secretary of State Dulles asserted by the beginning of 1957 as America's Declaration of Independence, in their words, the Declaration of Independence from British authority in foreign affairs. And thereafter, the US determinately asserted itself far more, and as Richard Nixon recalled from thereon, the United States took over the leadership of the West. I call this the most consequential of myths, believing that the British Empire evaporated and that America became a superpower. Because unless one understands this story, we're not going to grasp key influencers today, such as the extent of American insularity, such as the destabilization and redestabilization of the Middle East. The very basics, I would argue, of foreign policy as practiced and taught today are unknown. We have no understanding of who was making foreign policy decisively in the Truman administration. We have no understanding of the American involvement in Vietnam, for instance. We have no understanding of US policy toward Israel and Palestine as it was then established. So there are these enormous gaps, and I'd like to spend a little while going over these gaps and myths. The reason that I became interested in the subject is because I see US foreign and defense policy as endless improvisation. Americans don't do strategy. We didn't do strategy then. We don't do strategy now. We've certainly never done anything like grand strategy. Instead, what we call strategy is a mishmash of sudden domestic urgencies and rapid responses filtered through about a half dozen different illusions. And of course, since our foreign policy decision makers are by and large political patronage appointees, there's a little reason to expect that we would do strategy. So a key myth is that at the end of World War II, 1945, the British Empire was bankrupt. Because it had sacrificed massively during World War II. Selling off at American insistence, perhaps a quarter of its wealth, including many of its patents. Serious scholars talk about British bankruptcy. Keynes, as always cited, is talking about a financial Dunkirk. But that presumes not a close reading of Keynes because he saw the British Empire reasserting itself more so than ever before after World War II and America essentially going nowhere. Remember that the British capital stock was barely touched, that it was there in full bloom, waiting to burst forth. Also keep in mind that the British in 45, as Washington knew all too well, dominated the commanding heights of innovation and industry. Certainly in computing, life sciences, jet aviation, and civil atomic power, all the industries of the future. And in 1945, the Americans were plenty shaken about the prospect of British revival as a tough trading partner in the absence of Germany and Japan, and also whatever the Royal Navy might do in a competitive buildup with the United States. So Britain, of course, was spread really thin. But keep in mind that what follows is financial crises, not the solidity of the underlying economy. The Americans gave a grand loan to the British, and it was intended merely as a one-time bridge into the future, not as sustaining British strength on and on and on and on. We wanted to stay back from the world. A country like the United States, protected by high tariffs and oceans, it's not going to plunge overnight from insularity into an enthusiastic superpower, as is commonly envisioned. But by 1947, we were getting more and more alarmed. And we believed that the way to keep the world at bay, the way to stay away from this, step by step, was to ensure that the British Empire is as strong and relatively assertive as possible. The British at the time had a very tough foreign secretary. Recall that Churchill was voted out in 45. The labor government came in. And the socialist labor guys that came in were the tough bully boys of British politics. Truman and FDR had been vastly accommodating to Stalin, to put it mildly, especially Churchill. One forgets how accommodating he was to Stalin. He was the greatest man I hope Stalin likes me. This changed on a dime in July 1945, when labor came to power. Because there you had the tough labor union guys who had literally fought the communists in the streets during the 20s and 30s, and used Stalinism intimately. Also, the new labor government, as embodied in the tough Longshoremen, Ernest Bevin, wasn't about to give up the British Empire remotely and turned themselves over to tycoons from Chicago and Houston. They bluffed America into the Truman doctrine. The big fear the British uttered was that they were going to leave Greece and Turkey and abandon the Eastern Mediterranean. And one can see it in the documents. They're playing the Americans. And having said this, the famous book being The 15 Weeks by a State Department Functionary, having said this, they sat back to look at the Americans panic as we did. We appropriated an enormous amount of money and went plunging forth into Greece, putting the Truman doctrine on the table, and oftentimes adhering to the Truman doctrine ever since. The British, of course, were dominant throughout the Middle East. And it was a dominance that we never challenged. We were, by and large, content with such dominance. The one searing issue, of course, was Israel and Palestine. And that vastly troubled Anglo-American relations. It indeed threatened the British loan. It threatened the Marshall Plan. It threatened everything until the British left. And Israel declared independence in 1948. But as we can see and as we'll talk about in the discussion, the US relationship with Israel in the years thereafter is poorly understood, established US policy again and again and again and again and probably again five times, is to bring Israel before the United Nations Security Council for censure. That's what we did over and over and over until 1957. Other issues in the mix, the origins of the American entanglement in Vietnam, despite a big book having been written on that recently, it says absolutely nothing about the most powerful players that helped push and maneuver the United States into its early commitments with Vietnam. Why did the Americans get interested in Southeast Asia anyway? It was for the defense of the British colony of Malaya. Who was the most powerful person in the Pacific other than General Douglas MacArthur in Japan and Tokyo? It was the British High Commissioner for Southeast Asia, Malcolm McDonald, tirelessly, tirelessly, tirelessly for a decade lobbying, pushing, as the British did, for an American commitment to Vietnam as the first line of defense of Malaya. To write about America's step by step entanglement in Vietnam without noting Malcolm McDonald and the role of the British would be like writing about World War II and overlooking General Douglas MacArthur. So we see these enormous gaps in an understanding of those errors. Among the more surprising is overlooking as well the greatest financial catastrophe of the 20th century or so it was expected to be. And that was in October, September, October 1949, when Wenhai had top players in the Senate saying, we are going to go down. What did they mean by we are going to go down? It meant the economic devastation of the United States and something far worse than 20 years before in 1929. It was a close call. It was called very much the most important negotiation of history, the financial crisis of 1949, but it's been overlooked. What that enormous financial crisis did, what the morassive policy in Southeast Asia and in the Middle East by 1949 did was compel one of the most exhausted National Security Council studies ever conducted. It began in September 1949 and it took 10 months to complete at the heights of government. The purpose of the National Security Council study was to determine American global defense interests. Two, since those couldn't be separated from the British Empire, tried to calculate the future of the British Empire. And three, come up with recommendations for President Truman. NSE 75 was finally completed in July 1950, by which time the US was at war. And also, there was a spin out of this massive undertaking, a spin out that became known as NSE 68 that just focused on what US defense interests might be in the world. Meanwhile, the larger study kept on moving forward. The larger study, NSE 75, is called simply British military commitments. The conclusion in NSE 75, which can be taken as consensus opinion at the heights of government in the United States, was the British Empire hadn't retreated one wit since 1945. It had merely consolidated, decentralized, and had become stronger still. What was the military capacity of the British Empire in 1950? About a million men, so concluded NSE 75, not that the British told us anything about their military capacity or organization. That all had to be ferreted out secretly. About a million men and maybe 1,000 garrisons and bases worldwide. That's why we found them really, really important if we wanted to keep our distance from the world. How large is the US military today, about 1.3 million men and women? So imagine a military force of nearly a million, not even counting what's in reserves in the colonies. And think about that in a world of only 2 and 1 half billion. People, to be sure, the US military at that time was very large too. And our naval forces, at least in the Pacific, were unrivaled. But we didn't have jet aviation. We had to depend on jet aviation on the British. We had to license from them jet bombers. They were the only power that had jet bombers. Most of all, and this is entirely overlooked in NSE 68, a glaring, glaring gap. We could not retaliate against Soviet Russia without British cooperation, because the bases, the bomber bases that could reach out and strike Soviet Russia were all in Oxfordshire. There were many other reasons why the bases in Western Germany wouldn't suffice. There weren't simply enough B-36s yet to have a longer reach. So we were dependent on the British Empire even to strike Russia. Now, there's been a recent biography of Churchill. And Churchill, of course, is a fascinating character that plays throughout these dozen years. First, of course, is Prime Minister, where we meet him at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 with his intimacy with Stalin and his disdain by Roosevelt. There was never a friendship there, as myth has it, between FDR and Churchill. Churchill out of office becomes the leader of the opposition. And he has to walk very carefully during those years as leader of the opposition, because he can't push away the United States. Churchill knew, as did the key labor leaders, that the United States had to back them, the British, if they were going to retain their global presence. Yet the reason, of course, that the British raced forward to build an atomic bomb and thereafter raced forward to build a hydrogen bomb, which they achieved in July 1957, was the absolute dread of US isolationism. It went to the core of Churchill's being. And he pushed and pushed and pushed until they became a hydrogen thermonuclear power. Churchill comes back into Downing Street in October 1951, his first time as Prime Minister in a time of peace. This era in Churchill's life has been utterly overlooked. Andrew Robert's 1,000-page biography of Churchill devotes 30 pages to Churchill's return to power. Yet Harold McMillan, who would be Prime Minister in 1957, and who was part of the new Churchill government, as did Anthony Eaton, as did others, have found this by far the most fascinating period of Churchill's life. Because here, Churchill is at bay against the Americans, issuing threat after threat after threat and driving those threats home. Indeed, McMillan sees Churchill's second time at Downing Street as by far the most eloquent part of Churchill's life, the most riveting speeches as in February 1952 on the death of George VII or on May 11, 1953, when the Americans had the temerity to send a Secretary of State to Cairo to the Middle East for the first time. And Churchill stood before Parliament at the exact moment that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was landing in Cairo and disclosed previously secret conversations with the Americans. For once in Churchill's life, unlike World War II, he had the freedom of maneuver to push back against the Americans, to threaten the American bases and Oxfordshire, to threaten a pullout of what British forces there were in Korea, and to be very, very testy indeed toward any question of a United Europe, which, remember, United Europe was critical to American foreign policy. It was a condition on which the Europeans got Marshall Plan aid. That was the condition. You'll get the aid if you unify. And it was Britain that was expected to lead in a United Europe and right away, using the documents at the time, sabotaged and sabotaged and sabotaged US hopes for a United Europe. I remarked in my opening comments that we have no idea even who was making policy in the Truman administration. One thinks of George Kennan and Dean Atchison, but that's easily disproved by a closer look because by far the most consequential figure of the Truman administration, other than the president himself, of course, was his best friend John Wesley Snyder, Secretary of the Treasury. It was the Secretary of the Treasury who was responsible for the Marshall Plan for hiring Dean Atchison over Truman's objections. And ultimately on that Sunday morning in March 1951 when he and Truman huddled in the family quarters of the White House for firing Douglas MacArthur, there was no question at the time of who was calling the key shots in foreign policy for the Truman administration. It's been obscured by the glittering sparkling memoirs of Atchison and certainly the deceptive memoirs of Kennan himself. And John Wesley Snyder, the most powerful Secretary of the Treasury in US history, bar none, really would sit back like his close friend General Marshall and not care a whit about publicity. And certainly unlike Kennan who was a chronic bureaucratic intrigue or a leaker to the press, John Wesley Snyder simply kept a civil distance from dealing with the press. So my story will take us to 1957, the US making its Declaration of Independence from British authority in foreign policy, taking over the leadership of the West, as Richard Nixon said, and then striding forth. Eisenhower came down hard on Israel in February 1957. And what he did was dig back to that British Declaration of War in 1949, which had been kept very secret. And he leaked it. He leaked it and showed a lot of precedent for dealing hard with Israel indeed when it defied the United States. And then he gave a national address. Israel withdrew immediately from Egypt, which along with Britain and France, it had invaded the previous October and November. The most searing event in American life was not Pearl Harbor. It was not 9-11. It was Sputnik in October 1957. Nothing has shocked the nation more because we felt we lay exposed to being irradiated by the Soviet Union. We had no comparable ICBM, let alone an ability to shoot a satellite into space. Our ICBM attempts had blown up on the launching pad. Americans were more shocked by that than at any time by anything in our history. It propelled us to, therefore, assert ourselves as strongly as possible in foreign policy to push allies' well-meaning or not to the side. And it made it utterly clear that there were only two players in the globe that could compete at that sustained level. The two authentic superpowers, the US and Soviet Russia. From there on, I conclude we really had the bit in our teeth, and we charged forth. Country was primed for the calls of the magnetic young senator from Massachusetts to bear any burden, pay any price, and to engage ourselves utterly in trying to fine-tune the planet. So much of what we now take for granted in US foreign policy has its origins in those early years. Everything from Vietnam to US involvement in the Middle East to the horrible legacy of Vietnam. In some, why did I get interested in this issue? Because of four failed wars in a row that the United States has tolerated. Before also tackling this book, I had written others and had been in the foreign policy arena for a while. And I kept on being appalled by the lack of understanding of the basics, such as I've asserted today, and the extent to which discussions of foreign policy in the United States are a little more than clashes of opinion. So what I've tried to do is put a lot of provocative material on the table. And I think it would be great fun and really mutually rewarding if we could discuss these issues and if I can perhaps elaborate on my observations and conclusions. OK? Thank you. So one of the first things I want to do pick up on in your presentation is your discussion of how, in your view and as demonstrated by a lot of the examples in this book, the US doesn't really have a grand strategy in any meaningful sense. Yet on the other hand, your book has several examples where Britain seems to bluff the US into doing its well, seems to maneuver the US quite effectively. In Sir Lawrence Friedman's book strategy, he sort of presents that in the British effort to draw the US into World War II as exactly the element of what strategy ought to be in its meaningful use. I think it seems that British, as having been successful, at strategy in this period, are they different? Yes. At that time, far more so than the Americans. As I noted, we were improvising throughout. John Updike at the moment looked at the foreign policy of the Truman administration and compared it to a mad gambler on a riverboat on the Mississippi. We weren't thinking strategically. Containment, which is often thought of as a strategy, in fact meant anything to anybody. We were improvising bit by bit. Because remember what our greatest fear of the late 1940s was, the greatest fear of the 1940s was return of the Depression. That framed everything that America did at home and in the world, the dread that the Depression was going to return. And the last time that I saw that that was framing US foreign policy would have been with the recession of 1958. But everything we did, whether the extent of loans, the extent of military commitments, the sparse military budgeting, was all governed by fear of a returned Depression. When we went into Korea, it wasn't that much different. The extent of labor strikes delayed our buildup for the Korean War by at least a year, according to the chief of staff of the US Air Force. The Secretary of the Treasury, John Wesley Snyder, had, on his assistance, he had his friend Truman declare a national emergency. But let's remember how the war was fought in Korea. American combat troops, let's not forget, American combat troops in 1951 and 1952 were under instructions to collect the metal of their bullets, the spent shells of the mortars and the artillery, and to save them for recycling. Because the extent of the metal shortage was so severe, we had to frantically bring back material that we had deployed in Europe. We were operating on a really, really thin line, despite nearly quadrupling the military budget. So time and time again, we see the Americans not thinking strategically, but too often. And it has extended today and gotten worse, just tripping over our shoelaces. So another issue that I think is really raised by your book is this question of, was the US sort of inevitably going to pick up the superpower role? And this sort of debate is over, do we misplace the date of one of the British collapses? Or can you envision a world in which the US did not replace the British Empire? Well, let's look at the conclusions of NSC-75. In 1950, let's also recall that Eisenhower and nobody at the time used the word superpower. It wasn't part of the jargon. As you may know, the term originated in 1944 to describe the one superpower. Superpower has a specific definition. It means global deployment, network of global alliances, the ability to project force anywhere, most anytime, and its intracular intelligence apparatus. In 1945 and after 1946 for sure, there was only one power that fit that definition. That was the British Empire. The Soviet Union, of course, was the greatest unitary land power in history, and the Red Army was the strongest army that ever existed, but it was very much a land power. The US was the greatest industrial state and had an atomic monopoly, but it had minimal force projection after 1946, 1947, after the great demobilization. The British didn't demobilize as fast as the other two big powers, which is why NSC-75 could calculate roughly a million men globally deployed. Because we saw the British Empire, not as this little island in the North Sea, but we saw it as everything woven together. And an obvious question, David, and maybe this is about to be asked by somebody, is, well, gosh, with the loss of what was called the Indian Empire. In August 1947, wouldn't that have eviscerated what we thought of as the British Empire and Commonwealth? No, quite the contrary. The way the British framed that is now within their financial and military alliance structure was the largest Muslim nation in the world, Pakistan, and the world's largest democracy. And this, in their view, as it was so well asserted by their superb foreign office, made the British Empire and Commonwealth all the stronger than ever before. Recall that when Truman returned to office in October 1951, it was with the explicit intention of contesting leadership of the West with the United States. As Harold McMillan and Anthony Eaton expected, there were ways that the British could surpass the United States in world power. So was the American role inevitable? With the end of the British Empire, with the enormous industrial muscle of the United States, and especially by 1954 or 55, when we finally got jet aviation, jet bombers, then we very explicitly were able to project power, we did believe it was going to be far simpler than it turned out to be. And then we indeed believed we could project power anywhere, that we too had a tentacular intelligence apparatus, that we too now, finally, only in the late 50s, finally had a global network of alliances. That's how it came about. And inevitable or not, without the British Empire there as a buffer, yes. We enthusiastically jumped right into the world. And that magnetic young senator, John Kennedy, with bear any burden, bear any pay any price, gave an inaugural address in which nothing was mentioned about domestic affairs. It was entirely foreign policy and all the excitements that go along with it. And that's what's brought us to our current day. There's a debate in the terrorism studies literature about whether or not terrorism has the specific targeting of civilians is a strategy that actually has a record of victory. And a lot of cases are cited from this period of decolonization that quite a bit overlaps with the period of your study. I'm wondering if you, so a lot of people dismiss some of the decolonization cases as unique because the empires had just collapsed. They had been destroyed by the aftermath of World War II. I'm wondering if your revision of that, understanding at least for the British, leads you to sort of challenge some of the dismissals of the anti-colonial movements and how important they were as actual agents. But what's clear of the literature of the time is that Zionist terror in 46, 47 was exceedingly effective in driving the British from Palestine time and time again in the British documents. You see the frustration and you see the extent to which the British worked against themselves by their crackdowns. And there is exhibit A of Churchill, Ernest Bevin, we're sick of this, throw it to the Americans, let them resolve it. Then one has Israel's Declaration of Independence, war with the Arab states, Israel comes out on top. But let's look at the terrorism that came thereafter. Terrorism, counter-terrorism that Palestinians are kept under a brutal military rule until 1966. And terrorism gets to be used really loosely. We went into Greece, the Truman Doctrine, to oppose terrorism and terrorist activities, not communism, not Russia. Mao Mao in 53 brought terrorism to the fore yet again. This is the first involvement of the CIA in Africa, which kept very close tabs on the British and our covert activities there. Terrorism, we called it again, so did the British in Malaysia. So time and time again, terrorism, and you know this, gets defined by whoever happens to be on top at the moment. The definition of a superpower, remember, is that it is everywhere. And again, there was only one global power, one power of any sort that fit that definition, the British Empire, and that went on and on and on. And the British were very forthright about their presence in Latin America, certainly in British Guiana, and also in asserting rights in the Falklands. And the involvement that you're referring to, David, Guatemala in 1954 is again pretty well misunderstood. Who was sounding the toxin the loudest of all? It was Churchill, of course, and he had been doing so for quite a while about communist Guatemala. Even here in Washington, we never went that far to call Guatemala communist. Communist Guatemala had to have its teeth kicked in, not that the British were going to do it themselves when you could get the Americans to do it, because of land reforming leftist leadership in Guatemala and the hysterical anti-communist cries of George Cannon, Americans got more and more interested in Guatemala, which had long had designs on what is today Belize. In America, Washington had always supported Guatemala claims to Belize. By 54, there is this coup. The British had been marvelous cheerleaders. Not that we necessarily needed their encouragement, but it helped a lot. And it was done entirely for geopolitical reasons. It didn't have one width of involvement with United Fruit Company, as myth has it. Why do we know that? Because at the same time that the CIA was doing its blundering plotting to pull off the coup, the Department of Justice was about to lower the hammer on United Fruit and sue them. They were being sued in Bronx Superior Court. They were being sued in federal court. Over a whole list of malfeasance. And indeed, you have the Attorney General at the time calling John Foster Dulles, because he knew that we were launching our overthrow of the Guatemalan Left of Center government at the same time that they were gonna take United Fruit to pieces. John Foster Dulles says, go right ahead and do it. Doesn't interest me one bit. So one finds these myths that John Foster Dulles was reacting on behalf of United Fruit that just build up year after year, decade after decade, and indeed shape our understanding of the world today. Also, one other thing your book discusses is this concept of the West and its creation during this period. The concept of the West, of course, is somewhat being debated again today, both due to challenges within the West from the right, as well as criticisms from the left. I'm wondering what's your sort of view of this competition between Britain and the US that doesn't really solidify into a friendly partnership mean for our understanding of what the West means and the merchants of that concept? Yeah, the West was a term that only slowly came into being. There is a belief that some kind of world order got into place after World War II, it didn't. The best minds of the time saw nothing like it, nothing like a world order. At most, it would have co-heared in the late 1950s when currencies became convertible and when organizations finally got built up behind the North Atlantic Treaty, the Southeast Asian Treaty and Middle East Treaty. But for much of this time, what we think of as an international order didn't exist. The United Nations was supposed to be the one other buffer in addition to the British Empire to keep America out of the dirty world, but the UN was quickly discredited. US hopes for economic transformation didn't happen at all, the British Empire became more protectionist than ever, didn't convert its currencies. So the term West, which came to mean essentially anyone who opposed communism soon came to include Japan, the Philippines, et cetera. What can we draw today insights about the rise and decline of superpowers? It seems to me that the most compelling insight is not to believe our own misconceptions, to look beyond the illusions that time and time again have guided the United States in the world over the last lifetime, the belief that everybody wants to be like us, the belief in the magic bullets of technology that will make weaponry so effective that wars can be won so easily, the belief that it's going to be simple, the illusion that one doesn't need to do your homework and study history or learn languages or have competent people making foreign policy in contrast to political appointees. Need to get beyond all of that before there's any hope of US effectiveness. I argue that less is more in the US role in the world, the relentless effort to fine-tune the planet, to involve ourselves in issues that we know so little about, by and large makes matters worse. To be sure, we won the Cold War and that's a triumphant victory, but it took a long, long time through many diversions and through enormous sacrifices in life and money. It didn't have to happen that way either. Let's take some questions. We have a mic, so please wait for that to come to you. When it comes to you, please introduce who you are and any affiliations and then ask a question. Do we have any? Let's do in the back there. Thank you. Joseph Salla of the A&N Group. Central element of your presentation is NSC 75, or NSC 75 to get into the public realm. Was there an effort to hide the document or just an ignorance of its existence? The latter. I got it declassified. Nobody was trying to hide it, but what I've concluded in the past books that I've written is that there is a shallowness to diplomatic history and to the study of national security that wouldn't be tolerated in other disciplines such as business or even medicine, healthcare, et cetera. So no one looks too deep in examining the record and instead so many academic historians take on face value, the writings of Kennan and Atchison and so forth. So when I saw this title in the archives that was still classified, and it said British military commitments, and it said original title was what are the consequences for the United States of the retreat of the British Army? Of the retreat of the British Empire? I thought, hmm, that might be worth getting declassified. And then when I looked a little deeper and saw that NSC 68 was a spinoff of this document, when zooming off in Paul Knitz's hands, I thought, well, there's gotta be a story here. So I did get it declassified. And what NSC 75 is, it's an exhaustive audit of the British Empire. Financial audit, military audit, region by region, nearly country by country. And that's what led us to the conclusion that the British Empire hadn't retreated one-wit, nor was it likely to retreat anytime in the foreseeable future, and point three that the United States could never step in for the British Empire because we didn't have the experience and we didn't know what we were doing. On to you right next. You make a really persuasive argument about the superior British over American capabilities in the immediate post-war period, particularly around force projection, aircraft capability and range, and also just the staying power of the British Empire through the Commonwealth. But the part of the argument that I'm not getting or accepting is how we overlooked or how the British thought that they could maintain this superiority effortless or not through the post-war period when their economy had been so crippled by the war effort. And we know well that British economy was, and society was in the grip of severe austerity not only through the second half of the 1940s, but into the early 1950s. My mother tells me of her trip to the UK and also in Europe the summer of 1952 in a cafeteria line asking for milk with her lunch and being told quite archly, we don't have milk yet here back in this country. Everything remains powdered. That's just a personal anecdote from my own family. But we know that the British economy was crippled and that was one of the solvents along with nationalist movements in the empire that led to the dissolution of big pieces of the empire and decolonization. So with, I don't know if economic insolvency is too strong a phrase, but with the British economy in such dire straits, at least as I understand it, in the middle of the late 40s, how were they able to perpetuate this power and how were we to be able to have the perception of their relative power to this extent as you're asserting? Using right to the heart of the matter, the absolute depths of the British economy were in 1952 and there were shortages in bread and milk. Nothing like this had happened even during World War II. Churchill was prime minister. He said this was a more terrifying time for him than had been World War II because Churchill saw himself as utterly cornered. But through that tight austerity, they were able to get out of their scrape in 1952. If there is an answer, it's that the Americans and the British always thought that prosperity a turnaround was right around the corner for the British. We didn't understand their economic straits at all. We thought there was going to be a rebound. The British kept asserting that and we had enough information by and large to swallow it that there would be a rebound. We were impressed by their high tech competency and we were impressed perhaps most of all by their prospects, Africa. Africa was going to substitute for the Indian Empire, both in military manpower and in massive resources because remember that the British were leading the world in life sciences, the work of imperial chemical among others and they were coming up with what the Americans called empire drugs. The empire drugs were able to erase some of the basic diseases that had impeded colonization in Africa plus create goodwill. So that was one way that the British were going to rebound through high tech. The fact that their global trading rivals seemed to be dead in the water. Nobody expected Germany and Japan to revive as strongly as they did. So all of this, it was a British delusion. It was one that we certainly were more than happy to bend over backwards agreeing with them. Yeah, great. You'd be strong and handle Southeast Asia and Africa. You stay dominant in the Middle East even after Suez please, we don't wanna be in that snake pit. So there was always this hope that the British Empire would become stronger than ever quote unquote. Are there questions? Let's do up front here. If you could use it, we have a live stream. You mentioned the declaration of war. Declaration of independence. Oh, declaration of war. Yeah, that's David Medgarian. Would you expand about it please? Sure. I'm a bit confused what it meant. Sure. The Arabs and the Israelis were at war. The Arabs were getting their clock cleaned by December. The Israelis swept into Egypt. Egypt in 1948. So we're talking about the declaration of war, Britain against Israel, right? So Israel goes into Egypt. Egypt has a defense alliance with the British. The Israelis go in deeper and deeper. By the end of 1948, the British and the Americans had had their fill with Zionist terror because, recall the Falk Bonadet, Count Bernadette, the first UN peacekeeper was killed that October, and who attended his funeral? It was the US Secretary of State and the British Foreign Secretary. They together lowered the boom. Enough was enough. Britain did not have an ambassador in Israel because it didn't recognize Israel for a year after a declaration of independence. So the British threat had to be handed to Ben-Gurion by the American ambassador. And that threat was given to Ben-Gurion on New Year's Eve 1949, 4849 at his ranch by the American ambassador under Truman's signature. And Ben-Gurion's reaction was, this is a declaration of war from the British Empire. Well, yeah, it was. You've got 48 hours to get out of Egypt. Israel got out within the week, it's asked. What happened to that episode of history, which remained highly secret? It was, kept classified, of course, but it was pulled out of the drawer in February 1957 when Israel again wouldn't get out of Egypt. And Eisenhower then took that issue to the country. So can you talk a bit about, you've described sort of Israel's effect in the Middle East and relationship to this broader competition. It seems that a lot of the states that are now involved in conflicts today, or in the recent past, Israel, Iran, Iraq, were for a while sort of the not powers on their own, but then quickly big sort of replacement client states for Britain and then the US, but also start breaking those ties during this period you talk about. And you talk about that dynamic in the rise of these regional powers and how they play into the British and US visions of what the Middle East would be. Well, the relation with Iran has always been fraught, which is so unfortunate and it didn't have to be that way. But America in 1951, 1952 and certainly 53 was correctly described at the time as simply being the hit man and the gunman for the British because we embraced democracy in Iran just wholeheartedly in 1950, 51. Mosadeck came here meeting triumphantly in Washington, Philadelphia, New York time and time again, but the British Empire would put up with none of that. It had the American ambassador Henry Grady recalled, essentially the British foreign office fired the American ambassador. And we were simply doing Britain's dirty work step by step by step. Now, it didn't have to happen that way. The British knew what would work on the Americans and they started rigging the Clarkson of communism. Unless we get our oil rights with the Anglo-Iranian oil company, they're gonna go communist. There was another threat and this came from both the laborer and immediately from the Churchill government. And if anyone thinks that the British Empire was anything but a superpower, look closely at what happened in 1951. There was a record of the late 1940s of the British socialists, Nai Bevin and others simply wanting to do a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union before it got too strong when cooler heads prevailed. However, by 1951, they were not shying away from going to war themselves with Soviet Russia. To that end, the largest mobilization of airborne forces, 70,000 man assault force was put together, ready to go into Iran by the British. They were gathering on Crete. The British had the strongest naval presence in the Mediterranean and they were set to go in, whether it would have been all 70,000 or not. Soviet Russia made it very clear that under the 1923 Friendship Treaty, if Britain went into Iran, Russia would intervene. That had no deterrent effect at all on the British. You can imagine the US reaction. This became one of the most excitable foreign policy issues of the 20th century in that summer of 1951 when we insisted that the British put on the brakes. As they did, clearly they did not invade Iran. They instead used economic and covert means. What did the British do with that force? Well, then they did the largest airborne operation since World War II. They did a marvelous pivot in the Middle East and they sent it right to Suez to calm the Egyptian riots about getting rid of British occupation. And they threw about 12,000 airborne commando forces into Suez. They left Iran, as they called it, to stew in its own juice and they used the Americans as hit men eventually to overthrow Mazadak in 1953. Other questions? You discussed about how in America this history has been forgotten and replaced by myth. I'm curious if you have a sense if the British have been better about remembering this or if they too have forgotten this period and replaced it with their own version of a myth. My previous book, Magic and Mayhem, looked at the delusions that have guided US foreign policy for the past lifetime. And yes, every power has its own myths. The Russian myth of always being besieged and beleaguered. The British have plenty of myths as do the Dutch, for example. That their colonial subjects loved them and that there was some benefit in the colonization of India and Africa. Or that the foreign office had unsurpassed wisdom because so many of them were oldy-tonians and oxonians and fellows of all souls. So the British got tons of myths. I was doing book talks for the simultaneous publication of this book in England in November. And the British now, look how they're caught on their own myths with Brexit. That they can still be going back to glorious days. Remember that so many of the propelling arguments for Brexit was going to be a special relationship, that they'd have a special relationship with the United States. One found scholars like Andrew Roberts and other making this argument. They still believe that there is some Anglo-Saxon cabal that will make everything right and make things special for the British. Yeah, they're full of myths. Other questions? Since you did elude, my name's George Paik and as it happens I'm doing some volunteer work for the American Committees on Foreign Relations, which I mentioned because I was gonna ask if you could talk about the American foreign policy establishment at the time, their attitudes. What role, how significant might they have been in this dependence that we've been talking about prior to 1950s? The American foreign policy establishment of those years, 45 to 57, was much different than it is today. One, it was much smaller, of course, but there was a far more prominent role for the American US Foreign Service, professional diplomats. It hadn't gotten to the extent of patronage politics that it is today when Deputy Assistant Secretary's office directors, NSC staffers are essentially amateurs. They are political appointees, patronage appointees and the foreign service in the US has been vastly marginalized and shrunk proportionally. So, were these the glory days or not? Probably not. Books like The Wise Men, for example, that look at the imminent figures we remember, such as Acteson and NHTSA and Kennan and so on, are probably misleading. To be sure it was the heyday of the Council on Foreign Relations where you'd get a New York banker or a lawyer to come in at the heights of the cabinet departments. By and large, perhaps, it was more effective in that era than today and an explanation to me is that we now have a learning experience by just about everybody when they come into government. The world moves faster, they're not learning any faster, so by and large, we're flying blind. That establishment had a certain anglophilia to it, I don't know if that's unified if there's a dynamic. It's a myth, it's a complete myth matter of fact. Why would anyone think the Dean Acteson who won't in his memoirs even acknowledge that his father was born in England? Why would anyone think like that? Somebody of Scotch-Irish heritage think that there was any affection at all for Britain? Well, I tried to get to the bottom of that mystery because Acteson's antipathy toward the British went deep, deep, deep, which didn't mean that he didn't have British friends. He had lots of British friends, but as far as the British establishment, that was a different story. Why do we think there was anything anglophile about Acteson who forbid his staffers to use the word's special relationship? It's because he looked the part. Henry Kissinger and other people who by and large wing it in their pronouncements say that he had his suits made on Savile Row. He didn't have his suits made in England. He had no time to have suits made in England and he hadn't even been to England for 11 years by the time he became Secretary of State, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State. It is tailoring in his mustache and that he's Episcopalian and many people assume that Episcopalians are slavish, anglophilia enthusiasts. But time and again, and same with John Foster Dulles. Both Acteson and Dulles were very clear. Where does America's affection lie overseas with our oldest ally, France? They said it over and over again. You could have friends in Britain but as far as buying into British foreign policy and the foreign office elites, that didn't happen much. So one thing you mentioned in your discussion of Guatemala is the anti-communist push really came from the British end. I'm wondering if there's a broader trend there regarding the role of anti-communism as motive in the sort of 45 to early 50s and where you fall down on sort of the debate over was US foreign policy development to the extent it was occurring driven in sort of the crises you talk about by anti-communism as ideological question or geopolitical competition with Russia or others. It's very easy to manipulate US foreign policy for allies. It's happened time and time again. One doesn't have to single out Taiwan or South Vietnam or Israel or the British for that matter. Because we don't do strategy because the way our government is structured because foreign policy is made through political patronage it's easy to play the game here. So one can see us being gamed literally as in Greece 47, as in Iran 53 by the British or one can see the influence of nationalist China again. So that's the overarching point. We're easily manipulated. Is it anti-communism per se? Probably a lot less than people think. John Foster Dulles was hoping against hope to write off South Vietnam in 1955. He could never understand how we had gotten entangled in such a mess. The answer I would argue heavily, heavily due to British influence. But alas, that opportunity was passed. Americans by and large are not ideologues. We want to stay home. We want to make money. We want to trade with the world. This enthusiasm for fine tuning the planet and for involving ourselves in every nook and cranny of which by and large we're woefully ignorant. This is all pretty new stuff. And we do it dreadfully. Any last questions? So just following up on that point. Are there some particular lessons that you would kind of want to see us try to apply today? Or is it all still improvisation so that the lessons just don't apply in everyday situations? Like for example, in what should be happening in Middle East with, say, Syria? I'd like to see more authority given to Congress in foreign policy. Syria seems to be an exhibit A of that. We initially did not go deeper into Syria because Congress was outraged. Americans had enough of enoughness after Iraq. Congress, the power to declare war just has been eviscerated since World War II. As soon as Congress asserted itself more, I think there'd be much more in tune with the American public who would be far more reluctant than academics and political appointees and emergency enthusiasts who want to involve themselves everywhere. Do you see the 2011 Libya intervention as an analog to Britain pulling the U.S. into doing its work and maintaining its activity? Or is it a different dynamic? It would seem to me that in the Middle East as much as possible one would want to get allies involved because American policy in the Middle East is radioactive. We've made a habit of upholding vicious dictatorships decade after decade after decade. Saudi Arabia being a case in point. Egypt being another. We uphold the dictators. We're then taken aback when our dictators as in Iran implode. So America in the Middle East is not encouraging and perhaps can be better conducted by allies. Thanks. Well, if we don't have any further questions, do you have any concluding remarks? You sort of addressed a bit what we should take for the current policy. Well, I'm grateful for your interest. It's a topic that with informed scholars such as yourself we could spend days and days debating and we'd love to follow up with anyone that's interested. Oh, thank you. I highly recommend the book. There's a lot in there we didn't even get to. We have it for sale outside and I think you'd be willing to stick around and sign copies for anyone who does. I'd be honored. Thank you. Thank you.