Britain in the Cold War

4 Key excerpts on "Britain in the Cold War"

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  eBook - ePub

  Rising Titans, Falling Giants

  How Great Powers Exploit Power Shifts

  • Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cornell University Press

    (Publisher)

  à -vis Britain. Instead, and in contrast to what one expects if Cold War competition alone drove U.S. and Soviet policies toward Britain, the evidence shows that policymakers in both states were initially reluctant to intensely assist Britain out of concern that doing so would foster East-West competition. And, just as important, it took Britain’s military collapse in 1946–47 to catalyze Soviet and U.S. efforts to improve British fortunes. In short, U.S. and Soviet policies toward Britain were driven by factors related to but separate from Cold War dynamics. By extension, had Britain not fallen from the ranks of the great powers, there might still have been U.S.-Soviet competition, but Britain’s role in it—and the accompanying U.S. and Soviet policies—would have looked substantially different.

  The Strategic Context of British Decline

  World War II altered the strategic map of Europe. With Germany occupied and France devastated, the end of the war left a power vacuum and unsettled conditions on the Continent that could sully great power relations. Entering the postwar era, the United States, United Kingdom, and Soviet Union were determined to prevent a German resurgence that could once again threaten European security.3 With each state occupying a portion of Germany, however, this also meant that unless the German issue was handled cooperatively, each side could end up threatening and threatened by others. After all, if great power cooperation faltered and any side established sole control of Germany, then that side would be positioned to mobilize German economic and military potential for its own purposes. This would threaten the other great powers, inviting countervailing moves that could result in rivalry or war.4 In the early postwar world, there was significant room for miscalculation with possibly dire consequences for the United States, United Kingdom, and Soviet Union alike.

  Within this environment, British policymakers focused on preventing any one state from dominating Europe. In context, this meant the Soviet Union.5 Yet because the Soviet Union was stronger than the United Kingdom, the latter would be hard-pressed to offset Soviet capabilities. “Time,” wrote Deputy Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Sir Orme Sargent in July 1945, “is not necessarily on our side,” partly because Britain was “the weakest and geographically smallest of the three Great Powers.”6 Left to its own devices, the country would need to commit a growing share of its scarce resources to blocking Soviet moves. While viable in the short term, this option risked long-term disaster as it promised an Anglo-Soviet rivalry that a waning Britain could neither sustain nor win.7

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  Britain and the Economic Problem of the Cold War

  The Political Economy and the Economic Impact of the British Defence Effort, 1945-1955

  • Till Geiger(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  26

  To some extent, the curious history of the term cold war illustrates the changing perception of the relations between the victorious powers in the immediate post-war period.27 The compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) attribute the first use of the term to George Orwell in an article for Tribune in 1945. The reference in the article, however, does not directly refer to the cold war as the ideological confrontation between the Soviet Union and the western powers.28 In March 1946, The Observer described recent changes in Soviet foreign policy towards Britain as starting “… to make a ‘cold war’ on Britain and the British Empire.”29 However, the term entered common usage in the American public debate through Walter Lippmann’s book on current American foreign policy entitled Cold War and published in early 1947.30 Indeed, the next British usage cited by the compilers of the OED occurs in a speech by Anthony Nutting, the Conservative Member of Parliament for Melton, during a debate on foreign affairs in the House of Commons on 22 January 1948, which attributed the term to American commentators.31 The manner in which the usage of the term evolved suggests that British policymakers became convinced much earlier than did their American counterparts that the Soviet government had become impossible to deal with. As D. C. Watt has suggested, British policy-makers formed this conviction by early 1946 which coincides with the reference to the cold war in The Observer article in March of the same year.32 To some extent, the learning process of British foreign policy-makers reflected not only Soviet actions, but also the open anticommunism of the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, and the majority of Foreign Office officials at the time.33 The present analysis underlines the fact that the cold war emerged after 1945 but drew on a much older historical conflict between the East and the West.34

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  International Relations since 1945

  East, West, North, South

  • Geir Lundestad(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Second, a whole series of new perspectives has been developed. The role of Britain has emerged again after an extended period of emphasis on the two superpowers (David Reynolds). Historians from a range of other countries have also added their respective national perspectives. Non-European actors have been analyzed more in general as well (Odd Arne Westad). The local scene was often of greater importance than earlier analyses suggested. This multilingual and multinational new Cold War history liked to see itself as transcending the old historiographical schools, although it was often not particularly difficult to fit the new wine into the old bottles.

  Some Structural Explanations for the Cold War

  Historians can describe what happened and suggest explanations as to why certain events occurred. Causal explanations, in particular, often contain an element of attributing blame or responsibility. But any discussion of blame and responsibility is also influenced by the author’s appraisal of how advantageous the outcome of a situation was. Whether the outcome was good or bad is, however, a political conclusion. In such appraisals the judgment of historians is no better than anyone else’s. In line with that reasoning, this post-revisionist presentation will describe US and Soviet policies and attempt to say something about the motivating forces behind those policies. The question of blame will not be explicitly considered, despite the place it has been granted in historians’ writings.

  The outbreak of the Cold War can be analyzed on several different levels. A number of features were determined by the international system as such, while others were linked to ideologies, nations, and individuals. The more general explanations will be considered here; the more specific ones will be dealt with in the section on motivating forces behind the superpowers’ policies.

  The changes that resulted from the Second World War were enormous. The most important change was the vacuum created by the defeat of Germany and Japan. This theory is most clearly presented by Louis Halle in his book The Cold War as History

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  War, Peace and International Relations

  An introduction to strategic history

  • Colin S. Gray(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Why did the Cold War happen? The most convincing answer must eschew any mono-causal determinant. Instead, three structural reasons can be identified and one of human agency. The structural reasons can be summarized thus: each superpower was, globally, the sole major threat to the other; they were deadly ideological rivals; and their political differences, especially with respect to East–Central Europe, which is where the Cold War began, were non-negotiable. As for human agency, the Soviet Union was led by the immensely paranoid Joseph Stalin. For a terse forensic summary of the Cold War, it would be difficult to improve on the judgement of former British senior intelligence official Gordon S. Barrass: ‘It was a toxic mix of history, ideology, geography and strategy’ (Barrass, 2009: 2). When one adds the personal human element to that deadly cocktail, one is in the realm of high plausibility.

  The conflict did not burst into life at a certain date, but rather emerged slowly between 1944 and 1947–8. Its emergence happened, in tactical detail, as a result of the interaction of Soviet and American behaviour. Context is not everything in strategic history, but it certainly explains, or helps explain, most things, always provided one makes due allowance for human agency and the occasional surprise. It is important to recognize fully just how significant and pervasive were the consequences of World War II. The ‘peace’ that came to be dominated almost immediately by the Cold War was the result of the great conflict that ended in 1945. The Cold War was not by any means made wholly in, or by, World War II, but its occurrence and much of its detail assuredly were. So, to understand the Cold War, it is necessary to view it in good part, albeit not entirely (for example, not with respect to the rival ideologies), as a consequence of World War II.

  It would be difficult to exaggerate the consequences of that war for all aspects of international life in the years that followed. It may be recalled that it is a premise of this venture in strategic history that organized violence has been, and continues to be, the most potent influence upon the course of events. Rather than simply claim as a generality the consequential sovereignty of World War II, Box 14.1 provides an itemization of the war's major consequences. This list describes the world of the Cold War. Repeatedly, this book has emphasized the consequences of war for the peace that followed. This introduction concludes by specifying the principal consequences of the very great war, or wars, waged from 1939 to 1945. Most of the fuel for the Cold War was produced by the events of those years, and Box 14.1

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