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From: mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Common interests of countries
Message-ID: <480@dciem.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 11-Nov-83 12:03:48 EST
Article-I.D.: dciem.480
Posted: Fri Nov 11 12:03:48 1983
Date-Received: Wed, 16-Nov-83 09:37:56 EST
Organization: D.C.I.E.M., Toronto, Canada
Lines: 102

There have been a few articles recently that discuss the fact that
US and UK actions have not always been friendly. The tone of several
of these articles suggests that the authors feel the UK is an untrustworthy
ally of the US because it has acted contrary to US interests on occasion.

I think that a fair reading of history links the US and UK more closely
than these incidents suggest. First I want to give some other historical
evidence to go along with what has been presented, so as to show that
aggressive or interventionist behaviour has not been solely British,
and then to argue that these disagreements have more the character
of family spats than of flare-ups between mistrustful opponents.

The interests of nations often coincide, but are seldom identical.
Several writers have brought up the British support of the Confederacy
as evidence of anti-american behaviour in the Civil War. But was it?
Suppose that the South had won. If Britain had supported the North,
it would have been seen as unfriendly by an independent South, and
if it had supported the South it would have been seen as unfriendly
by the North.

Why should Britain have supported the North? On the one hand, Britain
was anti-slave, despite having contributed greatly to the original
slave trade. On the other hand, the North abutted Canada, and had
a history of unprovoked agression against the Canadian territories,
starting with the land-grab that failed in 1812-14, and continuing
through the peiod of the Civil War with the illegal but tolerated
Fenian raids (rather like the Syrian support for the PLO now).
Again on the side of the South, England's economy depended heavily
on cotton manufacture, and the South supplied cotton. The situation
there was much like present US government support of US business
interests in various parts of the world. You support governments
that you object to on moral grounds if they are useful to your business.

In the US, do you remember the slogan "54.40 or fight?". We do in
Canada. That was a popular slogan until (and maybe after) the Anglo-US
boundary commission settled on 49N as the boundary between the US
and Canada. In that case, the US did not fight for the land, but
it certainly didn't support British-Canadian interests.

Look closer to the present. You justify the Grenada operation by
saying that it will lead to a more stable Caribbean in future
(at least the majority of US citizens support the Grenada invasion
for some such reason, even though many netters don't). The UK is
seen as unfriendly because it opposed and still opposes it. But
what happened in the parallel case when the Suez Canal was forcibly
taken from the Anglo-French company that was running it? Eisenhower
forced the UK and France to withdraw their invasion forces that had
recaptured Suez. At least in Suez, both countries had some kinds of
legal rights, if not moral rights, which is more than can be said
about the US in Grenada.

Look at 1943-45, and especially the last days of the European War.
The UK fought strenuously to prevent the US from giving Eastern
Europe to Russia, but was unsuccessful. Even after the treaties
had been signed, the UK still tried to get the Allied troops to
take as much territory as they could before the Russians got there.
But Eisenhower stopped them at the treaty line, and now we have
a divided Germany and Communist Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Who
was that friendly to?

Now to reverse the field. There are lots of other examples of what
some might call US agression against Britain and the Commonwealth,
but I claim that does not mean that there is any basic ill-will.
Can you think of any two states in the US that have had no frictions?
I remember when I was in graduate school at Johns Hopkins there was
an actual shooting war for a few days across the Maryland-Virginia
border. Maryland thought Virginia oyster-catchers were poaching and
using illegal harvesting methods, and Virginia thought Maryland was
illegally obstructing the interests of its fishermen. Does this mean
that Maryland and Virginia are not allies in the greater cause?

One correspondent brought up the fact that there was considerable
pro-German sentiment in the US before World-War I, and that Anglo-US
friendship dated only from the sinking of the Lusitania that was
engineered by Churchill and Wilson. But there was also pro-British
sentiment before that. If there had not been, how come there was
a pro-British President willing to enter into that kind of deceit?
If there had not been, I doubt that the sinking of one ship would
have brought the US into the war. (Anyway, from what little I know
of Wilson, I doubt very much that it was he who arranged the Lusitania
affair. He even had to be tricked into invading Mexico a few months
earlier.)

As for pro-German sentiment before WWII, there was a lot of it in
the UK as well. If Edward VIII had remained King, that pro-Nazi
sentiment might have been stronger, and could have kept England
either out of the war, or assisting Hitler in a war on Russia.
The existence of pro-German sentiment in the US is hardly evidence
that the US was unfreindly to Britain. Certainly after WWII started
in 1939 the US did everything it could to help, short of actually
fighting.

I think the thing a lot of people tend to forget is that friends can
differ without losing their friendship. When one partner insists that
the other toe the line all the time, you have a colonial relationship,
not a partnership of allies. Colonial relationships lead eventually
to enmity. Your friends MUST be able to criticize you as well as
praise you, or what good are they?

Enough.

Martin Taylor