Does Britain like America?

DOES BRITAIN LIKE AMERICA?

'DON'T GIVE UP, Tommy Atkins," sang Judy Garland, surrounded by stiff-upper-lipped English children, in a tear-jerking number from Babes on Broadway, made when Britain stood alone after the fall of France. This venerable movie happened to be shown on British television during the aftermath of the Libyan raid, while Americans were complaining about the Euro-wimps and Britain was vociferously divided over Mrs. Thatcher's decision to let the F-111s fly.

The contrast was poignant, a reminder both of how times change and of the depth and complexity of the Anglo-American relationship. I remembered how my cousin, an American, crossed the Canadian border and fought all through the war with the British army. I remembered Alice Duer Miller's White Cliffs, which can still, absurdly, bring tears to my eyes. And I was more distressed than ever by the surge of anti-Americanism that had been revealed, rather than caused, by the raid. Britain's reaction to the Libyan affair is but the climax of a succession of related incidents.

First came the Westland affair, in which the Minister of Defense walked out of a cabinet meeting and resigned because Sikorsky, a division of an American firm, was the favored bidder to rescue a bankrupt British helicopter company. He would have preferred a European consortium. Then a second row broke out over the future of British Leyland, a nationalized carmanufacturing conglomerate with persistent losses that had already cost every household in the country around $300 in taxation. The government had been negotiating with General Motors to take BL off the taxpayers' back; to sweeten the deal, the profitable part, which makes Land Rovers, was to be included. A great clamor immediately began, crying that Britain's industrial heritage was being sold at a knock-down price to the voracious Americans. You might have thought that a badly managed, chronically insolvent car firm was Westminster Abbey or Buckingham Palace. Losing its nerve, Mrs. Thatcher's government aborted the deal.

The Libyan Factor

AN OPINION POLL in the Sunday Times found 99 per cent wanted Land Rover to stay in British hands and 77 per cent wanted the government to insist that the whole of BL remain British. More alarmingly, according to the same poll, just over one-third of the British people regard the United States and the Soviet Union as an equal threat to world peace, and an additional one in five think America is actually a greater threat. As an accompanying editorial observed, "Half the British people regard their main ally as at least as big a threat to peace as their main antagonist."

Quite a strong anti-American tide is undoubtedly flowing. The punitive strike against Libya merely provided a new, more exciting, opportunity for its expression. In the recent municipal elections a "Libyan factor," the reverse of the "Falklands factor," is thought to have been one reason for the Conservative Party's bad showing.

A certain crude strain of anti-Americanism has been familiar since World War II, when it was said (but not seriously, since everybody knew they were our salvation) that the trouble with Americans was that they were "over-paid, over-sexed, and over here." In the decades that followed, and especially when John Foster Dulles opposed Britain's action over Suez, another cause of resentment was added. Sir Peter Ramsbotham, a former British Ambassador to Washington, said frankly that the attitudes reflected in the Sunday Times poll were the result of America's having moved, in the forty years since the war, into a dominant position, while Britain had sunk to barely the top of the second league.

Deplorably, these natural resentments are being exploited, both by the anti-capitalist Left, and by the cahuvinistic or Euro-fanatical Right. Both factions talked about Westland and BL as though America were a huge vacuum cleaner, sucking up the wealth of the world and leaving everyone else impoverished.

Cool statistics produce quite a different picture. During the past five years American investment in Britain has remained steady at around $33 billion, while British investment in the United States, including the purchase of three hundred American firms in the last two years, grew from $22 billion to $38 billion. Some 650,000 British manufacturing jobs, one out of every eight in the country, are attributable to American investment. Another 25,000 jobs and $1 billion of annual expenditure come from the American armed forces stationed in Britain. The trade balance too is slightly in Britain's favor. America buys $15 billion worth of British goods a year, compared with the $12 billion worth of American goods bought by Britain.

This two-way process, the working of a free market, greatly benefits both countries, or so any impartial observer might suppose. But the British Labour Party, yearning toward an Eastern European type of controlled economy, manages to disapprove of both inward and outward investment, seeing the one as financial domination and the other as an unpatriotic drain of capital.

U.S. Concessions?

AFTER THE Libyan raid, anti-American British commentators portrayed President Reagan as a senile cowboy, an image largely derived from the American East Coast media. Another consequence of seeing America reflected in this particular distorting mirror is that very few Britons appreciate the strength of isolationist feeling in the heartland of America. The political classes of Washington, D.C., and New York tend to be Atlanticist, and, if they do sometimes toy with the notion of reducing America's troop commitments in Europe, they discuss it in a muted style.

The danger to NATO in the quarrel over the Libyan raid was therefore never properly grasped. It has been stated but not felt.

Some people, of course, don't care about the Alliance; others are positively hostile. The anti-American demonstrators, whether because their own affiliations are with Moscow or because nuclear disarmament is their only concern, would welcome its collapse. "Even the Italians could stand up to the Americans," lamented one amazingly perverse letter to a London newspaper, "and the poverty-stricken Spaniards joined with the French to do the same, but we seem prepared to go to any lengths to appease them. Margaret Thatcher is playing a dangerous game. Some of us lived to regret Chamberlain's appeasement, and we will regret this too. What will the Europeans think of us?"

But sensible people in Britain, and indeed throughout Western Europe, recognize that the preservation of the Atlantic Alliance is, or should be, the most important object of foreign policy, just as dividing Europe from America is a principal object of Soviet policy.

The Alliance is crucial to Europe because the freedom of Europe depends on it. Is it equally important to the United States? Subjectively, no: objectively, perhaps. However attractive the idea of Fortress America may be--assuming it were strategically practicable--the reality is that, if the Soviets were tempted to move into Western Europe or merely to Finlandize Western Europe, the struggle and instability that would follow could not be ignored by the United States. If there was a war, America would almost certainly be drawn in; which puts America's safety on the line as well as Europe's.

Some pro-Americans in Britain suggest that, in reciprocation for Mrs. Thatcher's help with the Libyan raid, Washington should now make visible concessions to Britain--over the extradition of IRA terrorists, or about future military action--so as to blunt the edge of current anti-Americanism. This may be a prudent calculation, but it fails to take into account the populist American view that the balance of debt lies in the other direction. If a man to whom you've lent $100 pays $10 back, he is not immediately entitled to another loan.

The Labour Party's lack of comprehension is far worse. Committed by left-wing pressure to expelling all American nuclear weapons from British soil, the party leaders believe, or pretend to believe, that American conventional forces would remain and that Britain could continue as a full and valued member of NATO. But as the American ambassador has just sharply reminded them, public opinion in the United States would react very strongly and might well demand a complete withdrawal. At best, Britain would be excluded from vital meetings, just as New Zealand is now being excluded from joint intelligence meetings.

Anti-Americanism and isolationsim are fraught with danger, both military and economic. But, beside and beyond all such calculations, there is something more. Bismarck said the most important fact about the modern world was that the British and the Americans spoke the same language. Almost every British family has relations or friends in America, and we all grew up within the ambiance of American culture. But to talk about common roots of language and law and literature still understates what I have always felt--that Americans are simply ourselves across the sea, that New York is as much my town as London.

In the 1960s i strove for an Atlantic Free Trade Area; instead of which, Britain was pushed, unwillingly and against every natural instinct, into the European Common Market. General de Gaulle had tried to keep Britain out because he understood that Britain's primary ties of kinship and loyalty lay elsewhere. And events have proved him right. The European connection remains anomalous and unpopular, a constant source of mutual irritation. Significantly, a rumor that Common Market regulations might compel British television to screen more European material instead of Dallas and Dynasty produced shock-horror headlines in every paper.

I share the sentiments--if not, alas, the prediction--which Conan Doyle put, nearly a century ago, into the mouth of Sherlock Holmes: "It is always a joy to me to meet an American, for I am one of those who believe that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens of the same worldwide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes."

A dream, no doubt. Unrealistic now. But still, I passionately believe, the proper light by which to view outbreaks of British anti-Americanism and its twin, American isolationism.