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At the heart of Anglo-American relations during the Macmillan-Kennedy years was the concept of ‘interdependence’. As we have seen, from the British side, interdependence was viewed as a form of partnership in which both countries would aim to pool their efforts more effectively and consistently, particularly in the field of defence. From the US side, although the language of interdependence was also used, the concept meant more effective central, and hence American, control of Western defence efforts. Since the October 1957 Eisenhower-Macmillan ‘Declaration of Common Purpose’ or ‘Interdependence’ had had at its heart the renewal of nuclear cooperation, it is not surprising that in the Kennedy years the nuclear relationship between Britain and America came to be seen as something of a litmus test of interdependence. In particular, from the British side, the attempt to maintain a national nuclear deterrent, a field in which Britain was ultimately forced to ‘depend’ on the United States for the most modern delivery systems, was seen as the key test of interdependence in action. Viewed against the background of differing interpretations of interdependence, and the imbalance in the resources devoted by London and Washington to their respective defence efforts, it should come as no surprise that the broader crisis of interdependence that this study has postulated during the winter of 1962–3 pivoted on the question of the fate of the British nuclear deterrent.

If the Laotian crisis has come to seem somewhat arcane with the passage of time, the same certainly cannot be said of contemporaneous events in Berlin. Standing before a tumultuous crowd during a visit to the city in June 1963, Kennedy struck one of the keynotes of the Cold War. ‘All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words Ich bin ein Berliner,’ he proclaimed.1 On the face of things, though, one free man who did not share his opinion was Harold Macmillan. Macmillan’s famous gaffe about the building of the Berlin Wall — ‘nobody is going to fight about it’2 — delivered as he left the eighteenth green at Gleneagles, suggests the existence of a wide gulf between the two leaders’ positions over Berlin. However, the conventional versions of these two incidents conceal as much as they reveal about Kennedy and Macmillan’s attitudes to the Berlin question. Playing back a film of his speech in private, the president later recalled that he had been ‘disturbed’ by the ‘almost hysterical reception’ he had received in Berlin. He felt that if he had come to his peroration and said ‘“and at this moment I call upon you all to cross into East Germany and pull down that wall” they’d all have gone.’ Kennedy, according to his close confidant Ambassador Ormsby-Gore, worried that ‘the German people … at this moment in history were not totally to be relied upon and that this rather sheep-like instinct of theirs could be very frightening under certain circumstances and under the wrong leader still.’3

If the fate of the British deterrent was one half of the Anglo-American nuclear problem in the Kennedy-Macmillan era, the other was the search for a nuclear test ban treaty. Harold Macmillan’s personal role in this field makes for what is at once a fascinating, paradoxical and problematical study. On the one hand, as we have seen in the previous chapter, he was tenacious in his pursuit of an ‘independent’ nuclear capability for Great Britain. On the other, he was a persistent advocate of detente, disarmament, and a ban on nuclear testing. Of course, this paradox could easily be resolved by recourse to a Machiavellian explanation. One might argue that Macmillan’s approach was governed solely by domestic electoral considerations. So, on the one hand, Macmillan wanted to play to that segment of public opinion in Britain which was wedded to the nation’s role as a great power by stressing the importance of the independent nuclear deterrent. On the other, he wanted to steal the clothes of the peace lobby by advocating disarmament and an end to nuclear testing. The latter policy could of course only be pursued in earnest once Britain had completed her own programme of nuclear tests by the middle of 1958.1 Although his behaviour can be made to fit this interpretation, it still seems incomplete. It is difficult, for example, to dismiss all of the evidence of private soul-searching over the question of the impact of the nuclear arms race on the future of mankind as a simple attempt to mask his true motives from his contemporaries and from the historical record.2 The terms of his 5 January 1962 appeal to Kennedy, in which he spoke of ‘humanity … setting out on a path at once so fantastic and so retrograde, so sophisticated and so barbarous, as to be almost incredible’, reflect more than eloquence in pursuit of political calculation.3

In the context of post-war Anglo-American relations over South East Asia it seems a remarkable irony that Britain came closer to intervening militarily alongside the United States in the comparatively insignificant state of Laos in 1961–2, rather than during the collapse of French Indo-China in 1954, or South Vietnam after 1965. One can equally well pose Khrushchev’s question to US Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson of British policy at this juncture: ‘why take risks over Laos?’1 The Laotian crisis, which was the first to confront the new Kennedy Administration, in fact revealed much about the strengths and shortcomings of the Anglo-American alliance from the British perspective. On the one hand, Macmillan was eventually able, in the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, to reinforce Kennedy’s own instincts against large-scale military involvement. On the other, Britain still came close to being sucked by hawks in the Pentagon and State Department into helping to fight an unwinnable war in Indo-China. One might observe here that Kennedy’s post-Bay of Pigs conversion to scepticism as regards the quality of advice he received from the CIA and military was most fortunate from the British point of view.

Of the interlocking set of international crises that came together in the winter of 1962–3, that in the Congo constituted at first sight the least direct threat to British interests. After all, the collapse of order and the outbreak of civil strife in its former colony were surely far more the responsibility of the Belgian Government? Nevertheless, the denouement of the crisis, involving the forcible reintegration of the secessionist province of Katanga into the Congolese state by United Nations’ forces, was a decisive defeat for the British government.1 Not only that, but it represented a clear failure for Macmillan’s efforts to coordinate British and American policies, a failure confirmed at the ill-tempered Nassau Conference of December 1962. If, next to the contemporaneous Cuban missile crisis, the Skybolt crisis, the failure of the EEC application, the dispute over Yemeni disengagement, and the unravelling of the concept of interdependence, the Katangan question did not seem to loom large, this merely reflected the exceptional nature of the times in Anglo-American relations rather than the magnitude of the Congolese problem itself. How, it must be asked, had the internal affairs of a former Belgian colony given rise to so much Anglo-American tension?

As the defining moment of the Kennedy Administration and a key watershed in the development of the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis must also loom large in any analysis of Anglo-American relations in this period. In the minds of the key policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic the missile crisis was closely linked to the problem of Berlin discussed in the previous chapter. Both Macmillan and Kennedy feared that Khrushchev’s goal in placing missiles in Cuba might be to press for some form of trade over Berlin. Nevertheless, although the crisis had broader ramifications for the waging of the Cold War, when judging the British role in October 1962 it is important always to have in mind Kennedy’s core perception of the Cuban problem. Here was a direct threat to the security of the United States, involving a Soviet incursion into the Western hemisphere. As such, it had the gravest potential domestic repercussions for the president. In this sense it was not a crisis in which from Kennedy’s perspective the Anglo-American relationship could expect to occupy centre stage.

Looming larger than events in the Congo, a key component of the crisis of interdependence that came together in the winter of 1962–3 was the failure of the British application to join the EEC. In Harold Macmillan’s mind, this application had been conceived in the wake of the collapse of the Paris summit of May 1960 as a means to maintain Britain’s international economic and political position in the face of the unreliability of the Anglo-American alliance. As such it was an exercise in the hedging of bets. That Macmillan should have chosen the EEC course by 1961, when one looks back to the beginning of his premiership, is somewhat surprising. In fact, in his early years as prime minister, Macmillan proved to be at best a reluctant European. Coming to office in the aftermath of the Suez crisis, it is arguable that he might have chosen a European rather than an Anglo-American path for Britain in foreign affairs. After all, one reading of the Suez crisis was that ‘European’ cooperation in the shape of the Anglo-French collusion with the Israelis had provided the only means by which Britain could defend her position in the face of American unreliability.

The two events which were to change the British attitude towards Nasser from one of continuing if rather more suspicious accommodation in the wake of the arms deal, to one of open and unremitting hostility, took place in Jordan. First came the failure of the December 1955 mission of General Sir Gerald Templer, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, to secure Jordanian accession to the Baghdad Pact. Hard on the heels of this humiliation, at the beginning of March 1956, came the sudden dismissal of General Sir John Bagot Glubb, commander of the Jordanian Arab Legion. Both events were bitter blows to British prestige in the Middle East and contributed to a major reorientation of British policy.

Viewed from one perspective, there was a broad unity of purpose between British and American aims in the Middle East at the start of 1955. Both countries wanted to protect access to the vast oil reserves of the region, and both thought that the principal threat to such access came ultimately from the Soviet Union. The importance of Middle Eastern oil to the economies of Western Europe was illustrated by British Government figures produced in early 1956. These showed that in 1955 the six main refining countries (the United Kingdom, France, Italy, the Netherlands, West Germany and Belgium) imported about 93 million tons of crude oil, of which 90 per cent came from the Middle East. Demand for crude oil products had risen by 17.4 per cent from 1954 to 1955, and was expected to continue to show increases of this magnitude in the following years.’ Thus, by the beginning of the period under review, it seemed more apparent than ever to both Britain and America that if the economies of Western Europe were to sustain their post-war recovery access to abundant, cheap Middle Eastern oil was a vital strategic interest. Protecting this interest was at the heart of all notions of Middle Eastern defence.

The developments which, more than anything else, conditioned the reassessment of British and American strategy in the Middle East in the last months of 1958 took place in post-revolutionary Iraq. Ideologically, the officers who had led the coup were a heterogeneous collection of men, ranging from those with sympathy for the Communists, through Iraqi nationalists, to pan-Arab nationalists. The direction which Iraq was to take, therefore, was very much to be determined by who won the struggle for power between these men, and on which allies he chose to rely to achieve his victory.

‘By the late summer of 1957 Syria was on the verge of disintegration as an organized political community.’1 Although Nasser’s intervention had served to defuse what might be termed the great-power crisis there, many Syrians had lost confidence in the future of their country as an independent state. The fact that it had required the deployment of Egyptian troops to stabilize the situation in the country had merely served to reinforce this sentiment. Syria had become the object of competition not only between rival Arab states, but also between the superpowers, and the rival poles of attraction seemed to be pulling the country apart.

Following the decision to halt operations on the Suez Canal on 6 November, British politics had been in ferment. It was Anthony Eden’s misfortune at this point to be obliged, under doctor’s advice, to take a complete break from work. Accordingly, on 23 November, he flew out of London bound for Jamaica. On his return, although he evidently believed that he could resume his position as Prime Minister, his reception in the House of Commons showed that he certainly could not command majority support, even within his own party. Although some scholars argue that his continuing bad health was the explanation for his swift decision to resign on 9 January, it is difficult to believe that the weakness of his political position did not have a bearing on that decision.’

One of the great ironies of the Suez Crisis is that it resulted in the replacement of one Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, deemed to have taken too radical an approach in defence of British interests in the Middle East, by another, Harold Macmillan, whose views on the region were, if anything, even more radical. Macmillan was not only the foremost of the Cabinet hawks over Suez, and the first to propose the involvement of the Israelis in military action against Egypt, he was also responsible for the effective misrepresentation to Eden of the views of the US administration on the use of military force in cables sent during his visit to America in September 1956. Finally, and confusingly, it was the breaking of Macmillan’s nerve during the Suez landings which more than any other single factor seems to have dictated the decision to halt operations on the morning of 6 November 1956.

The main point about the nationalization of the Suez Canal was that it was an issue perfectly formulated to drive a wedge between the United States and Britain in the wake of their respective reorientations of policy in March 1956. As has been suggested, aside from the broader strategic divergence between the two over the question of the promotion of the Baghdad Pact and of Iraqi leadership of the Arab world, they had come to subtly, but significantly, different assessments of the new approach to be adopted towards Nasser. British opposition to him was trenchant. Nasser was Britain’s enemy, and his designs had to be thwarted. If not, he would subvert Britain’s position in the Middle East, an area which, because of the importance of its oil supplies, was vital to national survival. The US, on the other hand, did not see Nasser threatening anything so vital. Certainly, his influence in the region was inimical, and his actions seemed to be profiting the Soviet Union. However, an important element of pragmatism still remained in the US approach to dealing with him.

The coup d’etat in Iraq early on the morning of 14 July 1958, which swept away the Hashemite Royal Family and replaced it with a cadre of officers led by Brigadier Abdel Karim Qassem, seems to have struck both the British and American Governments as a bolt from the blue.’ In fact, closer attention to the internal situation in the country might have revealed that the atmosphere in the capital was unusually tense even by Iraqi standards in the weeks immediately preceding the coup attempt. For instance, a visit by King Feisal to a degree-giving ceremony at the University of Baghdad early in July met with a particularly sullen response, with one observer sympathetic to the government arguing that it was reminiscent of the period immediately preceding Rashid Ali’s insurrection in 1941.2

The crucial events which were to bring about much closer Anglo-American consultation over the Middle East took place in Syria. The main point about the Syrian crisis which began early in August 1957 was that in its initial stages it appeared to present a challenge which incorporated both of the different primary threats which concerned the two powers in the region. In other words, during the months of August to October 1957, it seemed to the American government that the Soviet Union, acting at first in conjunction with Nasser, was fermenting an anti-Western coup in Syria with the object of establishing a Soviet satellite state in the heart of the Middle East. The British were similarly concerned that Nasser, acting as the Soviets’ agent, might gain control of Syria in alliance with the indigenous Communists and create a superstate which would straddle the oil supply routes via the Suez Canal and the Iraqi Petroleum Company pipelines.

The Middle East at the beginning of 1955 was entering a revolutionary era. The overthrow of the Farouk regime in Egypt in July 1952, and its replacement by a cadre of army officers, was the harbinger of far-reaching political changes which were to sweep the Arab world during the coming decade. In many respects, it seems fair to describe the period 1955–9 as a pivotal one in the post-war history of the region. Arab nationalist sentiment underwent a major renaissance at the same time as ruling elites were threatened or displaced by new social and political forces. The Western powers more often than not were to find themselves reacting to, rather than shaping events, while the influence of the Soviet Union with the Arab states seemed to be advancing on all fronts. Perhaps it is appropriate, therefore, to set the scene for these changes by sketching in brief details of the political situation in the major states of the region on which this study will touch at the beginning of 1955.

The origins of the crisis which erupted in the Lebanon early in May 1958 were bound up with the nature of the post independence Lebanese political system. The ‘National Pact’, which distributed power and political office on a confessional basis, served both to maintain the balance between the Lebanese sects, and to entrench their differences. The tension between what might be termed the Eastern and Western orientations of the Christian and Muslim sects, which the pact sought to mitigate, was heightened during the mid-1950s under the impact of Nasser’s pan-Arabism and the Anglo-French disgrace over the Suez crisis. The fact that Camille Chamoun, President of the country since 1952, refused to sever diplomatic relations with Britain and France in the wake of the crisis as other Arab states had done, enraged those within the country who increasingly looked towards the fulfilment of the pan-Arab ideal as Lebanon’s future.

After the comparative tranquillity of 1960, the Middle East returned to a more familiar pattern of turbulence in 1961. The year was marked by two particularly significant crises, occasioned by the declaration of Kuwait’s independence from Britain in June, and the break-up of the United Arab Republic of Egypt and Syria in late September. In view of all that has been said about the importance of Kuwait for British interests in the region it is not surprising that it was the Kuwaiti crisis which loomed largest in British policy during 1961. Here it was to be Britain that played the leading role of the Western powers, and the US that stayed on the sidelines, offering in the main logistical and diplomatic support.

One aspect of the Suez crisis which has so far gone unre-marked in this study, was the Soviet attempt to capitalize on the Anglo-French action by issuing threats of nuclear retaliation against the two should they fail to halt operations. While these warnings were pieces of pure propaganda, they no doubt served to underline in the eyes of the US Administration the extent to which the Soviets might reap the dividends of the discomfiture of the old colonial powers. In fact, the Suez crisis instigated a debate within the Administration as to what US response would be appropriate to prevent the Soviet Union filling what was then perceived to be a power vacuum in the region. The ‘Eisenhower Doctrine’ or ‘Middle East Resolution’ which emerged from this process was, however, to prove to be more effective as a piece of cold war rhetoric and posturing than as any meaningful contribution to the furthering of peace or stability in the region.