Analysis of Sir David Manning’s interview in New Statesman

Incisive blog comment about Sir David Manning and an interview he recently gave in the New Statesman.

Original interview/article here.

Black Tom explosion August 1916

The explosion at a munitions depot on Black Tom island in New York Harbor (wiki article here) is of some relevance in explaining the United States’ entry into World War One. It is also, then, part of the development of Anglo-American relations. Although the US fought in WW1 for very different reasons to the British, it has still become part of the ‘Anglo-American story’ – the romanticised image which has, on occasion, had major bearing on bilateral relations. It was a public relations disaster for the Central Powers, much like the Zimmermann telegram (for another post), and hardened attitudes to the Germans in both public and political circles.

A little context:

Franz von Papen, the German military attaché in the US in the period before the Americans entered the war, was part of a group of German agents aiming primarily to disrupt US trade with the Entente. He, for example, founded a phony business – the Bridgeport Projectile Co. – to purchase armaments that might otherwise have gone to Britain.1 He and other German agents in the US were thought to be responsible for the blast at Black Tom, which measured around 5 on the Richter Scale and – perhaps tellingly – damaged the Statue of Liberty. Franz von Rintelin is another figure in German espionage circles worth reading about ^.

Read about the aftermath on the New Jersey City University website here. I’ve extracted the following section:

“After World War I, the Lehigh Valley Railroad, who owned Black Tom, and others, brought charges of German sabotage before the Mixed Claims Commission under the 1921 Treaty of Berlin between the United States and Germany. The commission questioned the origins of the Black Tom explosion. Had the fire begun as a result of “spontaneous combustion,” carelessness of one of the employees or guards, or German sabotage?
A suspect in the incident was Michael Kristoff, a 23-year old immigrant living with relatives in nearby Bayonne and a former employer at the Tidewater Oil Company. Kristoff is said to have started the fires at Black Tom with incendiary devices in exchange for five hundred dollars. Kristoff died in a Staten Island hospital in 1928. On one side, officials at Black Tom were charged with “criminal and gross negligence” and on the other, documentation was found regarding German espionage at the time, but no one was found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. In 1939 after seventeen years of deliberation, the German-American Mixed Claims Commission claimed Germany responsible of sabotage. Germany was ordered to pay reparations of $50 million to all claimants.”

Whilst the sea-change in public opinion against the Central Powers brought about by events such as the Black Tom incident, the sinking of the Lusitania, and the execution of American nurse Edith Cavell did not provoke the US to fight alongside the British they did smooth the course to war. Unrestricted submarine warfare which threatened US shipping and US lives was the casus belli. The simple fact that Britain depended upon US exports of food and war materials to prosecute her war made the German decision to threated this supply route almost inevitable and in turn the US administration felt compelled to act. Despite winning the 1916 Presidential election on an isolationist platform (slogan: ‘He Kept us out of the War!’) Wilson recognised that US national interest was at stake when the Germans returned to unrestricted submarine warfare after a brief hiatus in 1916 and duly went to war the following year.

Other information:

Modern aerial view.

Footnotes:

1. Karl Hoover, ‘The Hindu Conspiracy in California, 1913-1918′, German Studies Review, Vol. 8, No. 2. (May, 1985), pp. 245.

The view from 2002

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1913522.stm

A very well written piece discussing the Anglo-American relationship just seven months after 9/11. In fact, this is a very good history piece, analysing much of the key events in the post-1945 relationship. I post it, then, to provide some background information generally, and also as an historical document. Reading ‘old news’ is laughably easy now and this is of huge benefit to the historian. Note particularly where Ben Wright says ‘British and American marines are currently fighting the remaining al-Qaeda and Taleban fighters in Afghanistan’. They are, of course, still there and still fighting.

Bill Clinton interviewed by The Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman

Hear the interview here. Bill Clinton, in London to promote his new book Giving: How each of Us Can Change the World, gives some of his thoughts on the global standing of the USA. Note that there is an acute difference between the public perception of the United States – overwhelmingly negative in much of Europe – and the views within diplomatic circles. I don’t, however, mean to suggest that the diplomatic view – within the British Foreign Office for example – is overwhelmingly positive. Rather, I simply try always to highlight that there are a number of relationships working at once and not always pulling in the same direction or concerned with the same values. The Anglo-American relationship is an aggregate concept. To return to the interview:

Burkeman suggests a ‘connection between how well you’re received around the planet and how good your wife’s chances are looking at the moment, and how much American’s dislike the incumbent’.

Clinton replies that ‘there is a connection I think between how well she’s doing at the moment and the concern Americans have for the standing [which] our country has lost in the world because of our excessive unilateralism. And its not just Iraq’. He goes on to express concern at the withdrawal from  the Kyoto agreement, loss of interest in non-proliferation, and the refusal to recognise the International criminal court.

While Iraq dominates the media and (partly as a consequence) public feeling towards the United States there are numerous diplomatic headaches within the upper echelons of diplomacy. More broadly, Clinton laments the loss of goodwill towards the US, which after the 9/11 attacks was at an unprecedented high. Whether or not you consider the motives for, and execution of, President Bush’s post 9/11 strategies good or bad there is no doubt that this goodwill has drained away. With this has gone a once-in-a-political-generation opportunity for a renewal of US ties to the outside world. Instead the Anglo-American relationship has been reforged in the heat of an increasingly unpopular war and its current form is frequently maligned as a result.

John Charmley on Churchill and the ‘Special Relationship’

John Charmley is a professor of modern history at the University of East Anglia and a controversial figure noted for his revisionist work on Winston Churchill. There is a good wikipedia entry for Charmley here.

His book Churchill’s Grand Alliance: The Anglo-American Special Relationship 1940-57 is brave in attempting to ‘clear away the lush undergrowth laid down by Churchill and his admirers’ (p. xiii). This undergrowth is both dense and misleading. One of its chief cultivators is Andrew Roberts, who is quoted on the dust jacket as saying about one of Charmley’s earlier works Churchill: The End of Glory: ‘For those who love Churchill partly because of his warts and feel that they have waited too long to hear the case for the prosecution put eloquently and with impeccable intellectual soundness, “it is a delight”‘. Roberts’ use of the word ‘warts’ is surely a deliberate echo of the supposed Cromwellian request to the artist Peter Lely to paint him ‘warts and all’ in his portrait. That aside, Charmley has a great deal to say about the A-A relationship, in his opening sentence he writes:

‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was Churchill’s, and he pronounced it good’.

He continues in a somewhat curmudgeonly way to say that ‘[t]he Anglo-American special relationship has been such a marked feature of the last fifty years that a generation which has the attention span of a television commercial is apt to regard it with awe as an ancient phenomenon. Yet in very large measure it was a artefact created by one of the greatest literary and political artists of the century, Winston Churchill.’ (p. 3).

It is indeed only in taking the long view that we can see the present state of friendship as something of a abberation. For a good hundred and fifty years after the War of Independence (1775-1783) the two powers seemed to be set for permanent conflict. Border disputes – relating primarily to Canada, maritime rights, and bitter memories of the war (both personal and national) were some of the factors that conspired to keep the countries apart. Churchill’s influence is most strong during World War Two and during his second premiership 1951-55, and there are many other reasons for the developing friendship of the late 19th century and early 20th. We can, however, look to him as one of the principal architects of both the actual and rhetorical relationship which has so often been given the tag ’special’ in the post war period.

Matt Frei on George W Bush’s evolving foreign policy

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7027166.stm

Great comment article. Frei, a BBC journalist and broadcaster for around twenty years, provides excellent insights into the Washington political scene. ‘In the cooler with the Brits’, is his assessment of the Bush administration’s current attitude to the UK.

Timothy Garton Ash comment on ‘Special Relationship’

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/conservatives/comment/0,,2182980,00.html

Timothy Garton Ash skewers some of the old cliches chucked around when talking about US/UK relations.

‘ … take the very serious danger of an Israel-hating, unstable Islamic Republic of Iran getting the nuclear bomb, and the associated risk that Washington will bomb Iran first, with likely disastrous consequences in the region. (For the avoidance of any misunderstanding: no shred of moral equivalence between Tehran and Washington is implied.)’

Ash’s answer is:

‘What can Britain do about this? The classic Tory answer is: use our fabled “special relationship”. Get on the blower to Washington. One tries to imagine the call. David Cameron: “Look here, George old chap, we really don’t think it’s a good idea to bomb Iran. And I have to say, you couldn’t count on the RAF.” George Bush (for it is he) turns to vice-president Dick Cheney: “Hey, Dick, David says we shouldn’t bomb Iran.” Cheney: “Well, gee, if Petraeus says that, maybe we should think about it.” Bush: “Not David Petraeus, David Cameron.” Cheney: “David who?”‘

T.G.A. is right to identify the rhetorical appeal to the concept of ’specialness’ in this transatlantic relationship as a tool of British politicians. Its effectiveness and success has been varied and it has often been little more than a figleaf to hide the poverty of British power. Britain’s global stature is out of proportion to its current standing in the power stakes thanks to – amongst other things – membership of the Permanent UN Security Council and G7, financial sector expertise and a first-class diplomatic service.

Recommended books on Anglo-American relations

• J. Baylis (ed.), Anglo-American Relations since 1939: the Enduring Alliance (1997)
• Kathleen Burk, Old World, New World: Anglo-American Relations from the Beginning, (forthcoming Winter 2007)
• Alan Dobson, Anglo-American Relations in the Twentieth Century (1995)
• Ritchie Ovendale, Anglo-American Relations in the Twentieth Century (1998)
• David Reynolds and David Dimbleby, An Ocean Apart: the Relationship between Britain and America in the Twentieth Century (1988)

Library of Congress image resources

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/british/britobje.html

A great many cartoons and images covering the entire Anglo-American relationship not only in its political sense but also in terms of society and culture.

Anglo-American Cartoons

http://www.cartoonstock.com/vintage/directory/a/anglo-american_relations.asp