| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
While highly sensitive to embarrassment by us, the British exhibit a distressing lack of sympathy for the discomfiture to which we are exposed because of our association with them.1
Being for the most part abysmally ignorant, [Americans] are convinced that, as a result of the British Empire being kept together, the toilers of overseas are burdened with taxes for the benefit of the degenerate dukes in the metropolis.2
The close diplomatic relationship between Britain and the United States during the Second World War continues to inspire historical interest, much of it coalescing around the mixture of cooperation and discord that underscored the relationship. The received historical view is that the most significant disagreement between the Atlantic powers was the future of the colonial order in general and the status of the British Empire most especially. Washington and London's fundamental antagonism over the principles of postwar trusteeship and self-determination emerges virtually as a historiographical truism, evidenced by the florid and deeply divergent rhetorical positions taken by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill themselves.3 Turning to America's relationship with the objects of decolonization, however, it is evident that in many cases the U.S. commitment to freedom for oppressed peoples did not live up to the ideals espoused. From this angle, the Anglo-American disagreement over colonialism opens broader questions about the sources of U.S. foreign policy itself and the political constraints of its implementation. Did American strategic imperatives outweigh ideals that were genuinely held in the case of colonial self-determination? Was the rhetoric of decolonization purely instrumental? Or, as Michael H. Hunt has contended, was the "ideology" of U.S. foreign policy multifaceted, incorporating notions of racial hierarchy and an antipathy to revolutionary change as well as the much-valorized commitment to freedom, such that decision makers were at key moments highly amenable to the colonial status quo?
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