Two Hundred Years of American Policy: Mothers and Daughters (or Greeks and Romans)

Alastair Buchan

From Foreign Affairs, July 1976

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Summary:  Social scientists write many books and papers nowadays about the development of "transnationalism"-meaning the impact on interstate relations of unofficial contacts and communications-as if this were something new on the face of the earth. Actually, over the long reach of history, it is the autarkic state or society that is the rarity. Certainly no interstate relationship has been more permeated or effectively influenced by transnational factors than that between Britain and the United States. No two societies have had a more profound impact upon each other, in terms of racial stock, political and juridical concepts, culture in all its meanings. And personal dealings have repeatedly affected specific historical events since American independence-for example, British banking houses largely financed the Louisiana Purchase, while private messages between Richard Cobden and Charles Sumner defused an imminent confrontation between the two governments over the Trent affair in 1863.

Until his untimely death in February of this year, Alastair Buchan was Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford. He had been Commandant of the Royal College of Defence Studies, London, 1970-72, and Director of the (then) Institute for Strategic Studies, London, 1958-69; and is the author of Power and Equilibrium in the 70s and other works.

Professor Buchan had completed the manuscript for this article before his death. Minor revisions and editing were completed by his close friend, Herbert G. Nicholas, Rhodes Professor of American History and Institutions at Oxford since 1969, and the author of The United States and Britain and other works.

Social scientists write many books and papers nowadays about the development of "transnationalism"-meaning the impact on interstate relations of unofficial contacts and communications-as if this were something new on the face of the earth. Actually, over the long reach of history, it is the autarkic state or society that is the rarity. Certainly no interstate relationship has been more permeated or effectively influenced by transnational factors than that between Britain and the United States. No two societies have had a more profound impact upon each other, in terms of racial stock, political and juridical concepts, culture in all its meanings. And personal dealings have repeatedly affected specific historical events since American independence-for example, British banking houses largely financed the Louisiana Purchase, while private messages between Richard Cobden and Charles Sumner defused an imminent confrontation between the two governments over the Trent affair in 1863.

This interpenetration is a palpable fact and will, I have no doubt, be explored in depth in many different places during 1976. There is also no dispute about the fact that over the past hundred years the relationship has swung through an arc of 180 degrees, that the economic and cultural dominance of Britain over America in broadly the first century gave way to a position of increasing American dominance-first economic, later strategic, political and in many ways intellectual-over Britain as the second century advanced. There have been periods of marked alienation in the relations of the two countries, notably just after the Civil War and even more markedly between the world wars, but there has never been any serious discontinuity in political and economic relations, except briefly in the war of 1812-14; no equivalent of the Gaullist "ice age," the long estrangement between the United States and China, or the wars with Germany and Japan.

Has this continuous and pervasive contact which has swelled in volume in the past generation damaged or strengthened the two countries? Has the one society been able to prevent the other from making serious mistakes or to contribute to its learning process? Have the two countries lured each other into needless adventures, inspired a false sense of confidence in each other, distorted the other's perspective; or has the relationship been as benign as much Bicentennial oratory will no doubt maintain?

II

One way of reexamining the first century of the Anglo-American relationship is to think of it in terms of the first "adversary partnership" that the republic had to manage. This phrase too comes out of the social science jargon of the past decade, applied primarily to contemporary Soviet-American relations. At first sight there seems no useful analogy between the relations of the young United States, still not in full possession ...

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