29-03-2009, 10:24 PM
Jan Klimkowski Wrote:Paul - a fascinating piece of history. Thanks.
Do you know if De Gaulle's repudiation of NATO was in part due to his disgust at the geopolitical games being played in South-East Asia?
Jan,
De Gaulle's repudiation of US hegemony in NATO was of a piece with his rejection of American policy in SE Asia. He saw NATO for what it really was - the US conscription of the European military-industrial complex for Washington's ends, not least throught the perpetuation of the division of Europe.
I suspect most of European's pols saw this, too, but few had De Gaulle's courage, personal following or elan. Interestingly, the CIA didn't discriminate between the overt oppositionists (De Gaulle, Olaf Palme, Papandreou) and the "keep-your-heads-down-and-they-won't-notice-us" brigage: It toppled, or murdered, the lot of them!
Here's how one US journalist, perhaps the earliest & most consistent opponent of US conduct in Vietnam among mainstream US journalists, saw the respective division in early 1966:
Quote:The Washington Daily News, 4 March 1966, p.19
Decline and Fall
By Richard Starnes
The dreary de-escalation of Britain from world power to quaint anachronism is all but complete and in consequence it is small wonder that so little seems to turn on the outcome of the election that Prime Minister Harold Wilson has called for the last day of this month.
The suspicion grows that not even the British much care whether Mr. Wilson or Tory Leader Edward Heath is the Queen’s First Minister when April Fool’s Day dawns. The world that confronts the United Kingdom today is no different from the one that confronted it in other and greater centuries. Power is all that matters among governments and Britain today is powerless in the company of great nations.
It is customary in Britain to lay this decline to two interrelated circumstances – the examination imposed by the nation’s prodigious effort in World War II, and the end of colonialism. Both alibis contain elements of truth, but neither tells the whole story.
France could as well offer both excuses if it found itself seated below the salt at the table of nations. But France finds itself in no such humiliating situation. Its president takes surly delight in tweaking Uncle Sam’s whiskers and in otherwise acting as if he were the chief of state of a first-rate nation.
But Gen. De Gaulle actually brandishes no more real power than Mr. Wilson, and the difference in the influence which the two men command has to be found in their style, their vision and in their understanding of the world as it really exists.
“Mr. Wilson,” grumbles London’s respected Economist, “strove to be a Kennedy; he has turned out to be a Johnson. There is no Wilson charisma. He is where he is because he has outworked all the others. There is little or no Wilson doctrine.”
It is difficult after nearly a year and a half of Prime Minister Wilson’s stewardship to remember that he came into office on a Labor Party (i.e. socialist) ticket. Apart from the what the Economist calls “trivial bits of left-wingery” Mr. Wilson has run a centrist government that bears no relationship in the great Labor Party social schemes of the past.
Nationalization of the steel industry, which was a prime plank in Labor’s platform, got exactly the same sort of support from Mr. Wilson that repeal of Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley act got from President Johnson. He had to be for it because much of his support came from organisms that were passionately in favor if it, but no one was fooled.
But it is in the field of foreign policy that Mr. Wilson has so disappointed his own left wing. The war in Viet Nam is intensely unpopular in England, particularly so in the intellectual circles where so much of the Labor Party philosophy is developed and refined.
A Labor Party faithful to its own past would be calculated to follow a line on Viet Nam close to Gen. De Gaulle than Mr. Johnson. And yet Mr. Wilson has dutifully sneezed every time President Johnson took snuff on the Viet Nam issue. He has, with all his considerable skill at practical (that is to say unprincipled) politics, frustrated every attempt by Labor’s left wing to soften Britain’s policy on Viet Nam.
It is popular to ascribe the Prime Minister’s Viet Nam policy to the weakness of the pound and the need to believe that this is true. Mr. Wilson on Viet Nam and Mr. Wilson on Malaysia are part and parcel of the real Wilson – a conservative leader who unaccountably finds himself at the head of a Labor Party.
It is tempting to stretch the analogy between Mr. Wilson and Mr. Johnson too fine. But it is quite clear that both men have adopted the same basic tactics to insure personal power at the price of any real doctrinal convictions. The left wing in Britain and the left wing in the United States have no place else to go. If Mr. Wilson and Mr. Johnson can command the loyalty of the great mass of voters whose commitment is to the middle of the road, then each is politically invulnerable. The election this month will show how well this Johnsonian policy will reward Mr. Wilson.
