Grand Improvisation: America Confronts the British Superpower, 1945–1957

Abstract

Derek Leebaert has produced a lively, scholarly, and generally persuasive reinterpretation of Anglo-American international history after 1945. He does not see an abrupt and inevitable transfer of global sway from London to Washington occurring during the period. Rather, he suggests that British elites remained committed to their policies of global reach. Their American equivalents were jittery and uncertain about assuming new responsibilities. Leebaert musters extensive archival evidence. A July 1950 National Security Council document (Nsc 75) concluded, in Leebaert's words, that “the British Empire and Commonwealth would stay much as it had been, covering the globe with its nearly one million men under arms and who-knew-what in reserve” (p. 234). The doctrine of militarized global containment, as articulated a couple of months earlier in another National Security Council document (Nsc 68), was thus severely qualified. According to Leebaert, neither the Truman administration nor the first Eisenhower administration seriously questioned Britain's global commitment. Only in December 1956—the year of the Suez crisis, President Dwight D. Eisenhower's reelection, and the Soviet invasion of Hungary—did U.S. leaders commit fully to what Richard M. Nixon called “the foreign policy leadership of the world” (p. 4). Only the October 1957 Sputnik launch, in Leebaert's view, effectively put an end to the period of U.S. uncertainty about assuming its global burden.