FadeTheButcher
12-28-2004, 08:27 PM
Here is an excerpt from an interesting new book I am reading.
Prologue
Hail, Caeser!
Under the bright but chilly late winter Egyptian sunshine, an American vessel of war served as the stage for a show probably unique in the annals of the U.S. Navy. The Yalta Conference waas just over and the USS Quincy, which had transported President Franklin D. Roosevelt as far as Malta (from where he had flown to the Soviet Union), had steamed to the Suez Canal and dropped anchor in the Great Bitter Lake, an inland sea about two-thirds of the distance down the waterway. There, on February 20, 1945, President Roosevelt came aboard again.
With the conference at Yalta concluded -- Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had met to determine the shape of the postwar world -- FDR had ridden by car to Sevastopol and toured the battlefield where in the 1850s Great Britain and France had defeated czarist Russia in the Crimean War. Then he had flown to an Egyptian airfield near Ismailia, just west of the canal. Thereupon he had been carried aboard the Quincy and prepared to meet the local satraps.
The word satrap hs a long and telling history. We find its origin in the Old Persian khshathrapavan, meaning "protector of the country." At some point, perhaps during the Athenian efforts to fend off the Persian Empire, the word entered into Greek. The imperial Romans picked it up, spelling it satrapes. Passing eventually into English, it signified a subordinate ruler. In the course of its evolution, "satrap" came to conjure up a picture of local leaders bowing, scraping, even performing the kowtow before the throne of the emperor. So it was aboard the Quincy during the morning of February 20, 1945.
Draping a large black cape over Roosevelt's shoulders, naval aides wheeled him up to the forward gun deck. There he was lifted onto an ornate armchair, his throne.
The first of the satraps was the young Egyptian king Farouk. He had been a British creation, the puppet ruler of an Egypt that had long been a British protectorate (meaning an informal colony), and he had survived in his position for one reason: he had kept order on behalf of the British Empire. But now, his playboy's corpulence bulging against the brass buttons of his British-style admiral's uniform, he was paying homage to a new emperor, President Roosevelt. FDR gave him a twin-motored transport plane and urged him to plant more rice.
The next supplicant was Haile Selassie, the king of Ethiopia. Back in the 1930s, Italy's Benito Mussolini had shocked the world by invading the East African country, but the Ethiopians had fought his forces to a standstill; during World War II, the British had driven the Italians out altogether. Ethiopia thereafter had seemed on the verge of succumbing to British influence. Yet here was the Ethiopian monarch, a small, dignified, black-bearded man in a cap and an oversized British-issue greatcoat, also placing himself at Roosevelt's disposal. He got four reconnaisance vehicles.
Finally came King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia: tall, with a dark goatee and flowing white robes. His was the best part of the pageant. From his palace in Riyadh, which contained both the traditional harem of Islam and the only electric elevator on the Arabian peninsula, he had traveld by motor convoy southwestward to Jidda, on the Red Sea. Once his yacht reached the Suez Canal, seaman aboard the Quincy had made special arrangements to keep him comfortable. Dozens of thick carpets had been spread on the foredeck and a royal tent had been set up for the king to sleep in.
The king showed up with a retinue of relatives, guards, valets, food tasters, and servers of ceremonial coffee. Soon he invited the officers of the Quincy to a banquet held in the approved Arab fashion, with all sitting cross-legged and eating rice pilaf and broiled lamb kebab with their fingers.
While Ibn Saud was on board the ship, Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, the president's daughter who had accompanied her father to Yalta, kept out of sight. The Saudi king, FDR had told her, on such occasions would not allow women in his presence. "By the way," he had added, "those women he does see, he confiscates."
What did Ibn Saud really want? After Farouk and Haile Selassie had backed away from Roosevelt's presence, the answer became clear. While Arab guards, colorfully garbed and armed with daggers and rifles, stood about the deck, the Saudi king approached the American president. To maintain his power on the Arabian peninsula, he explained, he needed modern weapons.
Roosevelt listened carefully, then proffered a deal. The United States would extend military aid to Saudi Arabia and even pay Ibn Saud's bills; the assistance would be part of the Lend-Lease program.
In return the United States, before the war only a minor presence along the Persian Gulf, would get full drilling rights in Saudi fields. America would replace Great Britain as controller of Saudi oil.
Not until the last day of the Yalta Conference had Roosevelt said anything to Churchill about his impending visit with King Ibn Saud. According to Col. William Eddy, the American minister to Saudi Arabia and the official who set up the meeting aboard the Quincy, Churchill was "thoroughly nettled" and "burned up the wires of all his diplomats" with orders to arrange a similar conference. Indeed, after a brief stopover in Greece, hoping to soothe anti-British sentiment there -- Greece traditionally also had been a British protectorate -- he hurried to meet with Ibn Saud. But Churchill had come too late and had too little to offer: Britain was broke.
Churchill returned to London empty-handed. In one corner of the world, the Pax Britannica had been replaced by the Pax Americana.
I came across this episode, reported in the New York Times on February 21, 1945, while looking through old newspaper microfilms. At the time, I was doing research for a book on World War II in Asia and the Pacific, and my thoughts were far from any goings-on in the Middle East. But in the course of that work I came across evidence in the Public Record Office in London showing that at the end of the war the State Department went all out to keep British firms from returning to their prewar preeminence in the China market; that market, real or supposed, was to be an American preserve. (The Communists, of course, had other ideas.)
While in London, I also learned that in 1942 Churchill lashed out at Harry Hopkins, FDR's special emissary, with a "string of cuss words far into the early hours of the night." Hopkins sin was that he was relaying Roosevelt's demand that the British leave India.
A kind review of my book in the Toronto Globe and Mail led to a visit to that city. After I gave a lecture, the reviewer (a historian at Trinity College of the University of Toronto), several of his colleagues, and I sat around a fire in the common room. The talk turned to FDR. Did you know, one asked me, that in 1939 the president extended the Monroe Doctrine to Canada? I checked: he did.
Enunciated by President James Monroe in 1823, the doctrine had stated that the "American continents are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European power." The implication had been that the United States would protect Central and South America from European aggression. Now, in 1939, Roosevelt was assuming Great Britain's long-standing role as the protector of Canada.
A similar matter came to my attention. In 1941, the prime minister of Australia, like Canada a British dominion, encamped for six months not in London but rather in Washington, looking for protection against Japan.
So, almost by incident, I had a little list: Saudi Arabia, China, India, Canada, and Australia. A pattern was emerging. In each case, in the era of World War II, in theater after theater, Uncle Sam was replacing John Bull.
How far-reaching was this pattern? What was its origins? What were its consequences?
These questions led me back to the start of World War I, when Winston S. Churchill was the first lord of the admirality and Franklin D. Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the navy; and they led me forward to the end of World War II, when Churchill was out of office and Roosevelt was dead. At the beginning of that period, when they first met in London, Churchill sneered at Roosevelt as an upstart and an underling (at least this was FDR's recollection, expressed in 1939 to Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy); by its end, after a long series of wartime summit conferences, Churchill to all intents and purposes was Roosevelt's humble servant.
The turnabout in their personal roles, however, reflected something much broader, a great transformation of twentieth-century international relations. In 1914, at the beginning of World War I, the globe was Europe-centered, Britain-protected, and London-financed. In 1945, at the end of World War II, the globe was North America-centered, United States-protected, and New York-financed. The British Empire was in its death throes, and the American empire was very much alive.
The international changing of the guard, to be sure, was not just the result of the Roosevelt-Churchill story. Broad historical forces had been at work, and the British government in the two world wars had made decisions that had virtually eliminated its power abroad. Nevertheless, the emergence of the American empire has been the central feature of world affairs since 1945, and nothing illustrates the transference of power more vividly than the turbulent friendship of Roosevelt and Churchill.
Before we proceed, however, we need take up a crucial question: is there an American empire?
It is probably our most cherished item of national faith that the United States is not an imperial power. Empire, after all, is for those others, the French and the Belgians with their steaming tropical domains; the Axis power and theri brutal conquests; the Soviet Union imposing its system on a host of enslaved nations; and, above all, the British and the sloptches of red that on old maps and globes used to highlight the colonies on which the sun never set. America, we are convinced, possesses no such empire.
Yet when we say "empire," the principal example we have in mind is the British, and the British Empire was always more than the sum of its formal colonies. It embraced also a host of protectorates, especially along the sealanes between India and Gibralter; its investments underwrote the economies of Asia, Africa, and the Americas; the Royal Navy ruled the waves, and, combined with the British army, carried out the highest goal of Victorian foreign policy, the containment of Russia.
And America? America most certainly possesses de facto colonies. What lese are Puerto Rico, Guantanamo, Grenada, Guam, and Okinawa, and the military bases that encircle the globe from the North Pacific to the North Atlantic? In number, furthermore, America's protectorates -- Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Phillippines, Thailand, Pakistan, the emirates of the Persian Gulf, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bosnia, and all the members, old and new, of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization -- far exceed those of the Pax Britannica. American investments, private and public, cover the earth. The American military rules not only the waves but also the rocks and rills, deserts and forests, and much of both hemispheres besides. In containing Russia (the British called it the Great Game; the Americans termed it the Cold War), the United States took up where Great Britain left off. America is the very model of a major modern empire.
But how did the American empire, a fait accompli if there ever was one, come to exist? The answer begins with the raising of the curtain on the drama that Churchill called the Thirty Years' War: the British decision, early in August 1914, to intervene in the war that was getting underway on the European continent and that would not end until the spring of 1945.
In A Coffin for Dimitrios, the English novelist Eric Ambler wrote: "The situation in which a person, imagining fondly that he is in charge of his own destiny, is, in fact, the sport of circumstances beyond his control, is always fascinating. It is the essential element in most good drama."
In early August 1914, the sea lords of Britannia succumbed to such an illusion of control. Three decades later, as Roosevelt had wanted, the United States of America stood in Great Britain's place.
Prologue
Hail, Caeser!
Under the bright but chilly late winter Egyptian sunshine, an American vessel of war served as the stage for a show probably unique in the annals of the U.S. Navy. The Yalta Conference waas just over and the USS Quincy, which had transported President Franklin D. Roosevelt as far as Malta (from where he had flown to the Soviet Union), had steamed to the Suez Canal and dropped anchor in the Great Bitter Lake, an inland sea about two-thirds of the distance down the waterway. There, on February 20, 1945, President Roosevelt came aboard again.
With the conference at Yalta concluded -- Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had met to determine the shape of the postwar world -- FDR had ridden by car to Sevastopol and toured the battlefield where in the 1850s Great Britain and France had defeated czarist Russia in the Crimean War. Then he had flown to an Egyptian airfield near Ismailia, just west of the canal. Thereupon he had been carried aboard the Quincy and prepared to meet the local satraps.
The word satrap hs a long and telling history. We find its origin in the Old Persian khshathrapavan, meaning "protector of the country." At some point, perhaps during the Athenian efforts to fend off the Persian Empire, the word entered into Greek. The imperial Romans picked it up, spelling it satrapes. Passing eventually into English, it signified a subordinate ruler. In the course of its evolution, "satrap" came to conjure up a picture of local leaders bowing, scraping, even performing the kowtow before the throne of the emperor. So it was aboard the Quincy during the morning of February 20, 1945.
Draping a large black cape over Roosevelt's shoulders, naval aides wheeled him up to the forward gun deck. There he was lifted onto an ornate armchair, his throne.
The first of the satraps was the young Egyptian king Farouk. He had been a British creation, the puppet ruler of an Egypt that had long been a British protectorate (meaning an informal colony), and he had survived in his position for one reason: he had kept order on behalf of the British Empire. But now, his playboy's corpulence bulging against the brass buttons of his British-style admiral's uniform, he was paying homage to a new emperor, President Roosevelt. FDR gave him a twin-motored transport plane and urged him to plant more rice.
The next supplicant was Haile Selassie, the king of Ethiopia. Back in the 1930s, Italy's Benito Mussolini had shocked the world by invading the East African country, but the Ethiopians had fought his forces to a standstill; during World War II, the British had driven the Italians out altogether. Ethiopia thereafter had seemed on the verge of succumbing to British influence. Yet here was the Ethiopian monarch, a small, dignified, black-bearded man in a cap and an oversized British-issue greatcoat, also placing himself at Roosevelt's disposal. He got four reconnaisance vehicles.
Finally came King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia: tall, with a dark goatee and flowing white robes. His was the best part of the pageant. From his palace in Riyadh, which contained both the traditional harem of Islam and the only electric elevator on the Arabian peninsula, he had traveld by motor convoy southwestward to Jidda, on the Red Sea. Once his yacht reached the Suez Canal, seaman aboard the Quincy had made special arrangements to keep him comfortable. Dozens of thick carpets had been spread on the foredeck and a royal tent had been set up for the king to sleep in.
The king showed up with a retinue of relatives, guards, valets, food tasters, and servers of ceremonial coffee. Soon he invited the officers of the Quincy to a banquet held in the approved Arab fashion, with all sitting cross-legged and eating rice pilaf and broiled lamb kebab with their fingers.
While Ibn Saud was on board the ship, Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, the president's daughter who had accompanied her father to Yalta, kept out of sight. The Saudi king, FDR had told her, on such occasions would not allow women in his presence. "By the way," he had added, "those women he does see, he confiscates."
What did Ibn Saud really want? After Farouk and Haile Selassie had backed away from Roosevelt's presence, the answer became clear. While Arab guards, colorfully garbed and armed with daggers and rifles, stood about the deck, the Saudi king approached the American president. To maintain his power on the Arabian peninsula, he explained, he needed modern weapons.
Roosevelt listened carefully, then proffered a deal. The United States would extend military aid to Saudi Arabia and even pay Ibn Saud's bills; the assistance would be part of the Lend-Lease program.
In return the United States, before the war only a minor presence along the Persian Gulf, would get full drilling rights in Saudi fields. America would replace Great Britain as controller of Saudi oil.
Not until the last day of the Yalta Conference had Roosevelt said anything to Churchill about his impending visit with King Ibn Saud. According to Col. William Eddy, the American minister to Saudi Arabia and the official who set up the meeting aboard the Quincy, Churchill was "thoroughly nettled" and "burned up the wires of all his diplomats" with orders to arrange a similar conference. Indeed, after a brief stopover in Greece, hoping to soothe anti-British sentiment there -- Greece traditionally also had been a British protectorate -- he hurried to meet with Ibn Saud. But Churchill had come too late and had too little to offer: Britain was broke.
Churchill returned to London empty-handed. In one corner of the world, the Pax Britannica had been replaced by the Pax Americana.
I came across this episode, reported in the New York Times on February 21, 1945, while looking through old newspaper microfilms. At the time, I was doing research for a book on World War II in Asia and the Pacific, and my thoughts were far from any goings-on in the Middle East. But in the course of that work I came across evidence in the Public Record Office in London showing that at the end of the war the State Department went all out to keep British firms from returning to their prewar preeminence in the China market; that market, real or supposed, was to be an American preserve. (The Communists, of course, had other ideas.)
While in London, I also learned that in 1942 Churchill lashed out at Harry Hopkins, FDR's special emissary, with a "string of cuss words far into the early hours of the night." Hopkins sin was that he was relaying Roosevelt's demand that the British leave India.
A kind review of my book in the Toronto Globe and Mail led to a visit to that city. After I gave a lecture, the reviewer (a historian at Trinity College of the University of Toronto), several of his colleagues, and I sat around a fire in the common room. The talk turned to FDR. Did you know, one asked me, that in 1939 the president extended the Monroe Doctrine to Canada? I checked: he did.
Enunciated by President James Monroe in 1823, the doctrine had stated that the "American continents are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European power." The implication had been that the United States would protect Central and South America from European aggression. Now, in 1939, Roosevelt was assuming Great Britain's long-standing role as the protector of Canada.
A similar matter came to my attention. In 1941, the prime minister of Australia, like Canada a British dominion, encamped for six months not in London but rather in Washington, looking for protection against Japan.
So, almost by incident, I had a little list: Saudi Arabia, China, India, Canada, and Australia. A pattern was emerging. In each case, in the era of World War II, in theater after theater, Uncle Sam was replacing John Bull.
How far-reaching was this pattern? What was its origins? What were its consequences?
These questions led me back to the start of World War I, when Winston S. Churchill was the first lord of the admirality and Franklin D. Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the navy; and they led me forward to the end of World War II, when Churchill was out of office and Roosevelt was dead. At the beginning of that period, when they first met in London, Churchill sneered at Roosevelt as an upstart and an underling (at least this was FDR's recollection, expressed in 1939 to Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy); by its end, after a long series of wartime summit conferences, Churchill to all intents and purposes was Roosevelt's humble servant.
The turnabout in their personal roles, however, reflected something much broader, a great transformation of twentieth-century international relations. In 1914, at the beginning of World War I, the globe was Europe-centered, Britain-protected, and London-financed. In 1945, at the end of World War II, the globe was North America-centered, United States-protected, and New York-financed. The British Empire was in its death throes, and the American empire was very much alive.
The international changing of the guard, to be sure, was not just the result of the Roosevelt-Churchill story. Broad historical forces had been at work, and the British government in the two world wars had made decisions that had virtually eliminated its power abroad. Nevertheless, the emergence of the American empire has been the central feature of world affairs since 1945, and nothing illustrates the transference of power more vividly than the turbulent friendship of Roosevelt and Churchill.
Before we proceed, however, we need take up a crucial question: is there an American empire?
It is probably our most cherished item of national faith that the United States is not an imperial power. Empire, after all, is for those others, the French and the Belgians with their steaming tropical domains; the Axis power and theri brutal conquests; the Soviet Union imposing its system on a host of enslaved nations; and, above all, the British and the sloptches of red that on old maps and globes used to highlight the colonies on which the sun never set. America, we are convinced, possesses no such empire.
Yet when we say "empire," the principal example we have in mind is the British, and the British Empire was always more than the sum of its formal colonies. It embraced also a host of protectorates, especially along the sealanes between India and Gibralter; its investments underwrote the economies of Asia, Africa, and the Americas; the Royal Navy ruled the waves, and, combined with the British army, carried out the highest goal of Victorian foreign policy, the containment of Russia.
And America? America most certainly possesses de facto colonies. What lese are Puerto Rico, Guantanamo, Grenada, Guam, and Okinawa, and the military bases that encircle the globe from the North Pacific to the North Atlantic? In number, furthermore, America's protectorates -- Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Phillippines, Thailand, Pakistan, the emirates of the Persian Gulf, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bosnia, and all the members, old and new, of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization -- far exceed those of the Pax Britannica. American investments, private and public, cover the earth. The American military rules not only the waves but also the rocks and rills, deserts and forests, and much of both hemispheres besides. In containing Russia (the British called it the Great Game; the Americans termed it the Cold War), the United States took up where Great Britain left off. America is the very model of a major modern empire.
But how did the American empire, a fait accompli if there ever was one, come to exist? The answer begins with the raising of the curtain on the drama that Churchill called the Thirty Years' War: the British decision, early in August 1914, to intervene in the war that was getting underway on the European continent and that would not end until the spring of 1945.
In A Coffin for Dimitrios, the English novelist Eric Ambler wrote: "The situation in which a person, imagining fondly that he is in charge of his own destiny, is, in fact, the sport of circumstances beyond his control, is always fascinating. It is the essential element in most good drama."
In early August 1914, the sea lords of Britannia succumbed to such an illusion of control. Three decades later, as Roosevelt had wanted, the United States of America stood in Great Britain's place.