National Affairs: A BRITISH VIEW OF U.S. POLICY

The widening rift between Britain and the U.S. is caused largely by the pressure of British public opinion on Her Majesty’s Government. There is anti-U.S. feeling in both parties, but most of it is generated on the left, among journalists and intellectuals who consider themselves antiCommunist, and many of whom are Christian socialists. To exhibit to Americans the nature and depth of this British view, TIME asked Tom Driberg, Labor M.P. for Maldon and an influential Christian socialist, to say why his kind of Briton dislikes U.S. policy. Driberg’s response:

MANY Europeans and Asians mistrust the tendency to dragoon the whole world into two big-power blocs, each professing the noblest intentions and emitting, alternately, highfalutin slogans about democracy and Tarzanlike boasts of invincible might. We have seen this tendency in American and Soviet policy alike. We believe that it is wrong in itself, and likelier to lead to war than to peace.

Many of us also feel impatient when, like kids after a street fight, each side accuses the other of having started it. Did the Russians start it in Czechoslovakia in 1948? Or the French in Indo-China in 1945? Or the British in Greece in 1944? Any competent attorney could make a case either way. Blaming the other fellow is sterile diplomacy: it is more important to make a new start. (Hopes of such a new start are slightly stronger after some of the recent speeches of Mr. John Foster Dulles.)

This is not the neutralism of cowards or mugwumps. It is an assertion of the right of civilized and free men to reject doctrinaire absolutism, to judge issues on their merits, and to put forward constructive alternatives. Nehru in Asia and the democratic socialists of Britain and Western Europe may be more useful as intermediaries than as crusaders. After all, we agree on some issues with either side: with the Russians, we reject what seems to us the jungle philosophy of big-business capitalism; we stress political liberties as strongly as the Americans do—or did before the era of McCarthy.

Idealism & Trade. Laborite Britain was not neutralist on Korea. We jumped in to back the American initiative—admittedly with far smaller forces. We know how grievous American casualties in Korea have been; they could have been less grievous if General MacArthur had not raced north to the Yalu frontier and provoked the Chinese into crossing it. This was, in our view, the point at which the concept of the police action to deter aggression lost its validity.

America’s China policy seems to us neither idealistic nor realistic. How can there be idealism in friendship with a regime (Chiang Kai-shek’s) which corruptly squandered the billions of dollars generously given to it? What realism is there in refusing to understand that such a regime can never regain power in China? That China’s actual, effective government is the Communist government in Peking? And that the more vigorously Peking is boycotted by the West the more closely Peking will be tied up with Moscow?

Americans sometimes say that Britain recognizes Peking only because of British imperialist and business interests in Hong Kong. In India and Burma the Labor government showed we were abandoning Britain’s traditional imperialism. This was morally right and politically sound.

Certainly Britain, and other Commonwealth countries, want to trade with China. Why not? By blocking this trade—and by backing the Japanese invasion of other former British markets in Asia—the Americans are destroying British and Commonwealth prosperity. As a socialist, I am an anti-imperialist: but the new imperialism of the dollar seems to me at least as harmful as the old imperialism; I know that our small, overcrowded, over-industrialized island must trade to live, and we do not want to live mainly on dollar handouts, grateful as we have been for them. If all that Mr. Dulles and other American spokesmen have said is true, they want a strong British and Commonwealth alliance; yet American actions in recent years—the insistence on an impossibly large defense program for Britain as well as the disruption of British overseas trade—have tended steadily to weaken Britain economically.

The other most frequent American criticism of our general attitude to China and to Russia is that we are “appeasers.” They contrast this with our disapproval of the prewar appeasement of Hitler.

Communism v. Naziism. To equate Soviet Russia with Nazi Germany is a dangerous oversimplification. They seem to me essentially different, in several ways: 1) ideologically, Communism is a Christian heresy, but Naziism was anti-Christian paganism; 2) hence, in practice, though there has been much cruelty in Russia, there is nothing comparable with the calculated horror of the gas chambers and the extermination of the Jews; 3) geographically and economically, the Soviet Union is far more self-sufficient and therefore not intrinsically expansionist.

We also do not forget that Russia was on our side during the war, and suffered such human and material devastation that the prospect of another war must be even more hateful there than in the West.

We see with anxiety that American pressure for Western German rearmament is a divisive and inflammatory rather than a pacifying factor in Europe, and that the strengthening of Dr. Adenauer has coincided with the revival of militant German national ambitions.

Surely there must be something fundamentally wrong with a policy that has led to the reversal of all the hopes of 1945 and to alliances with men (Chiang, Bao Dai, Syngman Rhee, Franco) who are essentially antagonistic to traditional American and British ideas of freedom and progress?

It is difficult to see how ethical and even Christian sanction can be claimed for such a policy. I must respect the sincerity of Mr. Dulles, a fellow churchman; but I earnestly beg him to beware of what Britain’s leading Methodist, Dr. Donald Soper, has just called “forging God’s signature to our plans.”

Help for North Korea? Americans are rightly famous, and beloved, for their generosity; but there was no genuine or Christian charity in Mr. Dulles’ discriminatory promise of lavish material help for the rehabilitation of South Korea and not of North Korea. The American food parcel can be as true a symbol of Christian love as the cup of cold water; but the political, and even electoral, strings attached to such aid in Asia, in Italy, and in Berlin have robbed the gift of its virtue and induced either sycophancy or cynicism in those who receive it. The Good Samaritan did not ask to see the party card of the man he was taking to the inn.

Surely a Christian approach to modern world politics must include not only the Golden Rule itself (“do unto others…”) but an attempt to see ourselves as others see us and to put ourselves imaginatively in the position of others. There is, perhaps, a lesson for Mr. Dulles in the case of the French priests—workmen who, after a year or two of intimate missionary work among the industrial workers of Paris, now find themselves identified with them politically to a degree that seems dangerous to the Vatican.

That eminently respectable gathering, the 1948 Lambeth Conference of all the archbishops and bishops of my church, put it like this: “… Communism is presenting a challenge to Christian people to study and understand its theory and practice, so that they may be well instructed as to which elements in it are in conflict with the Christian view of man…and which elements are a true judgment on the existing social and economic order.”

Is that “appeasement”? Not in any bad sense. It may be nearer to “the perfect love [which] casteth out fear.”