"Sino-Soviet-Split"-like end to U.K.-U.S. Special Relationship?

whitecrow

Banned
Is it possible (either in the past or in the future) for U.K.-U.S. Special Relationship to go the way of the Sino–Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance? A rather sudden souring of relations and then outright hostility?

Any P.O.D has to be after 1945.
 
Perhaps if Wilson or some other Labour PM in the 1960's takes a much harder line against Vietnam? Something like what Germany did over Iraq IOTL. Also maybe America supports Argentina over the Falklands? Obviously that takes someone other than Reagan in the White House.
 
You could go with Ike and the pound in 1956 followed by the UK having more active opposition to Vietnam partly as a result. You won't get anything like the sino-soviet border conflict but relations would definitely not be rosy then.
 
But with a POD after 1945, can Britain possibly be viable enough as a Great Power for the "split" to have serious consequences?

Having posed the question I can see it is badly posed; if the US/UK relationship has gone sour, presumably the US/French relationship is even more bitter, and NATO is disintegrating completely. The USA still has legalistic claims on bases in West Germany, but how will the Americans access Germany if both Britain and France are freezing us out? Anyway with considerable uncertainty as to how Britain and France will react if things come to a head on the East/West frontier, Americans are more likely to throw in the towel and say, "Europe, you're on your own."

So--even granting that the UK loses its colonial sweep, all the faster due to lack of American de facto support of the fragments of Empire, the "split" has drastic consequences for American roles in Europe.

Unless in reaction to the split of the Anglosphere, the French swing over to a more pro-American position--not so likely if the POD is based in Suez since the French government was as badly screwed in their perception anyway as the British by US policy. But if the POD is something else entirely--the "split" then means that Britain unilaterally abdicates as a world power and spirals off into impovershed irrelevance. This seems unlikely to me; someone in Britain would speak up for maintaining alliance, someone in America would do the same. The POD really has to be one nation or the other putting real monsters of arrogance and stupidity into power--well, I can't unfortunately rule out that possibility in the USA! :( See A World of Laughter, A World of Tears, for instance--and tragically, Walt Disney isn't really a monster, even Roy Cohn isn't--but their style of conservatism seems all too likely to unleash real monsters.

It seems more likely for the stupidity to come from the American side than the British, since the British Empire, such as it was, was on life support from the American side and the Big Englanders knew it in those days, while a Little Englander had to be more in favor of more cooperation with Europe, which would also proceed under a US aegis, holding off the Soviet threat.

The odd pattern I've noticed in post-war European relations with the USA has been that while in Germany, as one might expect, the ascendency of the fairly conservative Christian Democrats has coincided with a more strongly pro-US policy while the rise of SD and other leftists has tended to make for a more arms-length relationship with the US, in France and Britain it was generally rather the opposite--those periods when France was most defiant of American hegemony, and Britain most committed to an independent policy, were when they had Conservative governments, whereas the rise of Labour/Socialists in the respective countries were the times of most close collaboration between them and the Americans.

So--a formula for a US/UK split seems to boil down to either the USA going completely radical--either to the right so very far right that even British Tories can't stand it, or going leftist at a time when the Tories are strong. Well, if one can imagine the USA going very far left in the immediate post-war period, which is hard for me to do--the elements are there to an extent, but the elements that OTL crushed them seem impossible to butterfly away without a huge civil war, one where the progressive side would start out dangerously weak--that might conceivably lead to a Tory regime determined to hang on to the Empire--but how could such a regime defy both the Labour sentiment in the UK itself that would almost certainly want to hitch it's wagon to the leftist Yankee star (in partnership with everyone's good friend Comrade Stalin of course!) and the combined military potential of said Stalin, the Yankees, and the determination of colonial peoples to free themselves, especially with all these powerful leftist regimes offering to help them free themselves?

The reality of the post-war world was that the USA was riding very high in the West; both French and British conservatives had to realize that they were weak enough both domestically and internationally with the half-baked, left-handed, inconsistent support their colonial regimes did have from the USA and they didn't have a leg to stand on trying to defy the Americans head-on (at least not until the 1960s).

If the alignment of leftist versus rightist domestic politics were somehow different in Britain and France--if the leftists there, Labour and Socialists, had early on felt that the Americans were a big problem but on their own they could reorganize domestic economies and also rally support for their respective empires among the colonized peoples with credible promises of a new order in mutual cooperation for everyone's mutual benefit, while the USA went farther right--that might conceivably do it, except that the Europeans were terribly weak and vulnerable in the 1940s, and their colonialist elements were very unconvincing to the colonial peoples.

So maybe, if French colonial policy could recover credibility among peoples like the Vietnamese and Algerians very soon during the early '50s (just about impossible but maybe someone could lay out a roadmap?) and the British Labour governments could be more effective than OTL at developing economic recovery and advancement on a socialist basis, one that benefited colonial peoples who also enjoyed advancing civil rights as well, thus holding both Empires together on an increasingly populist basis--all this with the cooperation of the Americans up to say the mid-1950s--and then while the Euro-socialists and their constellation of imperial possessions are riding high, the Americans go pretty far right--doubling down on American segregationism for instance, going even farther than OTL with McCarthyism and repression in general--I could see a general US/Europe split around 1955-60.

I've been lumping in France because even if Britain alone could hang on to her colonies, most of them anyway, and develop a strong economy based on high tech and integrating the resources of the Empire into growth and progress for all, Britain alone could not substitute for the USA in NATO. They'd need to pool with France as well, and be drawn into a strongly European-centered policy as opposed to the usual British overseas orientation. With Britain and France together, on a leftist policy basis that however firmly refuses to be drawn into the Stalinist system, West Germany and Italy would remain attached, the various smaller European nations would also remain in the constellation and Western Europe as a whole could be standing independent of a right-wing, reactionary USA.

Maybe someone else can see a way clear to some other configuration that could be stable; I think if the USA goes socialist it would take a post-OTL-1945 Western Europe with it; a Tory Europe that is not de facto aligned with the USA however defiant it is rhetorically is doomed to collapse IMHO (De Gaulle kept France in NATO for instance).

A strong and progressive Europe could well defy American policy vis a vis Vietnam--but of course the way I see France surviving as an equal partner to Britain, Indochina would still be affiliated to France anyway.

That's the part I think is rather ASB--France had practically zero legitimacy in Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh, who might have reached some accommodation with Americans but certainly would not with France, had quite a lot of it--maybe I should rethink France's role, have the French try and fail to retain their empire while Britain keeps hers and instead of De Gaulle, some other Fifth Republic joins a British-led European socialist-progressive federation--perhaps the British coax the former French zone back into an alliance relation not with France specifically but Europe as a whole and the French do play a special role in developing multilateral industrial and social relations with those countries.

In that latter case, Vietnam could still be the same sort of battleground it was OTL, with the French, before their conversion to socialistic globalism, losing the North as OTL, deeding the South over to the Americans rather than to Europeans, and 'Nam becomes a cautionary tale about the vices of the conservative/American approach versus the progressive European one.

Maybe the French learn enough wisdom soon enough not to lose Algeria as well, or lose it to a movement willing to become an equal partner in the European progressive federation?

I'd think we'd need multiple PODs, many of them rather unlikely, to make something like this happen. America going far right is not that unlikely unfortunately, but I don't see it automatically forcing the Europeans to become more successful--rather the opposite! Someone who knows a lot more than I do about the nature and details of European, particularly British, politics would have to outline how Labour could have been more successful in reviving British industry while also shifting the benefits of progress down the social ladder to solidify the stake of working people both in Britain and overseas in the colonies in a socialist system--many here of course think the whole problem Britain had in the post war period was too much socialism! I think they are wrong and with any less of it Britain would have collapsed completely, and more of it would be a good thing if intelligently done. The whole argument hinges on whether "intelligent socialism" is an oxymoron or not of course! OTL in my understanding much of the credibility the post-war Tories had up until Thatcher anyway rested on co-opting Labourite remedies in a way that didn't scare the big moneyed classes too much, but clearly by the late 1970s that approach had reached an impasse which Thatcher broke through by radical means that appear to me to have hurt a lot of people.

So the anti-socialist crew can feel free to make their pitch for a tough, competitive Britain. Good luck.

I think one way or another, for Britain to have the standing of being on one side of a Western "split" with America on the other, the UK needs access to resources and markets on a global scale, and I've outlined the only strategy that occurs to me for retaining at least some of the old pre-war preferential access they had during the Empire days. I don't see how earlier Thatcherism could accomplish that, not in the face of American competition. American competitiveness could fail if the USA goes into a dark enough phase; conceivably if the USA is aggressively white-supremacist the British might be able to persuade her colonies and those splitting off from say France that they need the protection of a strong power that isn't so insane on the subject--but that's one reason I think they have to be socialistic; the old British colonial regime might not look all that different from US white supremacy to Africans and Asians.

Is this split, even granting my moving European politics and economics leftward, plausible if the USA doesn't go nuts? Less so certainly; part of the credibility of a progressive regime is that it tries to reach a decent solution with rival powers by peaceful and friendly means, if the Americans are being reasonable then we wouldn't get a second, European-led bloc, we'd get a smoothly running collaborative Western order of the kind I was raised to believe we'd achieved OTL!

Such a split-up implies a rather miserable failure on the American side then.
 
I think the biggest step towards an Anglo-American Split would be taking the Soviet Union out of the picture, or bringing it into accommodation with either side. The U.S. would be easier in this instance, just push the anti-colonial agenda further within America (with appropriate PoDs that don't give us the Cold War of OTL). The pro-Soviet New Deal Democrats could properly leave British relations chilly, to say the least. A Henry Wallace/Rexford Tugwell would be an anglophobe's wet dream.

Amplify that by "aggressively" supporting decolonization against the French since they were arguably the first to go down the tubes and the British are going to get the idea. Military conflict is the biggest sticking point, as that would be terribly difficult in a world as bipolar as the Cold War but its not outside the realm of possibility.
 
How would US recognition of Rhodesia in the Sixties or mid-Seventies would affect Anglo-American relations?
 
How about this as a start?

Henry Wallace remains as Roosevelt's running mate in '44 and upon Roosevelt's death, becomes president. Meanwhile, Churchill and the Conservatives win the '45 general election in the UK. So this means we have a fairly lefty President in the White House who IOTL wanted friendly relations with the Soviets and Stalin while in 10 Downing Street we have Churchill the arch-Imperialist and anti-Communist. Would that be grounds enough for the beginnings of a "split".
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
You mean where the US and UK hate each other to the point that the former is only stopped from wiping out the latter in nuclear war due to Anglo-Soviet closeness?
 

whitecrow

Banned
How about this as a start?

Henry Wallace remains as Roosevelt's running mate in '44 and upon Roosevelt's death, becomes president. Meanwhile, Churchill and the Conservatives win the '45 general election in the UK. So this means we have a fairly lefty President in the White House who IOTL wanted friendly relations with the Soviets and Stalin while in 10 Downing Street we have Churchill the arch-Imperialist and anti-Communist. Would that be grounds enough for the beginnings of a "split".
But the term "Special Relationship" applies (as far as I know) to the friendly relations between US & UK post-1945. In your scenario there is no split - the relationship is just still-born.
 
How about this as a start?

Henry Wallace remains as Roosevelt's running mate in '44 and upon Roosevelt's death, becomes president. Meanwhile, Churchill and the Conservatives win the '45 general election in the UK. So this means we have a fairly lefty President in the White House who IOTL wanted friendly relations with the Soviets and Stalin while in 10 Downing Street we have Churchill the arch-Imperialist and anti-Communist. Would that be grounds enough for the beginnings of a "split".

Can we just pin any political configuration we like on any power we like?

Elements of a leftist USA did exist in the mid-1940s, but I fear they'd be overwhelmed by rightist ones. OTOH it's not that difficult to imagine those rightist trends, particularly based on southern segregationists panicking and finding overtly racist allies in the North, reinforced by the Red scare, prevailing handily, making the USA a strongly reactionary power--one that certainly would back something like the white-supremacist Rhodesian government, not to mention Apartheid South Africa.

Meanwhile, Churchill was in fact leader of a coalition government during the war, one that had strong Labour backing, and with the far-flung British services votes being counted in the election held after hostilities ceased, Labour won a solid majority OTL, sending Churchill packing at the very moment of his victory. Nominal Tory governments got into power fairly often in the ensuing decades, but along with Churchill himself, these were Tories with a reputation for making reasonable concessions to the Labour agenda. That's how Churchill got into power after all--in certain respects, he was a known hard rightist but in others he was a known sympathizer with various leftist causes. OTL the "special relationship" had a lot to do with both sides being led by moderates with mixed reputations--Truman being deeply committed to the New Deal but also known as a scrappy fighter for US power; Churchill as mentioned holding an average middle position composed of strong stances toward both right and left; the Labour government also including rather conservative union types and not extremists, and Eisenhower being so moderate both the Democratic and Republican parties courted him.

IMHO, polarization of the two nations to opposite sides is most reasonably achieved by the USA going hard right and Britain going hard left; the latter being the only hope they'd have of retaining some kind of preferential access to their (perhaps retained, perhaps legally ended) Empire sphere without being propped up by American power.

And I don't think simply joining Stalin would have been an option very many in Britain would want nor would it be feasible, however a more radically Socialist Britain might have given Stalin some political cover and possibly enacted some mutual trade arrangements, possibly arrived at some deal regarding a neutralized Germany being reunited--if the split between Britain and the USA is severe enough at that point, and the rest of Europe is more or less going along with Britain, the USA might be helpless to prevent it.

The upshot would be the USA being mainly restricted to the Western Hemisphere, with constricted markets, arming itself to the teeth and with some degree of McCarthyite informal/official police state repression to silence considerable opposition domestically. The US's chief allies would be South Africa and whatever dictatorships it could enlist; conceivably Spain and perhaps Portugal in Europe; probably a whole bunch of repressive regimes in Latin America.

Canada would be in a heck of a position; conceivably British rightists unwilling to reconcile to a Labourite Britain would flee there and tip its politics toward compatibility with the rightist USA, but I'd think there'd be enough civil libertarianism there to draw a line and thus keep the situation tense; the border would harden up, perhaps the conservative Britons would be encouraged to emigrate southward and there would be a constant issue on the agenda preventing the Americans and Britons from simply ignoring each other as Canada sits under the Sword of Damocles.
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Realistically, a Wallace Presidency might indeed be the POD. I like and respect what Wallace stood for, but I suspect he might indeed have crystallized that strong right-wing alliance of Taftite Republicans sworn to roll back the New Deal with Dixiecrats sworn to uphold segregation and white supremacy at all costs. Meanwhile we'd have also have Labour in Britain delivering somewhat more effectively. Perhaps a more generous US executive under Wallace would help lay the groundwork by softening American hard-line attitudes OTL under Truman to something more conciliatory that helps Britain over the roughest parts of the mid-40s economic situation, and Labour finds methods of combining socialistic intervention and direction with building progressive alliances with business leaders, who are in turn guided toward a more effective employment of British technical leadership reinforced by active engagement of working-class shared participation on broad national lines. Thus when the American Right takes over in '48 and reverses the supportive course of US policy, the UK can lead Europe through the emergency this creates; American forces in Europe become persona non grata, perhaps with substantial numbers of Americans defecting to Europe rather than obey the suddenly hard American line. Meanwhile while British and perhaps other colonial powers have some success in defusing the colonial liberationist movements, going with compromises that majorities there can live with, there is still a crisis in South Africa as the Afrikaaner-led Nationalists take power, and seceding from the Commonwealth align with the USA, which is hungry for compatible allies. That crisis could do a lot to harden the lines.

So--actually the "Special Relationship" gets better for a while, then goes spectacularly sour due to US domestic politics, but now Europe in general and Britain in particular is stronger and capable of leading a split of the Western world across the Atlantic, leaving Canada to teeter in the balance.

This is about as realistic an answer to the OP I can imagine.
 
And Taft would have had a harsher line on international alliances! Plus, Wallace would have widened the gap between Britain and the USA. Brilliant!
 
Honestly, taking the scenario from the standpoint that Britain needs to have a stronger economy in order to get to the stage where it can split from the USA, I don't see how having a more leftist Britain helps at all. The key problem for the British economy in the 50s and 60s was that it was overstretched maintaining full employment, a comprehensive welfare state and a strong, global military posture. Now one key aspect of Great Power-dom is military power, so Britain cutting its forces down to the bone doesn't fit in with the premise of the OP unless it is that Britain becomes an insignificant neutral power. That leaves the economic consensus and the welfare state to tinker around with. By definition more socialism almost certainly requires more money, but where does this come from? Britain was virtually bankrupt at the end of the war, and if the USA is unsympathetic towards the British government then it won't give Marshall Aid, which means the Attlee government almost certainly is not going to be able to roll our some aspects of the welfare state that it did using US cash.

In my (rather right wing) view, the only way for Britain to maintain a better global position in the post-war world, assuming the PoD is after VE Day, is for the post-1945 government to focus relentlessly upon economic reconstruction and increased exports. Forget about the nationalisations, forget about a welfare state that is as comprehensive as the one we ended up with - for this scenario to work, one needs the government's first and greatest priority to be economic modernisation. If there is Marshall Aid, this would go towards industry rather than welfare.

Anyway, talk of a more radically left wing Britain misunderstands the situation in Britain at the time, in my view. Labour wasn't brought to power upon a wave of socialist collectivism but rather a vague feeling that they would be better able to provide housing and employment. As far as the rather rudimentary opinion polling techniques of the time can tell us, it seems that nationalisation wasn't particularly popular, even amongst the people it was supposed to benefit, and few thought a free national health service was much more than a pipe-dream in 1945. If Labour moves more to the left then there will only be a stronger reaction towards the Conservatives.
 
Politically impossible for the US

Not if George Wallace isn't shot and runs against Nixon in '72 or Reagan or Ford in '76 or '80 and wins, or carries most of the South, plus parts of the Lower Midwest and Southwest, and successfully plays kingmaker.
 

whitecrow

Banned
Without reposting in the Future History forum, any chance of a "Sino-Soviet-Split"-like end to U.K.-U.S. Special Relationship occurring sometime in the future?
 
Warning: this post is chock-full of handwavium, vague non-specifics and other improbable goodies.

Post-WW2, Vargas is deposed by a military coup as OTL, but instead of leading to the reinstatement of democracy the military regime maintains power. A crippling economic depression impoverishes the country, and the regime becomes more and more repressive to maintain power. The regime is eventually overthrown and the resultant government is socialist or communist in nature.

In response, the U.S. maintains closer and friendlier ties with Argentina, as a counter-weight to the perceived spread of communism through Latin America. Eventually a Falklands War-analogue happens and after the Falklands are occupied by Argentina the U.S. offers to mediate the dispute. Since the Falklands are still occupied at the time of the offer, Britain sees this as a tacit siding with Argentina and a betrayal of the "special relationship."
 
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