Britain's Defenses: Commitments and Capabilities

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THE policy of one's own country in defense, economics or foreign affairs is not easy to define. The outside world may assume that at the center of government there is a coolheaded, far-sighted policy-forming group which has formulated a clear assessment of the national goals and the national interests, and which ensures that each action or reaction is planned and carried out in conformity with them. But to the student of internal politics--to say nothing of those more intimately acquainted with the erratic workings of any government machine--the image is less precise. Other nations seem to pursue their interests with resolution and wisdom; the policy of one's own country is all too clearly at the mercy of pressures and counter-pressures, of rival political groups, of conflicting economic interests, of ambitious or venal personalities. And although what emerges out of these conflicting forces may appear to foreigners to be a logical continuation of traditional policy, the close observer is more conscious of the painful and usually undignified process of the dialectic than of the synthesis which ultimately emerges.

The chronic schizophrenia from which Britain suffers as an offshore island, at once part of the continent of Europe and detached from it, is nowhere more apparent than in the strategic problems which have confronted her ever since, in the sixteenth century, she emerged as a major European power. The development in that century of long-range navigational techniques opened up to Europe new worlds of wealth and commerce which England, so long as she could remain aloof from continental entanglements, was in a unique position to exploit. Her rivals--Spain, Holland, France--were wealthier, further advanced in civilization and not her inferiors in seamanship. But they suffered from the crippling handicap that they had to pour money and resources into large armies for land warfare which nearly or quite bankrupted them. The English did not. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, England could concentrate the greater part of her military effort on naval development and maritime expansion, and emerge wealthier from each of the successive wars which impoverished her enemies and her continental allies alike...