Alastair Buchan
Essay
Jul
1976
Social scientists write many books and papers nowadays about the development of "transnationalism"-meaning the impact on interstate relations of unofficial contacts and communications-as if this were something new on the face of the earth. Actually, over the long reach of history, it is the autarkic state or society that is the rarity. Certainly no interstate relationship has been more permeated or effectively influenced by transnational factors than that between Britain and the United States. No two societies have had a more profound impact upon each other, in terms of racial stock, political and juridical concepts, culture in all its meanings. And personal dealings have repeatedly affected specific historical events since American independence-for example, British banking houses largely financed the Louisiana Purchase, while private messages between Richard Cobden and Charles Sumner defused an imminent confrontation between the two governments over the Trent affair in 1863.
Essay
Jul
1975
Sir Lewis Namier, the great British historian of a generation ago, used to warn his students of the danger of trying "to argue with history": of abstracting, that is, one event or sequence of events in a historical epoch in an effort to determine how world politics would have been different if it had not occurred; the past is a seamless web, he used to argue, of interrelated developments whose individual strands cannot be unraveled and examined separately. One does not have to be a historical determinist to accept the soundness of this view, and a great deal of the "oh, if only" historiography that now surrounds the American involvement in Indochina seems to me to be based on fallacious abstractions of parts of the national decision-making process at isolated points in time over the past quarter-century. The blow to American idealism which the protracted brutalities of the involvement occasioned, the damage which military and political failure in Vietnam may have done to American influence, are only aspects of a larger process of change; and the new structure of power relations in the world would not, in my view, be radically different if the United States had never become seriously involved in Indochina, or even if it had been able to impose a peace settlement upon the area between 1964 and 1973. Much of the American literature of mea culpa is an aspect of what Dennis Brogan first called "the illusion of American omnipotence," the belief that prevailed for nearly a generation, not only that American policy was all-determinant in molding the map of the world, but that the United States had a greater degree of choice at any point in time than was in reality the case.
Essay
Jul
1972
In the issue of Time of January 3, 1972, President Nixon is quoted as follows: "We must remember the only time in the history of the world that we have had any extended period of peace is when there has been balance of power. It is when one nation becomes infinitely more powerful in relation to its potential competitor that the danger of war arises. So I believe in a world in which the United States is powerful. I think it will be a safer world and a better world if we have a strong, healthy United States, Europe, Soviet Union, China, Japan, each balancing the other, not playing one against the other, an even balance."
Essay
Jul
1965
At the end of 1964, a cycle of American-European argument which had opened some seven years earlier came to a close when President Johnson decided to abandon American pressure for an immediate resolution of the negotiations regarding a multilateral nuclear force. Since then the common assumption has been that there is to be a nine-month lull, until after the German elections in September, before the next phase of the dialogue on the future scope and nature of the Atlantic Alliance is resumed, even though any successful outcome to it may have to wait until the attitudes and policy of post-de Gaulle France are clear.
Essay
Jul
1963
After the events of the past six months, few people on either side of the Atlantic would dispute the view that the concept of Atlantic partnership and the imagery of "twin pillars" and "dumbbells" need reconsidering. As applied, the imagery has obscured the disparity in European economic and strategic strength; it has overlooked the contrast between America's genuine desire to see European economic strength increase and cohere, and its equally genuine reluctance to encourage the proliferation of nuclear weapons; it has assumed an identity of political interest between the United States and Western Europe which can, one hopes, be evolved but may not exist prima facie; and it has rested on an important confusion between the six West European countries of the Community and the 12 European countries in NATO, whose interests also are not identical with one another.
Essay
Jan
1962
For several years there has been a general feeling on both sides of the ocean that the central institutions of the Atlantic Alliance, especially NATO itself, are inadequate to the steadily widening complex of problems which confronts them. The Berlin crisis, which directly concerns only three or four of the fifteen allies, has in fact illustrated, as no doubt Mr. Khrushchev intended that it should, a number of important divisions among them in both political and military policy, and has brought to light certain weaknesses in the organization of the alliance which have been visible below the surface of events for some time past. Indeed, the Berlin crisis could be a blessing in disguise, even though only a fragile or unsatisfactory negotiated compromise emerges over the city itself, if it forces governments and public opinion in the Atlantic countries to confront some distasteful facts about their shortcomings in constructive coöperation.
