Abstract
Special? Cooperative but competitive? Informal empire? Empire by invitation? The debate goes on. How can the complexity of the Anglo-American relationship since 1945 best be explained? One approach which has achieved valuable currency in recent years and which could supply a means of interpreting America’s relations with its allies is hegemony theory. But it is a contested concept, and there are also questions as to whether or not the USA is still a hegemonic power. Two authors concerned with policy-making recently adopted diametrically opposed views on this. In a survey of possible options for maximizing US interests, Michael Lind declared, ‘Anachronistic talk of “the world’s only superpower” to the contrary, the United States today is too weak to dominate the world by itself.’1 Martin Walker, writing in the next issue of the same journal, claimed that the price of US hegemony ‘can no longer be described as burdensome’.2 The 1996 cost of US military dominance was less than 4 percent of GDP — the smallest percentage since 1940. For this outlay, the USA had 20 000 troops in Bosnia and 100 000 in Asia and Europe respectively, patrolled the waters off Taiwan and in the Persian Gulf, and enforced the no-fly zone in Iraq, to name only the highest profile US international military roles. The conduits of US hegemony apparently still ring the world, keeping it safe for liberalism and the free market.
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Notes
Michael Lind, ‘Pax Atlantica: the Case for Euroamerica’, World Policy Journal, 13(i), 1996, p. 6.
Martin Walker, ‘The New American Hegemony’, World Policy Journal, 13(ii), 1996, p. 21.
Charles Kindleberger, The World In Depression 1929–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).
Competitive cooperation has been used by David Reynolds in his important work on US-UK relations: The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance 1937–41 (London: Europa, 1981)
Alan P. Dobson, US Wartime Aid to Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1986)
H. C. Allen, Great Britain and the United States: A History of Anglo-American Relations, 1783–1952 (London: Odhams Press, 1954)
D. C. Watt, Succeeding John Bull: America in Britain’s Place 1900–1977 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)
C. J. Bartlett, The Special Relationship: A Political History of Anglo-American Relations Since 1945 (London: Longman, 1992)
H. G. Nicholas, The United States and Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
Thomas J. McCormick, America’s Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
Arthur A Stein, ‘The Hegemon’s Dilemma: Great Britain, the United States, and the International Economic Order’, International Organization, 38(ii), 1984, p. 384.
Robert O. Keohane, ‘The Theory of World Politics: Structural Realism and Beyond’, in Robert O. Keohane, ed., Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
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Stephen Krasner, ‘State Power and the Structure of International Trade’, World Politics, 283, 1976, pp. 317–48.
Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 213.
Ibid. and David P. Calleo, Beyond American Hegemony: the Future of the Western Alliance (New York: Basic Books, 1987).
Duncan Snidal, ‘The Limits of Hegemonic Stability Theory’, International Organization, 39(iv), 1985, pp. 579–614.
G. John Ikenberry and Charles A. Kupchan, ‘Socialisation and Hegemonic Power’, International Organization, 44(iii), 1990, pp. 283–315.
Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 118.
Robert Cox with Timothy J. Sinclair, Approaches to World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 127.
See T.A. Wilson, The First Summit: Roosevelt and Churchill at Placentia Bay (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969).
R.N. Gardner, Sterling Dollar Diplomacy in Current Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).
Dobson, US Wartime Aid to Britain and Randall B. Woods, A Changing of the Guard: Anglo-American Relations 1941–45 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969)
Fred Block, The Origins of International Economic Disorder (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
Hugh Dalton, High Tide and After: Memoirs 1945–1960 (London: Frederick Muller, 1962).
Churchill to Roosevelt, 7 December 1940, from Warren F. Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt: the Complete Correspondence, 3 vols (London: Collins, 1984), vol. 1, pp. 49–50.
A. Van Dormael, Bretton Woods: Birth of a Monetary System (London: Macmillan, 1978).
See F. Williams, A Prime Minister Remembers (London: Heinemann, 1961).
Alan P. Dobson, Peaceful Air Warfare: The USA, Britain and the Politics of the International Aviation System (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
See Dobson, Economic Special Relationship, and Peter Burnham, ‘Re-evaluating the Washington Loan Agreement: a Revisionist View of the Limits of Post-war American Power’, Review of International Studies, 18(iii), 1992, pp. 241–61
The importance of economic policy in the early containment strategy is demonstrated in John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
I do not go along with Alan Milward’s interpretation of the ERP, The Reconstruction of Western Europe 1945–51 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
François Duchêne, Monnet (New York: Norton, 1994).
A. W. Lovett, ‘The United States and the Schuman Plan: A Study in French Diplomacy 1950–1952’, Historical Journal, 39(ii), 1996, pp. 425–55.
Ibid. See also Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe 1947–1952 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
Anne Deighton, The Impossible Peace: Britain, the Division of Germany and the Origins of the Cold War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)
Ian Clark, Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship: Britain’s Deterrent and America, 1957–1962 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York, Vintage Books, 1990), p. 492.
L. B. Johnson, The Vantage Point (New York: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1971)
Uwe Kitzinger, The Second Try: Labour and the EEC (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1968), p. 315
Harold Wilson, The Labour Government 1964–70 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), pp. 577
Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Michael Joseph, 1979), pp. 91
Contrast Geoffrey Howe’s, Conflict of Loyalties (London: Macmillan, 1994)
Margaret Thatcher’s, The Downing Street Years (London: HarperCollins, 1993).
Kathleen Burk and Alec Cairncross, Goodbye Great Britain: The 1976 IMF Crisis (London: Yale University Press, 1992)
James Callaghan, Time and Chance (London: Collins, 1986)
Denis Healey, Time of My Life (London: Michael Joseph, 1989).
Quoted from R. Dugger, On Reagan (New York: McGraw Hill, 1983), p. 517.
C. Weinberger, Fighting for Peace: Seven Critical Years in the Pentagon (New York: Warner Books, 1990).
See Dobson, Economic Special Relationship, pp. 166–73; W. Scott Lucas, Divided We Stand: Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991)
Statistics are taken from World Military Expenditures 1966–67 (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1969)
R. N. Rosecrance, Defense of the Realm: British Strategy in the Nuclear Epoch (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968).
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Dobson, A.P. (1998). The USA, Britain, and the Question of Hegemony. In: Lundestad, G. (eds) No End to Alliance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26959-4_7
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