The British Imperial Establishment, Post Imperial Era, and the ‘Churchillian’ World View, 1945-2016. (Adjustments & Challenges in Contemporary British Diplomatic Strategy)

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get
the Americans involved in the defence of Western Europe and Britain in
particular, as we saw in Chapter
Five. Similarly to Bevin, when heading the War
Cabinet in 1940, Churchill made efforts to bring in the
Americans to defend
Britain as well as the Commonwealth against the enemy. Therefore, the three
men
were in complete agreement as to where Britain’s interest with regard to defence
lay.

The
threat of Communist expansion became more and more obvious as
time progressed. In the mid-fifties
co-operation between the the third world and
the Communist world began to develop on a completely new
scale. For example,
India made an agreement with the Soviet Union for the construction of the
Bhilai
steel works. Following the Soviet-Indian agreement there came the Soviet-
Egyptian Agreement.
The U.S.S.R. provided financial aid and technical co-
operation to Egypt for the construction of the
Aswan High Dam. Moreover, there
was the sale of Czechoslovak arms to Egypt in 1955, which led to breaking
the
Western monopoly in arms supply to the Middle East. As a result, in particular
Churchill and
MacMillan, among the Conservative political elite, worked hard to
strengthen Britain’s relationship
with the United States.

When
the Conservative Government took office in 1951, defence spending
was still rising and over-heating the
economy. Therefore Churchill gave much of
his attention to the defence issue. The hydrogen bomb was
tested by America in
1952 and Russia in 1953. Churchill told his personal secretary Jock
Colville,
“we’re now as far from the atomic bomb as the atomic bomb was from the bow
and
arrow.”31 Churchill was convinced that the hydrogen bomb which
Russia now
possessed, had changed everything even further. However, while out of Office,
Churchill
had already begun working for a fresh alliance between Britain and the

U.S.A. On a private
visit to the United States in March 1946, in a speech which
he made in Fulton, Missouri, he remarked,
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste
in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the
Continent.”32 Churchill

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