Mapping the End of Empire

Mapping the End of Empire Mapping the End of Empire american and british strategic visions in the postwar world Aiyaz Husain Cambridge, Massachusetts London, En gland 2014 Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Husain, Aiyaz, 1977– Mapping the end of empire : American and British strategic visions in the postwar world / Aiyaz Husain. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-72888-2 (alk.paper) 1. Decolonization—Middle East. 2. Decolonization—South Asia. 3. Geographical perception—Middle East. 4. Geographical perception—South Asia. 5. Palestine— History—1917–1948. 6. Jammu and Kashmir (India)—History—20th century. 7. Great Britain—Foreign relations—1945–1964. 8. United States—Foreign relations—1945–1953. I. Title. DS63.18.H86 2014 956.04—dc23 2013037069 For my parents Contents Introduction 1 1 All of Palestine 23 2 Remapping Zion 52 3 The Contested Valley 78 4 Keystone of the Strategic Arch 105 5 Imperial Residues 129 6 Two Visions of the Postwar World 161 7 Maps, Ideas, and Geopolitics 187 8 Joining the Community of Nations 218 9 From Imagined to Real Borders 242 Conclusion 262 Abbreviations 277 Notes 279 Archives Consulted 349 A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s 3 5 3 Index 357 Mapping the End of Empire Introduction The close of the Second World War marked a triumph of the victorious Al- lied powers in a global contest against the forces of fascism. But victory presented immediate challenges: effective postwar cooperation to prevent the recurrence of a total war with its massive human costs, and assorted po liti cal, economic, and territorial questions prompted by the end of hostilities. In a series of war time conferences, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union had discussed the need for international cooperation to address postwar concerns. Those discussions led in 1945 to the creation of the United Nations Or ga ni za tion, which the Allies hoped would cement world peace after the second global confl ict within half a century. But the challenges of postwar diplomacy extended beyond just questions of interstate war and peace. The dispositions of vast Eu ro pe an colonial possessions throughout the Middle East, Asia, and Africa remained inde- terminate, despite growing calls for self- determination from active inde- pen dence movements pitted against colonial governments exhausted by the trials of war. Moreover not all Allied great powers were equal at war’s end. The most basic feature of the new international balance of power was the glaring disparity between the economic and military might of the United States and that of its Euro pe an allies Britain, France, and the Netherlands. While the Netherlands and France lay physically devastated by occupation, bombardment, and Allied liberation, the economic costs of the war accumulated in monumental sterling balances that threatened to crush the British Empire under their weight. 1 2 • Mapping the End of Empire An immediate consequence of this state of affairs was the impending withdrawal of those Euro pean powers from territories they controlled in the Middle East and Asia. But how would those power transfers occur, and what state or interstate authorities would manage them? While these questions remained unanswered, the basic outlines of one of the impending global shifts were clear. If the Pax Britannica was giving way to the Ameri- can Century, the geopo liti cal evidence of that change was now clearer than ever. The British Empire was fi rmly in retreat, overburdened by the monetary cost of imperial defense, which had contributed to a foreign debt burden that soared to some three billion pounds— over a third of Britain’s gross domestic product. Britain was vacating its strategic presence in Egypt, the cornerstone of its Middle East policy, leaving the Labour government with vexing quandaries about suitable locations that could sustain a residual force. At stake was nothing less than Britain’s access to the region’s vast oil reserves and the security of the Suez Canal Zone and the eastward sea route to India. Palestine, Cyprus, Cyrenaica, Iraq, and Transjordan were all possible candidates to offset the impact of the loss of Egypt and direct British control of the Canal Zone. And as the loss of India loomed ever larger in the minds of British strategists in the postwar years leading up to 1947, the Middle East seemed an obvious strategic foothold from which to secure the growing British interest in Africa—and thus as a justifi cation for the maintenance of ever costlier fragments of empire. But what ever al- ternatives remained for preserving infl uence in the Middle East, the fi nal- ity of the British Empire’s looming withdrawal from Egypt was clear. De- cades of British rule there, the keystone of the crown’s presence in the Arab world at the intersection of three continents, and a prerequisite for control of the Sudan would be at an end after the removal of British forces to the Suez Canal area. The costs of holding India were also mounting to unsustainable levels, while Indian nationalism surged after the wholesale defeat of the Axis powers and the successful defense of the subcontinent, toward which Indian troops had contributed signifi cantly.1 Against this backdrop of Britain’s hasty retreat from the Middle East and Asia unfolded the counternarrative of America’s expansion to fi ll dis- tant, residual spaces vacated throughout the postwar world by defeated Axis enemies and imploded empires. American power reached its apogee after the Second World War, as the United States contemplated a new role in a changed international landscape. It was American credit that would Introduction • 3 fi nance the Marshall Plan and American military manpower and materiel that would shoulder the postwar reconstruction of Germany and Japan. After the United States secured petroleum supplies through concessions on the Arabian Peninsula negotiated by President Franklin Roo se velt with King Ibn Saud, the synergy of Middle Eastern oil and American industrial output began to power global economic recovery and rehabilitate war- torn Eu rope and Asia. Marshall Plan aid soon fl ooded across the Atlantic to help resurrect Eu ro pe an allies, while billions of dollars of additional U.S. assistance fl owed to China, India, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, the Phil- ippines, and Pakistan.2 The displacement of British infl uence in the world by expanding Ameri- can economic and military infl uence thus was somewhat inevitable, as the United States sought to secure key strategic points and access to the raw materials of the third world that the Truman administration considered essential in case of a future global confl ict. Moreover fears of a growing confrontation with the Soviet Union as the early cold war began to divide East and West soon supplied a powerful new rationale for an expanded U.S. global posture: the need to safeguard the free world from communist infl uence and subversion, especially after the promulgation of the Truman Doctrine and the American assumption from Britain of the responsibility for economic and military assistance to reinforce ailing demo cratic governments in Greece and Turkey. But as this book argues, the disparity in their material power aside, both Atlantic powers—one falling, one rising— also adhered to distinct geo graph ical conceptions of their security needs in the new international order, conceptions that helped shape their respective postwar foreign policies.3 Great Britain’s sense of its own interests in the world had been curtailed by war’s end but remained decidedly colonial. The new British role in the postwar world was predicated on realism and oriented around shielding a contracting empire’s territorial integrity and remaining possessions. Sad- dled by outsized defense costs while the domestic economy slumped, Brit- ain sensed that its shrinking imperial reach was inevitable. And with that sense of a newly circumscribed international position came a revised geo- graphic conception of Britain’s postwar interests: more limited, more prac- tical, and more concerned with only the most vital interests. Crown rule was crumbling in the empire’s outposts in the Near and Far East, from Palestine to India, leaving strategists scrambling for alternative military basing postures and redefi nitions of British security requirements. 4 • Mapping the End of Empire Meanwhile America’s ascent to a new era of global infl uence prompted, in turn, the reinterpretation of its core postwar objectives. Those interests would be defi ned in terms of an expanded view of America’s international role, one commensurate with new economic and military interests in cor- ners of the world suddenly vacated by retreating empires, demobilizing allies, and defeated adversaries. With a worldview more ambiguous and ill- defi ned than the reconfi gured British one, offi cials in the Roo se velt and Truman administrations began to shape the global foreign policy that would come to be framed by the strategic thought of a young Sovietologist, George Kennan. Its basic precept, the “containment” of communism, would guide American foreign policy for the remainder of the century. Importantly these parallel and divergent geo graph ical conceptions of international interests and security emerged from both offi cial policy de- liberations as well as pop u lar conceptions of geography at the time. Both embedded themselves down to deep operational levels in the respective foreign policy establishments in London and Washington as sets of ideas about geo graph i cal interests that guided foreign policy. Colored maps of the British Empire around the Second World War re- vealed the extent to which a binary worldview of the bounds of the empire, on the one hand (usually colored red in offi cial maps), and the world beyond, on the other (often colored beige), penetrated British thinking about overseas territories.

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