Abstract
One of Saki Dockrill’s most significant publications was her monograph, Britain’s Retreat from East of Suez.1 In this, the first archival study of the subject, she set Britain’s reassessment of its defence priorities in a broad context, looking not only at withdrawal from Southeast Asia and the Persian Gulf, but also at relations with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) over such questions as nuclear-sharing and the size of the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR). She showed that, in reducing spending, the British initially sought cuts in NATO; yet, by 1968, the Wilson government was set on a European future, eager to abandon the world role and enter the European Economic Community (EEC). Saki also looked at the debate over particular weapons systems, such as aircraft carriers and the US-manufactured F-111 aircraft, both vital to a world role. Some previous writers emphasised that the January 1968 decision to quit military bases East of Suez by the end of 1971, was the vital turning point in the process of retreat.2 Others argued it merely marked an acceleration of earlier decisions, especially those announced in July 1967.3 But, Saki looked further back, seeing harbingers of retreat under the Conservative governments of 1959–63.4 Throughout the discussions, a vital question was the need to maintain friendly relations with London’s main ally, the United States, which, concerned about its own defence burden, could hardly welcome Britain’s retreat.
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Notes
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002. A more recent analysis on Southeast Asia is P.L. Pham, Ending East of Suez: the British decision to withdraw from Malaysia and Singapore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Jeffrey Pickering, Britain’s Withdrawal from East of Suez (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998) and ‘Politics and “Black Tuesday”: shifting power in the Cabinet and the decision to withdraw from “East of Suez”’, Twentieth Century British History, 13/2 (2002).
David Greenwood, The Economics of the East of Suez Decision (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1973).
See also Matthew Jones, ‘A Decision Delayed: Britain’s withdrawal from Southeast Asia reconsidered’, English Historical Review, CXVII/472 (2002), pp. 569–95.
The chapter therefore builds on an increasing interest among scholars in the role of embassies. See, for example: Michael Hopkins, Saul Kelly and John Young (eds), The Washington Embassy: British ambassadors to the United States, 1939–77 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009);
Jonathan Colman, ‘Portrait of an Institution: the US Embassy in London, 1945–53’, Hague Journal of Diplomacy, 4 (2009), pp. 339–60.
Nelson Lankford, The Last American Aristocrat: the biography of David K.E. Bruce (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995);
Jonathan Colman, ‘The London Ambassadorship of David K.E. Bruce during the Wilson–Johnson years, 1964–68’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 15/4 (2004), pp. 327–52;
and ‘Introduction’ to Raj Roy and John W. Young (eds), Ambassador to Sixties London: the diaries of David Bruce, 1961–69 (Dordrecht: Republic of Letters Publishing, 2009).
Philip Kaiser, Journeying Far and Wide (New York: Scribner’s, 1992), pp. 59–71.
John W. Young, The Labour Governments, 1964–70: Volume II, International Policy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 21–2;
and see Jonathan Colman, A Special Relationship? Harold Wilson, Lyndon Johnson and Anglo-American relations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).
Saki Dockrill, ‘Forging the Anglo-American global defence partnership: Harold Wilson, Lyndon Johnson and the Washington summit, December 1964’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 23/4 (December 2000), pp. 107–29.
Cyrus L. Sulzberger, An Age of Mediocrity (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 265.
Dockrill, East of Suez, pp. 148–9 and pp. 155–6; Pham, Ending, pp. 74–7; John Subritzsky, Confronting Sukarno: British, American, Australian and New Zealand diplomacy in the Malaysian-Indonesian confrontation (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 199–201.
Henry Brandon, Special Relationships: a foreign correspondent’s memoirs (London: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 213–15; Pham, Ending, pp. 151–4.
LBJL, NSF, CF, UK, box 210, London to State, 14 and 18 April 1967; and see James Ellison, The United States, Britain and the Transatlantic Crisis: rising to the Gaullist challenge, 1963–68 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 140–43.
For example: C. J. Bartlett, The Special Relationship (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 109–18;
David Dimbleby and David Reynolds, An Ocean Apart (London: BBC Books, 1988), p. 256;
John Dumbrell, A Special Relationship (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001), p. 72.
Alan Dobson, Anglo-American Relations in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 138.
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© 2013 John W. Young, Effie G. H. Pedaliu and Michael D. Kandiah
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Young, J.W. (2013). The US Embassy in London and Britain’s Withdrawal from East of Suez, 1961–69. In: Young, J.W., Pedaliu, E.G.H., Kandiah, M.D. (eds) Britain in Global Politics Volume 2. Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313584_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313584_8
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