@CWO:
@Private:
Further the US were less keen on the survival of the British Empire than the UK - no surprise there!
I would even go so far as to say that the US would have been quite happy to see the British Empire dismantled, if for no other reason that at the time it had a tariff system that gave preferential treatment to British / Imperial / Commonwealth goods.�� �� The Americans much prefered the concept of open markets, and disliked what they saw as British protectionism.�� �� The Anglo-American tension on this issue can been seen in the fourth point of the 1941 Atlantic Charter, which stated "Fourth, they will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity."�� �� Most of this point reflected the American position, but the “with due respect for their existing obligations” part reflected Churchill’s wish to include a “notwithstanding clause” that would (in his interpretation) let the system of Imperial tariffs continue unchanged.
I know we are way off topic, but I thought you’d find the following interesting Marc - especially the final sentence:
On May 10, 1982, Henry A. Kissinger mounted the podium at Chatham House, the London home of the Royal Institute for International Affairs, to deliver the keynote address for the bicentenary celebration of the Office of the British Foreign Secretary. Kissinger boasted of his loyalty to the British Foreign Office on all crucial matters of postwar policy matters in dispute between the United States and Britain. The crux of his disagreement with his own nominal country, the United States, he told his audience, was the basic dispute in policy and philosophy between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, reflecting our different histories.'' Roosevelt, Kissinger stated, had condemned Churchill as being needlessly obsessed with power politics, too rigidly anti-Soviet, too colonialist in his attitude to what is now called the Third World, and too little interested in building the fundamentally new international order towards which American idealism had always tended.‘’
It is Churchill who was right, and Roosevelt, who was wrong, in these matters, said Kissinger.
While the majority of Kissinger’s elite audience was keenly aware of the bitter dispute between Roosevelt and Churchill, a different history has been made available to the average American: a mass of lies and half-truths about a so-called ``special relationship’’ between Britain and the United States, based on common ideals, supposedly supported by both Churchill and Roosevelt, and intended to last into the next millennium. This rewriting of history began almost immediately with FDR’s untimely death in April 1945, and has continued to this day.
Thus, what was perhaps the defining battle that shaped the course of current history remains unknown to most Americans. It is important that this story now truthfully be told, especially as a young American President has taken the steps to walk away from Britain and the ``special relationship.‘’
The historical evidence shows that Roosevelt entered into the military alliance with Britain with only one purpose in mind: the defeat of an enemy. The historical evidence also shows that Franklin Roosevelt was committed to dismantling the British Empire–and all other empires–and to replacing them with sovereign nation-states, modelled on the American constitutional republic, in which each citizen would be given, through access to modern scientific education and Western culture, the opportunity to create a better life for himself and his posterity.
It is this view of man, in the tradition of Western Judeo-Christian civilization, that places a value in each sovereign human individual, that the oligarch Churchill bitterly opposed, and that President Franklin D. Roosevelt espoused.
In 1946, as the history of the period was already being rewritten, FDR’s son, Elliot, published a short book, titled As He Saw It. With pungency and force, using first-hand acccounts, Elliot told the truth about his father’s bitter fights with Churchill, leading the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. to state in a contemporary review that the book’s central thesis was that Roosevelt saw Great Britain and its imperial system as a far greater adversary to the United States than Russia.
Here’s a link to the full article if you want it:
http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/FDRlw95.htm
