ABSTRACT
During the Cold War, Britain’s foreign policy was a very cautious one. In general, London conducted relations with the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite states in a much more circumspect way than did the USA. Both in the second half of the 1940s as well as in the 1950s and 1960s, British prime ministers from Attlee to Wilson pursued a policy which continued the close alignment with the USA and, on the whole, also successfully managed to avoid dangerous military entanglements. For instance, after the initial commitment of fighting the war in Korea, London could not be persuaded to contribute to General MacArthur’s envisaged escalation of the conflict. Prime Minister Attlee even felt the need to travel to Washington in early December 1950 to persuade President Truman not to consider deploying atomic bombs in the Korean War. 1 The British also refused strong US pressure to provide military assistance to the desperate French position at their Indo-Chinese military base at Dien Bien Phu in 1954; a decade later, Britain rigorously ignored US requests to participate in the Vietnam War. 2 London also often managed to avoid being drawn into overly rigid and fundamentalist political-diplomatic positions toward that superpower and its allies beyond the Iron Curtain. During the first two decades of the Cold War, for example, the British recognized Mao’s China while it took the USA until the early 1970s to accept the diplomatic existence of a communist China. 3
