There exist so many obvious proofs of the tightness of the decades-long alliance between Britain and the United States, such as their recent joint wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that one could be tempted to see the ‘Special Relationship’ as almost inevitable or natural. Historians, however, have long rejected this by exposing rifts between the two countries, even when they were faced by their greatest threat, aggressive global fascism during the Second World War.
Post-War Planning on the Periphery suggests that the two allies mistrusted one another when it came to their wartime economic policies in Latin America. The US government acted in ways that hurt British influence in South America, with a wartime movement towards an ‘economic Monroe doctrine’ that would exclude from South America all European influences, even those of allied Britain. According to Mills, this contradicted the overall global push by the United States towards more ‘multilateral’ economic policies.
In the most interesting parts of this book, Mills analyses the personal papers of Cordell Hull, Sumner Welles and lesser figures in the US State Department, and also official correspondence from the British Foreign Office. With this material, Mills creates intriguing descriptions of the course of negotiations between the United States, Britain and the Brazilian government over the control of Radiobrás and the lucrative concession to electrify the Central Brazilian Railway.
However, one wishes that Mills had shown more regard for the many contexts of the events in this book. The back stories and the future lives of some of the decision-makers might help to provide more of a sense of what they were thinking. The lack of historical context is also apparent in his failure to describe the Anglo-American relationship in South America during the Great War just two decades earlier. Mills explains that US officials and businessmen were the ones calling for tougher economic warfare measures against the Germans in the Second World War, with British businessmen advocating leniency. This was the exact opposite of the situation during the First World War. Also, during the First World War the British wanted Argentina to break its neutrality, while during the Second they preferred that Argentina remain neutral. This book could have benefited from some explanation of why Britain's tune changed.
Most surprisingly, there is little sense of the context of British and US relations with the Latin American governments themselves. Mills follows an unstated assumption that the bargaining between the United States and Britain was the only conversation that really mattered, but why should this be accepted as true? Certainly for the nationalist Vargas in Brazil and the military governments that took power in Argentina during the war, coming to any agreement with any foreign power was fraught with political risk. There is no example in this book of any moment when these South American governments caved in on any economic issue due to foreign pressure, and no moment when they acted against their countries' apparent self-interests. Indeed, there is virtually no mention of South American politics at all.
But certainly the worst example of this lack of context is at the very root of Mills' main thesis, which posits that US policy towards Britain in Latin America was fundamentally different from its policies towards the rest of the world. Other than a brief description of Anglo-American wartime negotiations over access to Middle Eastern oil, Mills gives no proof that what happened in South America was unique compared to Anglo-American relations elsewhere. One wishes for some direct explanation of whether, for example, wartime US officials striving for multilateralism pushed for Britain to end the system of imperial preference that linked its empire through trade.
Mills claims on a number of occasions that US actions may not have been intended to hurt British interests and that some of the policy inconsistencies were due simply to the disorganisation of Roosevelt's ever-expanding war administration, and perhaps due to the government's infiltration by business-minded men like Nelson Rockefeller. But regardless of intention, there really isn't much proof that US actions actually hurt British interests at all. For example, when Mills writes about the Axis Replacement Program, in which the US government urged Latin American countries to take over German-owned companies, he gives no examples of any South American companies that changed hands or benefited any US business. Even when it comes to what for Mills is the pivotal case of the Central Brazilian Railway, he presents no evidence that the US government did anything that particularly deviated from the international norm of rather generic rhetorical support for US businessmen in negotiating large concession contracts with Latin American governments.
By the end one is quite cognisant of Mills' failure to define and describe two critical terms, ‘business’ and ‘multilateralism’. There are no sources in this book from business archives or written by business historians. When speaking of ‘business’ he appears to be talking solely about companies in the United States and Britain exporting goods to South America. But when it came to British and German business interests in South America, the critical ones were actually those centred in South America, such as the German-operated exporting houses in South America focused on the movement of coffee and grains to customers overseas and the extensive merchant banks that financed such international trade. Shockingly, Mills never mentions banks or finance at all, an omission that one would have hoped was impossible in any book on British power in South America, at least since the publication two decades ago of the pivotal work by Cain and Hopkins on the financial nature of British imperialism.
By the end of the book, one is thoroughly tired of and confused by the term ‘multilateralism’. Mills initially describes it as a commitment to lowering of tariff and trade barriers and a commitment to free trade. Yet later he cites the unwillingness of US officials to follow through on the creation of a ‘self-denying ordinance’ (whereby US businesses would refuse to take advantage of the wartime weakness of their British competitors in South America) as the pivotal example of US official rejection of multilateralism. But wouldn't ‘self-denying’ be fundamentally different from multilateral free trade principles? Mills suggests at the end that the US failure to advocate wartime multilateralism in South America set a horrible precedent for US policy in the future, but one wonders exactly what future policies he is thinking of. ‘Multilateral’ would seem to be a quite reasonable term to define the global trade regime pushed forward, jointly, by Britain and the United States since the end of the Second World War.
