From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (93 page)

For Roosevelt, the last act in the unfolding drama came in February 1945 en route home from the Yalta Conference when he met Ibn Saud at Great Bitter Lake north of the Suez Canal. The king was transported there by a U.S. destroyer, traveling in a tent pitched on deck (U.S. sailors called it the "big top") with an entourage of forty-three attendants and eight live sheep to meet requirements of Muslim laws for preparing food. Much impressed with Ibn Saud, FDR labeled him a "great whale of a man" and left a wheelchair for the battle-scarred warrior's use. The president hoped to persuade the king to acquiesce in a Jewish homeland. What he got was adamant opposition to further Jewish settlement—even to the planting of trees in Palestine. "Amends should be made by the criminal, not by the innocent bystander," he told FDR, proposing instead a Jewish homeland in Germany. Taken aback, Roosevelt pledged in typical fashion that he would "do nothing to assist the Jews against the Arabs and would make no move hostile to the Arab people." His subsequent public statement that he had learned more from Ibn Saud in five minutes than from countless exchanges of letters struck fear in Zionists allayed only in part by subsequent soothing reassurances.
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The Middle East took a backseat to more pressing issues in the last stages of the war. By virtue of its rising power and emerging interests, however, the United States had taken a keen interest in the region and through oil and Palestine had become caught up in a hopelessly intractable dispute.

A powerful undercurrent in the Middle East, the issue of colonialism dominated U.S. involvement with South and Southeast Asia. Held in check in the 1930s by brute force and token concessions, nationalists quickly saw in the war a chance to gain their freedom. They read carefully and literally the 1941 Atlantic Charter and found in it sanction for their cause. Japan's sweep through Southeast Asia in 1942 graphically exposed the weakness of colonial regimes. In some areas, the new rulers
imposed a more cruel and oppressive rule than the Europeans, but their cry of "Asia for Asians" resonated with local nationalists. Because of its power and its anti-colonial tradition, nationalist leaders looked to the United States for support. Like it or not, the Roosevelt administration found itself ensnared in the complex historical process of decolonization that would dominate world politics for years to come.

The colonial issue was among the most challenging of the myriad complex problems raised by the war. Many Americans were firmly committed to Wilson's dream of self-determination. African Americans in particular saw a direct connection between the oppression of peoples of color at home and abroad and pushed for an end to both.
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The colonial issue became in the eyes of Americans and peoples across the world a test case for the nation's commitment to its war aims. At the same time, many U.S. officials doubted, usually on the basis of racial considerations, that colonial peoples were ready for self-government and feared that premature independence could lead to chaos. They also worried that to force the issue of independence during the war could undermine crucial allies like Britain and threaten Allied cooperation when the outcome of the war remained uncertain.

Roosevelt's handling of the issue is typically difficult to decipher. He often railed against European colonialism—Britain, he once snarled, echoing John Quincy Adams, "would take land anywhere in the world even if it were only a rock or sand bar."
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At a Casablanca conference dinner, while Churchill chomped angrily on his cigar, FDR raised with the sultan of Morocco the possibility of independence. On the other hand, he shared the assumptions of his generation that most colonial peoples were unready for independence and would need guidance from the "advanced" nations. Critics have correctly noted that his often bold rhetoric was not matched by decisive actions. He refused to demand of the colonial nations forthright pledges of independence. As Kimball has emphasized, on the other hand, he was utterly Wilsonian, and correct, in his assessment that colonialism was morally reprehensible—and doomed. Ever the pragmatist, he refused to jeopardize the alliance by mounting a frontal assault on colonialism. At the same time, he kept the issue on the front burner, bringing it up often, using various means to nudge the colonial powers in the right direction, apparently hoping that what he called
the glare of "pitiless publicity" (turning Churchill's own words against him) would promote international support for independence.
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In the first years of the war, India was the most visible and emotional of decolonization issues, and it clearly reveals Roosevelt's approach. Under the leadership of the saintly Mahatma Gandhi, Indian nationalists had pushed the British toward self-government, and they seized the emergency of war to press for pledges of independence. Many British leaders, including the arch-imperialist Churchill, were not prepared to abandon the crown jewel of an empire on which it was once said the sun had never set. They in turn used military exigencies and the threat of communal warfare between Hindus and Muslims as excuses to delay, offering no more than vague promises of "dominion status" once the war had ended.
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India quickly became the major irritant in the Anglo-American partnership. Even before Pearl Harbor, the United States had given symbolic support to India's appeals for independence by establishing direct diplomatic relations with the colonial regime. It insisted that lend-lease aid be sent directly to the Indian government rather than through the British. At their first wartime meeting in January 1942, Roosevelt prodded Churchill to pledge support for eventual Indian independence. By his own account, the prime minister exploded, and the president never again raised the issue with him directly. But FDR continued to needle Churchill through third parties ranging from Hopkins to Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek. He insisted that the government of India sign the United Nations Declaration. At various stops on a world tour taken at the president's behest, Wendell Willkie denounced imperialism. In China, he pressed the colonial powers to set a timetable for independence. Over and over, the president offered U.S. mediation between Britain and Gandhi's nationalists.

Such efforts deeply antagonized the British. Hopkins's initiative provoked a "string of cuss words that lasted two hours into the night"; Willkie's unwelcome intrusion brought forth Churchill's famous affirmation about the liquidation of the British Empire.
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In India, the standoff hardened, and when nationalists demanded that Britain get out, the authorities responded by imprisoning Gandhi and other leaders. Britons suspected the United States of horning in on their imperial interests; Indians viewed it as an accessory to British imperialism. Critics at home and abroad attacked the Roosevelt administration for doing nothing. A
high State Department official warned that if the United States appeared to be "more interested in the creation of sonorous phrases than in the implementation of the principles enunciated in those phrases, we can expect a harvest of hate and contempt the like of which our imperialistically minded ally has never known."
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Roosevelt responded in 1943 by sending career diplomat William Phillips to India as his personal representative, his furthest and final intrusion into an intractable issue. An Anglophile who looked down on "lesser" peoples, Phillips typified that group of upper-class professional diplomats who manned the State Department. Viewing him as "the best type of American gentleman," some British officials expected him to sympathize with their position. Once in India, however, he traveled widely and spoke to Indians as well as Britons. He found the British stubbornly uncompromising, the Indians divided on many issues but united in their demand for independence. Seeing firsthand the rising power of Indian nationalism, he pressed the British to make concessions. They rebuffed his interference and even forbade him to see Gandhi, then engaged in a much publicized hunger strike. Phillips eventually left India in frustration, and his generally unsuccessful mission typifies Roosevelt's approach to this difficult issue. The president refused to challenge Churchill directly and thereby threaten the alliance. On the other hand, he used Phillips to keep the colonial issue alive and pressure the British. Phillips's presence in India and his growing support for the cause helped regain the trust of Indians and permitted the United States to retain a nominal commitment to the ideal of self-determination.
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Frustrated in India, Roosevelt after 1943 shifted his attack on colonialism to French Indochina, in his view no doubt a more convenient and vulnerable target. His relentless verbal assault against French colonialism and his espousal of a trusteeship policy for Indochina manifested the then novel presumption that the United States should and could dictate solutions to global problems. It reveals much about Roosevelt's—and America's—larger views toward colonialism, nationalism, and the postwar world.

In 1943, FDR frequently expressed his wish not to permit the French to regain their Indochinese colonies, then under Japanese protectorate. His position and the adamancy with which he expressed it reflected his general dislike for the French, reinforced by their collapse in 1940, and his
particular contempt for the imperious Free French leader Charles de Gaulle. Unlike the British, the Dutch, and especially the Americans, FDR averred, France had brutally exploited the Indochinese and done nothing to prepare them for self-government. It had "milked" Indochina for one hundred years, he told the British ambassador. "The people . . . are entitled to something better than that."
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Roosevelt's determination to prevent a French return did not translate into support for Vietnamese independence. In part because the French had not been responsible colonizers, he believed, the Vietnamese were not ready to govern themselves. He knew little of the nationalist movement then building in Vietnam. Like most Americans, he paternalistically looked down upon the Vietnamese as childlike and in need of guidance before being given their freedom. He thus proposed the idea of trusteeship through which an advanced nation would help backward people evolve toward full independence. His model, not surprisingly, was U.S. rule in the Philippines, through which, in his view, a benevolent Western nation had prepared a colonial people for independence over a half century. There are "many minor children among the peoples of the world who need trustees," he observed in 1941, "just as there are many adult nations or peoples who must be led back into a spirit of good conduct."
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Roosevelt's trusteeship scheme provoked vigorous opposition abroad and at home. As a means to restore their lost glory, French citizens of all political persuasions were deeply and emotionally committed to reestablishing the empire in Indochina. To curry favor with an old ally and protect their own Southeast Asian colonies, the British backed the French. Churchill stonewalled Roosevelt on decolonization in general and the Indochina trusteeship in particular. Behind FDR's back, the British also facilitated a French return to Indochina by permitting French participation in the British-run Southeast Asia Command. Some conservative State Department officials preferred a French return to Indochina on condition the French committed themselves to eventual independence. Top military officers sought U.S. sovereignty over the Pacific islands held by Japan as mandates to permit "full control" over bases deemed vital to America's postwar security. They saw application of the trusteeship principle to liberated areas in general as a threat to U.S. security interests.
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Roosevelt bent in the face of opposition, but he did not falter in his commitment to the idea of trusteeship for Indochina—and presumably other colonial areas as well. While admitting the need for U.S. bases in the Pacific, he adamantly insisted that sovereignty must rest with the islands themselves. Eventually and grudgingly bowing to Paris and London on Indochina, he conceded that France might be the trustee, but he insisted upon a firm and explicit French commitment to independence and accountability to international authority, presumably a new international organization. By permitting France to return, the compromise certainly weakened the trusteeship plan. On the other hand, as Kimball concludes, Roosevelt may have set a trap to force France in time to dissolve its empire in Indochina and elsewhere as well. FDR certainly underestimated French determination to return and Vietnamese determination to resist. But his instincts were right, and the result of his not following them more aggressively and his successors deviating sharply from them was thirty years of war in Indochina.
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Few wartime problems were more perplexing for the United States than what historian Herbert Feis called "the China tangle," where imperialism was also a key issue.
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Japan's defeat seemed likely to end Western imperialism in China, but it was not clear what would follow. The United States and China differed sharply over how and for what purposes the war should be fought.

The two nations entered the alliance with high expectations. Chiang Kai-shek shared the intense nationalism of his generation and did not exempt the United States from those imperialist nations responsible for China's woes. But for Chiang Pearl Harbor was a godsend. The United States would now presumably take up the burden of liberating China. It would provide military and economic assistance to help eliminate rivals like Mao Zedong's Communists and solidify Nationalist control over a free China. By December 1941, Chiang had a well-lubricated influence machine operating in the United States including paid lobbyist and former New Deal insider Tommy "the Cork" Corcoran, China Defense Supplies, a purchasing agent staffed by well-connected Americans, and the powerful Time-Life publications of Henry Luce. With U.S. belligerency, Chiang's operatives sought to make China a full partner in the war.

Americans also had high expectations. Conditioned by forty years of the Open Door policy to see themselves as China's patron and more recently
by Luce to view Chiang as a heroic and embattled defender of freedom against Japanese tyranny, they looked upon China as an important ally. Roosevelt sensed the power of Chinese nationalism and sought to contain it through the person of Chiang Kai-shek. He spoke of China as a fourth great power, a bastion of regional stability in East Asia after Japan's defeat, and a buffer against possible Soviet expansion. Like other Americans, he hoped a grateful China would support U.S. policies, "a faggot vote," Churchill sneered.
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Shortly after Pearl Harbor, the administration moved to cement its ties to China by extending a loan of $500 million and dispatching Gen. Joseph Stilwell to Chungking as a military adviser.