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No Secrets Between ‘Special Friends’: America's Involvement in British Economic Policy, October 1964–April 1965
Author(s) -
ROY RAJ
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.12
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1468-229X
pISSN - 0018-2648
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-229x.2004.00306.x
Subject(s) - foreign policy , power (physics) , historiography , politics , special relationship , feeling , prime minister , political science , economic history , government (linguistics) , economic power , political economy , great power , history , law , sociology , psychology , social psychology , linguistics , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics
The war in Vietnam has dominated the historiography of American foreign relations in the 1960s, and in particular the foreign policy of President Lyndon Johnson. The military difficulties endured by the United States in Vietnam, together with a number of international economic crises, have all been conclusive evidence, in the eyes of diplomatic historians, of the decline in the power and influence of the United States during this period. Historical treatments of the relationship between Britain and the United States have been equally gloomy, with the visible tensions and ill‐feeling between Lyndon Johnson and the British prime minister, Harold Wilson, being highlighted. Through an examination of the involvement of the United States in the British government's domestic economic policy in late 1964 and early 1965, this article argues that the United States, far from simply managing the process of decline, had come to use new and more subtle techniques to wield considerable power and influence in the domestic politics of its allies. Moreover, whilst the conduct of the war in Vietnam may have generated personal tensions at the highest level, common interests ensured that Britain and the United States continued to enjoy an extremely close relationship in the economic sphere.