Hard bargains

That exemplar of partnership with America, Winston Churchill, in a moment of retrospective reflection, once confessed to an aide, “No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt.” Any leader worth their salt has always had to negotiate a tricky tightrope, between striking the right tone for American ears, without disgracing themselves before the domestic audience to whom they’re ultimately accountable. Americans have always demonstrated two tendencies, one typical of the new rich (the idea everyone is out to take advantage of them) and another typical of those with an abundance of land (that it’s better to keep outsiders out). At times, this makes it even more difficult to be a friend of America than one of its enemies—except for that thing that makes it worthwhile because it’s not merely a transaction but rather what’s described as shared values. There would always be a greater affinity between the British or Filipinos and Americans than say with Soviet Russia or Communist China.

There was nothing surprising in Donald Trump’s demand that Ukraine allocate half of its mineral wealth to American use as payback for its national survival. America has always struck hard bargains, though part of the exchange is expressions of mutual regard between the contracting parties for foreign and domestic consumption. You could go back to Franklin D. Roosevelt and his successors, who, even as they built a durable, American-led peace, kept a shrewd and ruthless eye on the American bottom line. In 1940, in exchange for obsolete American destroyers, Britain handed over bases in Newfoundland and the Caribbean. Writing at the time in his diary, Churchill’s parliamentary private secretary wrote, “The West Indian Colonies, the oldest of the Crown, are resentful and their feelings are shared by many people here in view of the conditions which the Americans have demanded and which amount to capitulations. Both sides are haggling and ill-feeling has arisen.”

Two months later, when Britain ran out of funds to pay for supplies to save itself, Roosevelt maneuvered the Lend-Lease Act through Congress, despite a public united in isolationist opinion. To do so, he made sure the United States earned more than it gave.

And Britain gave plenty, aside from bases. In 1940, a delegation of British scientists handed over the technology for radar and in 1941, the design of the jet engine.

Fighting for its very survival, Britain adorned this brutal exchange, with ribbons of rhetoric, all the while anxiously trying to ensure its lifeline would continue for the rest of the war. Then, at the moment of victory in Europe, the United States announced it was suspending lend-lease, risking wrecking the Soviet and British economies at the moment they direly needed assistance in reconstruction. The lifeline would continue, as it turned out, as long as there was still a war to be won against Japan. After Japan’s defeat, the lifeline was again cut off.

The economist, John Maynard Keynes, was dispatched to Washington in 1946 to negotiate a loan to keep the British economy afloat, which he did. This debt to America was finally paid off in December 2006, but the terms were tempered by the British being allowed to defer payments in times of economic crisis (1956, 1957, 1964, 1965, 1968, and 1976) and with an extremely low interest rate of 2 percent. It was these considerations, aside from American military protection of Europe that were the payoff for cultivating the “special relationship” over decades.

Filipinos have had an experience of this firsthand; they were made expendable in 1942, but promised a full indemnity or war damages and equal pay for Filipino troops under American command. Then shattered by liberation, they were told by a Republican-controlled Congress that the price of reconstruction would be to grant Americans the same economic rights as Filipinos while veterans would find neither justice nor honor because of the Rescission Act in 1946, denying Filipino veterans’ benefits. It was the price of reconstruction and the American security umbrella.

Filipino leaders learned their lesson and took to increasingly hard bargaining over the years as chronicled in the American historian Nick Cullather’s book, ”Illusions of Influence,” which argues Americans continuously overestimated their influence and underestimated the ability of Filipino leaders to wheedle what they wanted out of Washington. (The Americans’ final miscalculation came when they negotiated an extension of their bases agreement but left out lobbying the Senate—which rejected the deal, shrinking the Philippine desk from one of the biggest to just another small one at State and knocking off several stars’ worth of promotion positions in the US military, no wonder Americans were sore for close to a generation). For now, this shrewdness has enabled our government to successfully navigate the stormy waters of the Trump White House.

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Email: mlquezon3@gmail.com; Twitter: @mlq3