Günter Bischof - The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968

The timing coincided with Britain’s devaluation of sterling in the autumn of 1967 and its subsequent announcement of an accelerated withdrawal from East of Suez in January 1968. 22Reporting to London, the British ambassador to Moscow, Sir Geoffrey Harrison, expressed his amazement at the bad press Britain was receiving in Moscow over its East of Suez decision. Great Britain was described by the Soviet press as a country going through a period of “profound malaise and disillusionment” in 1967, and warned that 1968 would be even worse for Britain. 23The problems, they analyzed, were due to Britain’s dire dependence on the United States. The Foreign Office suspected that these were the usual Soviet tactics of trying to drive a wedge between the two Anglo-Saxon countries. 24Behind the façade of peaceful Anglo-Soviet relations, the Soviet Union in the aftermath of Britain’s retreat from East of Suez quickly projected its naval power into the Indian Ocean. Prior to July 1967, there had been no permanent Soviet naval presence in the Indian Ocean, but by 1974, the number of Soviet warships in the ocean rose to more than 10,000. 25The Kremlin optimistically saw the fragmentation of American society after Vietnam as a sign of the failure of the Western capitalist system. There was rising confidence in Moscow that the Soviet Union, and not the United States, was “becoming the dominant actor” in the world. 26

Just as Britain thought that the real solution to the Cold War required a drastic change in the Soviet system, Moscow’s condition for any improvement on Anglo-Soviet bilateral relations would be for Britain to sever its relations with the Western alliance, especially the United States. One can see that there was, therefore, little room for the two governments to cultivate any real friendship beyond certain trade and cultural exchanges. This, in turn, implies the severe limitations Britain and the West would face in exercising any influence over the Soviet Union and its policies, such as over Czechoslovakia in 1968.

All was not well in the Western Bloc, either. The emergence of détente resulted in differing approaches in the West to the security of Western Europe. In the mid-1960s, many observers on both sides of the Atlantic raised serious concerns about the possible collapse of NATO, which was seen to be in deep crisis. The role of the United States as the ultimate nuclear guarantor was becoming increasingly questionable, since the superpower nuclear arms race now produced a balance of terror in Europe. The John F. Kennedy administration’s solution was to enhance the conventional capabilities of European powers to meet a less serious military threat. This meant that European NATO allies had to raise the nuclear threshold, making U.S. nuclear deterrence less credible to military conflicts in Europe, and increasing the risk of conventional limited wars occurring there. 27Moreover, the question of NATO’s nuclear sharing, especially that of meeting West Germany’s aspirations for an equal status in NATO’s nuclear policy, required skilful diplomacy. The idea of creating the Multilateral Nuclear Force (MLF) proposed during the Kennedy years had, however, never become a serious proposition for the Europeans, and by 1964, West Germany and the United States were the only countries who supported the scheme. 28

General Charles de Gaulle, the president of the French Republic, became increasingly irritated by what he perceived to be Kennedy’s intention of dominating European NATO, and the relaxation of East-West tensions prompted the general to embark on an East-West rapprochement “from the Atlantic to the Urals” outside the framework of the transatlantic alliance. In July 1966, France withdrew from NATO’s integrated military structure and asked NATO to withdraw its staff and institutions from France by April 1967. The emerging East-West détente was by no means accepted by all the NATO powers at this time. Those countries close to the Iron Curtain (West Germany, Turkey, and Norway) took the growing Soviet military capability more seriously than did other European countries, and Bonn was, in any case, unlikely to be drawn into a premature détente unless it embraced the reunification of Germany. 29

Not only did France withdraw from NATO’s military command, but the two other major powers, the United States and Britain, also revived their long-term grievances about NATO. They felt that their initial troop commitment to Europe, which had been forced upon them when the Cold War was at its height in 1949–1950, should now be reduced. London and Washington were united in maintaining that the other European allies, especially the Federal Republic of Germany, should pull their weight by contributing more resources to the defense of Western Europe now that their economies had become prosperous. 30

For Britain, some defense cuts in a relatively peaceful Europe proved to be possible when the Labour government embarked on a series of defense reviews after 1964. The United States became heavily involved in the war in Vietnam with over half a million troops fighting there. U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam was regarded in Europe as a diversion of attention and resources from the defense of Western Europe. The United States, on the other hand, was displeased with a lack of support from its European allies to the cause of Asian containment, and in August 1966, Congress began to call for a substantial reduction in U.S. troops in Europe unless the Europeans were prepared to resolve the “dollar gap” in the foreign exchange. The subsequent tripartite negotiations between the United States, Britain, and West Germany about Anglo-American troop reductions demonstrated how difficult it was to overcome the differences between these three Western countries. 31

In order to overcome NATO’s mid-life crisis, Whitehall had plenty to worry about and to do to maintain the cohesion of the Western alliance. In the end, however, the alliance survived de Gaulle’s challenge reasonably well. NATO resolved the question of nuclear sharing by setting up the Nuclear Planning Group (December 1966), accepted in 1967 the new strategy of flexible response, which included options preferred by both Europe and the United States, and agreed to adopt the Harmel Report (December 1967) calling for détente and defense, a strategy which served to increase Western Europe’s pressure for détente in the 1970s. All of these were, in fact, in line with the national interest of the United Kingdom, and it welcomed the fact that détente was now part and parcel of NATO’s objective, a slap in the face to de Gaulle’s solo pursuit of détente.

By contrast, the UK’s interest in Eastern Europe remained unremarkable. While it agreed to start negotiations on what became known later as the Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) Talks with the Warsaw Pact, Whitehall did not make much effort to promote cultural exchanges or contacts at ministerial levels either. The prime minister focused heavily on improving Anglo-Soviet relations. The Foreign Office gave only a grudging approval of change in “the atmosphere and mechanics” of the relationship with Moscow, but reported that the two powers were not any closer on “fundamentals.” 32There was also the problem of a large expansion of Soviet and Eastern Bloc intelligence activities in England after 1964. Following the arrest of a British citizen, Gerald Brooke in Moscow in 1965, V. A. Drozdov (a third secretary in the Soviet embassy in London) turned out to be a spy and was sent back to Moscow in 1968 after he was caught collecting top secret official information from a so-called dead letter-box in London. 33The Foreign Office’s prescription was that Britain should be firmer and more realistic in dealing with the Soviets and avoid “running after them.” 34