Ringing Down the Curtain

Though nighttime long ago overtook Britain's empire, the sun has been much slower to set on its military system. With 429,000 men in uniform, its navy steaming regularly through three oceans, tommies quartered at volatile fronts and its airplanes based from Cornwall to Hong Kong, Britain still supports a sizable chunk of the West's defense capability. A succession of budgetary cutbacks, including four in the past two years, has stretched its forces ever thinner. But, as recently as last summer, Whitehall's defense planners referred to the notion of pulling back from east of Suez as "long term" -- a decade away, perhaps.

Last week those plans lay in shreds. Aiming to slash $2.4 billion from his government's budget as a necessary sequel to devaluation, Prime Minister Harold Wilson dispatched aides around the globe to tell his allies of new and faster military pullbacks -- moves that would ring down the curtain on Britain as a major armed power of the world. Unless the plans are modified in last-minute Cabinet debate before he submits the new budget to Parliament this week, all but token numbers of Britain's military, the builder of its empire and binder of its commonwealth, will pull back into the confines of Europe within 36 months.

Trump Card. The U.S., which felt that Britain's earlier pledge to stay in the Far East until the mid-1970s was not nearly long enough, was naturally upset by the new schedule, delivered to Dean Rusk in Washington by Foreign Secretary George Brown. Short of registering its displeasure, though, there is little that the U.S. can do: Britain's SEATO membership, which she plans to retain, calls for no specific troop commitment. Washington's other concern was Britain's $350 million aircraft order with the U.S. for F-111 fighters. Since at least a dozen were ordered for Far East duty, some cancellations are almost sure to occur.

The biggest power vacuum would occur in the cleft federation of Malaysia and the nearby island republic of Singapore, where 35,000 British troops bolster morale in China's shadow and the British fleet enjoys strategic access to Far East sea lanes. Both countries, which had been counting heavily on British protection through 1975, are now busy organizing a NATO-style defense agreement with Australia and New Zealand.

"All I want," said Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, "is sufficient time to develop my own muscles." At week's end Lee flew off to Britain to seek a reprieve. His trump card: 400 million pounds sterling in his own and Malaysian reserves, which could cause great damage to the pound's value if exchanged for yen or other currencies. Whatever happens, Singapore seems destined to move even closer to Japan, whose businessmen already hold one-quarter of Singapore's industries and were conveniently in conference there last week.

The desire for a new self-help alliance was also strong in the Middle East, where a number of oil states--including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain--learned of plans to pull back Britain's 6,000 troops guarding the Persian Gulf oil route, probably in 1971. Britain even placed its European commitments under review, especially the Rhine Army of 52,000, whose continued presence in West Germany seemed more dependent on German offers to offset costs than anything else. In fact, as Defense Minister Denis Healey watched his establishment mercilessly pared, he must have wondered somewhat whether his entire ministry was not one of the three suggested on Fleet Street to be ready for mothballs.

Mooing Herd. He was not alone. As budgetary meetings of the full Cabinet approached their 24th hour, the Evening Standard reported that "the whole mooing herd of the government's once-sacred cows was driven to 10 Downing Street." The result, said the Standard, was "much slaughtering." If Wilson was stripping defense to placate the "mini-England" wing of his Labor Party, he was also tightening plenty of belts among the social services. Education Minister Patrick Gordon Walker described the sessions as "heartbreaking," and Minister of Arts Jennie Lee threatened to resign--and perhaps drag others with her--if a charge for medical prescriptions is reinstated.

The whole process was bitter medicine for Britain, and Harold Wilson could offer little good news with which to sugar-coat it. December, the first full month after devaluation, brought a balance of payments deficit of $168 million, the third highest monthly total of the year.

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