end of March. Militarily the British actually con-
tinued to support the royalist government until
the communists were defeated in 1949. The US
stood in the financial breach. This took the dra-
matic form of the Truman Doctrine announced
on 12 March 1947, which pledged American help
to defend the cause of the ‘free peoples’.
The Truman Doctrine was followed in June
1947 by the offer of Marshall Aid. Bevin prompt-
ly responded by concerting with the French a
positive Western European response. Stalin, on
the other hand, ordered the Eastern satellite
nations to pull out of the conference in Paris
which met from July to September 1947 to dis-
cuss the details of Marshall Aid. The division of
the East and West was becoming ever clearer, as
was America’s support for Western Europe. But
this support still fell short of a firm military com-
mitment, let alone an alliance. Thus in 1947,
despite its weakened state, Britain was still the
only major power that could be relied upon to
defend Western Europe.
The breakdown in December 1947 of the
London Foreign Ministers’ Conference on the
question of the future of Germany had finally
convinced a reluctant Bevin that priority would
have to be given to strengthening Western
Europe economically and militarily. The commu-
nist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 was
interpreted in the West as signalling a new phase
of Soviet aggression. But Bevin was not willing to
place total reliance on an American readiness to
defend Western Europe and Western interests in
the Middle East and Asia. It was true that Britain
and Western Europe were shielded by the
umbrella of the US monopoly of nuclear
weapons, but America had only a small stockpile
of atomic bombs and not until the Berlin crisis of
1948 were US bombers sent to Britain to act as
deterrent to the Soviet Union. So Western
Europe had to grasp the nettle of providing for
its own defence. Bevin tackled this energetically.
The outcome of his diplomatic efforts was the
conclusion of the Brussels Treaty in March 1948,
an alliance between Britain, Belgium, the
Netherlands, Luxembourg and France. Its aims
were not only to promote economic collaboration
in Western Europe; Article IV provided for mili-
tary assistance to any member of the alliance who
became ‘the object of an armed attack in Europe’.
Although the preamble of the treaty referred only
to Germany as a potential enemy, the defensive
alliance applied to any aggressor in Europe – and
the aggressor warned off in March 1948 was the
Soviet Union. Britain had now joined a Western
bloc and Bevin was its principal architect.
The Labour government’s vision of acting as a
peacemaker and mediator without exclusive
alliances with any one group of nations, a vision
that corresponded to a long tradition in British
foreign policy, had been abandoned by Bevin and
the Attlee Cabinet as the post-war dangers inher-
ent in the Cold War became ever more apparent
in 1948. But it was only a partial abandonment.
Neither the Conservatives nor Labour intended
to join a united Western Europe, a supra-national
Europe. Britain’s alliances with its continental
neighbours were not exclusive: it valued its world-
wide Commonwealth ties too highly. Bevin also
believed that Western Europe was not strong
enough to defend itself. For him, the Brussels
Treaty was a stepping stone to a wider transat-
lantic alliance to be constructed when the US was
ready for it. In the event, that was not to be until
1949, when NATO was created. Thus in a signifi-
cant sense the British foreign secretary was a
principal architect of the most important Western
post-war alliance.
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