Anglo-American relations after Suez, the rise and decline of the working group experiment, and the French challenge to NATO, 1957-59

This article explores the establishment of a number of Anglo-American working groups at the Washington Conference of October 1957, and explains how the British regarded the groups as an attempt to institutionalize the principle of consultation in Anglo-American relations. American and British officials were anxious that the existence of the groups be kept secret for fear that they would be a cause of resentment to other close allies. De Gaulle's attacks on an Anglo-American monopoly within NATO, and disruptive calls for institutionalizing tripartite cooperation following his assumption of power in June 1958 underlined this point, and helped to cool US attitudes to any notion of formal machinery that by-passed established alliance structures. Practical problems associated with the functioning of the groups, as well as the potential for political embarrassment they could represent, meant that their role had largely by the spring of 1959, yet their brief history was illustrative of the tensions that exclusivity in ANglo-American relations could bring to the Western alliance.