‘They have complete confidence in me’

Abstract

In Europe, de Gaulle, having returned to power in 1958 in France, was proposing the replacement of NATO with an Anglo-American-French triumvirate, whose authority should extend beyond the NATO area. Macmillan saw this as ‘an attempt by France to claim a special position with Britain and America’, and the proposal ran directly counter to the Macmillan/Eisenhower agreement excluding any third country from the bilateral exchanges on nuclear weaponry. Macmillan also thought that it would cause problems with the Germans. De Gaulle, for his part, told Adenauer that Britain should not enter the European Common Market so long as she remained the instrument of America.¹