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The tie that binds Commonwealth members has impressive reality. A Canadian will often feel some strange, inarticulate blood link with a New Zealander or a South African or an Indian that he does not feel with an American. One result has been the close association in world affairs between Canada and India. In Washington, Canada's Ambassador to the U.S. is able to explain to the State Department some particularly obscure Indian move on the world scene. When he spoke to the Indian Parliament last year, Canada's Prime Minister John Diefenbaker was heard attentively and respectfully as he allayed Indian fears of U.S. intentions in the cold war.
Though the Commonwealth countries still turn to Britain for parliamentary guidance and cultural sustenance, most are realistic enough to recognize that the challenge of Communism cannot be faced without the help of U.S. military power.
Individually and together, they have entered defensive alliances with Washington: Canada and Great Britain are members of NATO, Australia and New Zealand have joined the U.S. in ANZUS (excluding Britain) and SEATO. Canada and the U.S. made common cause in building the radar DEW line to prevent surprise attacks by Soviet planes coming from the North Pole.
Unity & Continuity. Because the Commonwealth itself is new, the Queen's role in heading it is new, and is thus a task demanding far more sensitivity and stamina than the easier chores of many another monarch who ruled the Empire. She clearly sees travel as a major method of ruling. But even when she is at home in London and serving as Queen of Great
Britain and Northern Ireland, Elizabeth II does her Commonwealth job. She has assigned Marlborough House as a meeting place for Commonwealth representatives, and when a conference is held in London, she invites each Commonwealth Prime Minister at least once to a private audience. At her coronation, Elizabeth wore a special gift from Commonwealth members: gold armils, or bracelets, a royal emblem that had not been used in a coronation since the 16th century.
Her Prime Ministers, collectively, steer the Commonwealth of Nations, but it is Elizabeth's ennobling and historically new role to be the single human figure in the great association that symbolizes and inspires its unity and continuity. Calmly seeing her duty, she has pledged herself to a Commonwealth "built on the highest qualities of the spirit of man: friendship, loyalty, and the desire for freedom and peace. To that new conception of an equal partnership of nations and races I shall give myself heart and soul every day of my life."