Abstract
The nineteenth-century prophecy that Russia and the United States would be the dominant powers of the twentieth century was fulfilled at the end of the Second World War. None of the other former major powers could have any pretensions to the superpower status which it was recognised the United States and the Soviet Union occupied. Japan and Germany were defeated and the latter was about to be divided. France was recovering from the humiliation of defeat in 1940 and from the divisions caused by the Vichy regime. Britain, despite retaining the trappings of an imperial power, was financially broke. As the war had progressed its relative contribution of men and material to the fighting forces had steadily declined. Britain, Churchill ruefully acknowledged, was a ‘little donkey’ compared to ‘the great Russian bear’ and ‘the great American buffalo’.1 While the manpower and economic resources of the United States and the Soviet Union were fundamental to their leading positions, the dramatic extent of their predominance owed much to the involvement of the European powers in a second major war little more than twenty years after the end of the first.
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Notes
D. Dilks (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Alaxander Cadogan, 1938–1945 (London: Cassell, 1971), p. 382.
Quoted in R. Ovendale, Appeasement and the English-Speaking World (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1975), p. 7.
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Quoted in J. W Dower, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harrard University Press, 1979), p. 109.
Quoted in Ian Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy: Kasumigaseki to Miyakezaka (London: Routledge, 1977), p. 260.
Quoted in Ikeda Kiyoshi in I. Nish, Anglo-Japanese Alienation, 1919–1952 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 144.
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© 2001 Margaret Lamb and Nicholas Tarling
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Lamb, M., Tarling, N. (2001). Conclusions. In: From Versailles to Pearl Harbor. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-3772-8_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-3772-8_9
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