The British Imperial Establishment, Post Imperial Era, and the ‘Churchillian’ World View, 1945-2016. (Adjustments & Challenges in Contemporary British Diplomatic Strategy)

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and
other parts of the empire it was a single that the British Empire was fragile
and therefore the struggle
for attaining independent nationhood began with India
leading the way.

The
British, nonetheless, did reconquer their lost Far Eastern empire but
Britain’s imperial standing was
already too damaged to be able to maintain the
empire as it did before 1939. “After 1941 the Soviet
Union and the United States
bore an increasing share of the war effort. Neither of these powers
were
particularly friendly towards British imperialism; the Soviet government disliked
the Empire
from conviction based on theory, the Americans from habit. In some
respects President Roosevelt was as
inclined to trust Stalin as Winston Churchill.
This meant that neither Russia nor the United States
considered in their duty to
help maintain the British Empire.”42 The United States’ anti-colonialism attitude
also became a pressure on the
British Empire.

American Anti-Colonialism and the
Decolonisation of the British Empire.

The
United States’ first phase of expansion was without fighting any major
wars. It had no rivals on the
continent and therefore rapidly occupied its
hinterland. It soon made its presence felt outside the
continent (Liberia, 1820;
Japan, 1854; China, 1859) and by the turn of the century ensured its
economic
dominance over the American continent and occupied the Pacific as far as the
Philippines.
“Until the Korean War, the U.S.A had known only absolute victories,
total successes; the conquest of
the West, the purchase of land from foreign
powers (Alaska in 1867), wars against Mexico and Spain. The
interventions in
1917 and 1941 themselves were wars in which the United States was protected
by its
geographic isolation.”43

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