Conceived at first at a moment of triumph, at the height of the crisis that followed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and Ludendorff’s Western offensive in the spring of 1918, this encompassing vision of empire became instead the vision of a defensive redoubt to which Britain would retreat if France collapsed and control of the continent fell to a rampant Germany.73 This made it all the more pressing to decide how such expansionism might be squared with the dominant power of the future, the United States. As Milner put it, ‘the remaining free peoples of the world, America, this country and the
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