In 1917 Russia’s collapse, France’s enfeeblement and the recovery of Britain’s military position in Mesopotamia came together with the new imperial focus of Lloyd George’s cabinet, to produce a far more aggressive strategy. In the eyes of Curzon and Viscount Alfred Milner the outcome of the war should be the total suppression of imperialist competition by the assertion of British control over the eastern Mediterranean and East Africa, establishing a British Monroe Doctrine in the Indian Ocean and its approaches. It was to be an all-empire project.
