On the morning of 11 February, Robert Cecil rounded on Léon Bourgeois, ‘speaking very frankly but in private’, he reminded him that ‘Americans had nothing to gain from the League’, that the ‘offer that was made by America for support was practically a present to France, and that to a certain but to a lesser extent this was the position of Great Britain’ as well. ‘If the League of Nations was not successful,’ Cecil warned, Britain would withdraw from the negotiations and make an offer of a separate ‘alliance between Great Britain and the United States’. With the darkest fear of French policy
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