In their struggle to defeat Germany, the Entente entered into an unprecedented period of dependence on the United States. This new asymmetrical financial geometry signalled the end to the great-power competition that had defined the age of imperialism. It did so in a double sense. On the one hand, the Entente’s transatlantic war effort defeated Germany. But at the same time it raised the US to a position of unprecedented dominance, not over its Caribbean satrapies or the Philippines, but over Britain, France and Italy, the great powers of Europe. In its basic outline this was exactly the kind
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