476 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
Austria had not, by A.D. 1952, yet followed East Germany and Nort
East Austria into Russia's maw was that these two other fragments oi
dismembered Third Reich had come meanwhile under the control
the United States and her West European allies Great Britain ai
France; and by this date it had become clear that the substitution
a United States protectorate for an untenable independence was t
only insurance against Russian domination that promised to be effecti
in the long run for any state anywhere in the World.

This role, which was a new role for the United States in the C
World, was a familiar role of hers in the New World; for the substitute
of a covert for an overt subjection through a process of nominal libei
tion was a tragi-comedy that, before being played in Central and Easte
Europe between A.D. 1918 and A.D. 1945, had been played in Lai
America more than a hundred years earlier, between A.D. 1810 and A
1823. From the days of the Holy Alliance to the days of the Third Rei(
the Monroe Doctrine had saved the successor-states of the Spani
Empire in the Americas from falling under the domination of soi
other Continental European Power at the price of replacing a Spani
imperial administration by a United States political hegemony, that h
been none the less effective for being exercised light-handedly, and
a no less alien economic ascendancy that had been enjoyed for a hundi
years by the United Kingdom before this, too, had passed into Noi
American hands. Since the reversal of the ratio of the relative strengi
of the United States and Great Britain as a result of Great Britain's lo
and the United States' gain, in economic strength in the War of A
1914-18, the underwriting of the Monroe Doctrine by British sea-pov
had ceased to be a necessity for the United States at the moment wt
it had ceased to be a possibility for the British Empire.

In a nineteenth-century Western World in which all the Great Pow
except Great Britain had been situated on the European peninsula of i
Eurasian Continent, the sea-power of the United Kingdom had
cidentally screened the Americas in the act of screening the British Is
and the Transoceanic possessions of the British Crown against •
danger of attack by any other Great Power then in existence. The te
porarily favourable politico-geographical situation that had made it p
sible for the British Navy thus to provide strategic security for the enl
English-speaking and overseas world bad, howevers ceased to e:
when, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of the Chi
tian Era, two new Great Powers—the United States herself and Jaj
—had arisen outside the British naval cordon round Continental Eur<
at the moment when, from within the cordon, British naval suprem
was being challenged by Germany; and the United Kingdom's inabil
in these radically altered circumstances, to continue to give effed
naval protection to the whole of the British Empire, not to speak of
United States and the Latin American republics, had been dem<
Ttrated in the course of half a century ending in A.D. 1945.

Even before the outbreak of the First World War, the challenge fr
Germany had constrained Great Britain to seek a reinforcement of
OFWB naval strength—in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean by enter