484 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
would have the effect of putting the United States and the Soviet Union
in jeopardy from one another on no less than three out of the four
quarters of the compass. As a consequence of the latitudinal encircle-
ment of the globe by the OikoumenS through the United States Navy's
strategic conquest of the Pacific in A.D. 1942-5, the two surviving Great
Powers were already both in the same plight of simultaneously encircling
and being encircled by one another—colliding, as they now did, on a
front or rear in Eastern Asia, as well as on a rear or front in Europe.1
The approaching conquest of the Arctic by the aeroplane was threaten-
ing soon to make the strategic position of both Powers even more pre-
carious by now exposing both the United States' and the Soviet Union's
northern flank to the new danger of trans-polar attack by air;2 and, if
this menace were to materialize, either Power would find itself in the
desperate situation of having to provide concurrently for the defence of
three fronts, each of which would be in danger of being turned from one
flank as well as from the rear. Thus, in a now global Oikoumen$ at the
opening of the second half of the twentieth century of the Christian Era,
either of the two still standing gladiators was in a posture to inflict upon,
and to have inflicted upon him by, his adversary the shattering expe-
rience that once, at the crisis of the second paroxysm of an Hellenic Time
of Troubles, had been inflicted upon the Romans by Hannibal and his
brethren,

ad confligendum venientibus undique Poenis
omnia cum belli trepido concussa tumultu
horrida contremuere sub altis aetheris oris
in dubioque fuere utrorum ad regna cadendum
omnibus humanis esset terraque marique.3

Nor was this the end of a twentieth-century transformation-scene;
for, in the act of enveloping the face of the globe, the Oikoumen& was
contracting in scale, as measured by the speed of human means of com-
munication, far faster than it was expanding in area, as measured by its
extension over the physical surface of the planet. At the instant at which
the OikoumenS was assuming, on the strategic plane, the shape of a
thirteenth-century Western helmet, this great helm was shrinking to the

1 When the news of the Japanese attack on the United States fleet in Pearl Harbour
reached England, an American visitor remarked to an English colleague of the present
writer's, with whom he was discussing the news: 'It is all very well for you here in Eng-
land to take this news so calmly! You can afford to, I suppose, considering that, in
England, you are six thousand miles away from the front'. Forgetting, in the excitement
of the moment, that the "World had now become round and boundless, instead of being
still flat and finite, this American commentator had consequently forgotten for th<
moment that a Britain which was six thousand miles and more to the east of the Japanese
fleet's and air force's Pacific theatre of operations against Pearl Harbour was only twenty
miles to the west of the German Luftwaffe's Continental bases of operations against
Britain herself.

2 The possibility that the ardent'advance of Western Science might soon be going tc
set the North Pole on fire seems to have been overlooked by Senator Dandurand oJ
Canada when, in A.D, 1924, in a debate on the draft Geneva Protocol for the Pacific
Settlement of International Disputes, he had the hardihood to say about his nativi
country: 'We live in a fire-proof house, far from inflammable materials. A vast ocear
separates us from Europe.* In A.D. 1952 it was manifest that, as soon as the Arctic Circb
became traversable by military aircraft, Canada's strategico-palitical situation wouk
become much like what Belgium's had been in A.D. 1014 and in A.D. 1040.

a Lucretius: De Rerum Naturd, Book III, 11. 833-7.