ABSTRACT
Only two conditions of humankind really count, war and peace-the latter in its fullest sense: may peace be with you. The great failures of Britain and the USA in the 1920s and 1930s were their inability both to absorb the changes wrought by the last war and to prevent the next. One of their great achievements was that peace was kept in their own relationship to an extent that made their world-saving co-operation possible between 1940 and 1945. The reasons for their failure and their success are not unconnected, as the context for their relationship in the inter-war period will show.
