ABSTRACT
Americans who had hardly thought of it before became anxious about the French Fleet, as if they suddenly realized it was part of America's defences. In the previous decade the first German world war had been popularly "de-bunked". It had been proved to the satisfaction of bright young nationalists that America's participation in that war had been a huge swindle; that the people had been drawn in by propagandists and munitions-makers to serve British interests. It had that effect in the Hitler period when both Britain and America sought to avoid war by negative or ineffective measures that is, by measures that were not supported and were not intended to be supported by force. But there is no doubt on one point: the division among the nations that was displayed and accentuated at the London conference intensified extreme nationalism everywhere, including the German nationalism which was to prove the major cause of the world war that was to come.
