In retrospect, it is all too easy to see the common interests of the nations of Europe to band together to stop the onward march of ugly Nazism. At the time, it was obviously easier for these nations to see instead their own immediate individual interests, and they lost sight of their permanent common interests until too late.

Not only did the legacy of World War I naturally divide the victors from the vanquished; it also left the victors divided among themselves. In the idiom of Winston Churchill, Britain was a sea animal, and France was in 1918 primarily and unavoidably a land animal. From the date of the armistice, their interests diverged. That document stipulated the surrender of the German navy, the German colonies, and a large part of the German merchant marine; in other words, of all the instruments of German Weltpolitik of primary concern to the maritime interests of Great Britain. Although it also stipulated general German disarmament, it did not give the French anything comparable to God's own gift to the British, that great moat of the high seas, the English Channel, between London and the continent. So the French reached for substitutes. They proposed breaking up Southwestern Germany into separate states, but the British and the Americans refused, as it would violate the sacred principle of self-determination. The French then demanded an Anglo–American alliance to guarantee the security of their German frontier.