Americans find it tedious to be told by the more assertive Britons how their beleaguered island stood alone against the world in 1940. The American conviction that the war really began when the Japanese blew us into it at Pearl Harbor is equally tedious to Britons. Nevertheless, the British did stand defiantly alone. They whipped the _Luftwaffe_, and they took heavy punishment from German bombs. They fought hard, if often unsuccessfully, in the Western Desert, Greece, Crete, Abyssinia, and Syria. All this went on while we across the Atlantic began ponderously to arm and to argue at great length whether the Nazi dictatorship really was a threat to freedom. These events affected those Britons who are now moving toward the direction of the nation's destinies. The cabinet minister of today or tomorrow may be the destroyer seaman, tank-commander, or coal-miner of 1940. However deplorable the attitude may seem from our standpoint and from the standpoint of some individual Britons, the British people believe something is due them for their exertions. The wiser leaders, speaking from both the left and the right, advise their countrymen to forget the past and think of the future. How they will think of their international future is a different matter. For the first time since 1940 there is now a strong sentiment in Britain for going it alone. There is also a revulsion against all forms of international association, starting with the United Nations and extending to NATO and SEATO. To anyone who understands the pride and toughness that lie at the center of the British character this is understandable. They have never been afraid of being alone. In considering British dissatisfaction with the place accorded their country in the American outlook, it should not be thought that this reflects lack of liaison between the two nations on the lower echelons of diplomacy. The co-operation between the United States Embassy officials and the Foreign Office in London ordinarily is very close. So is the co-operation between the British Embassy diplomats in Washington and the State Department. To repeat, it is in situations like the crises over Cyprus and Suez that the British feel they are treated by the State Department and the administration not as the most powerful and reliable of allies but as just another friendly nation. This concern over Britain's place within the alliance is sharpened by doubts over the ability of the United States to exercise leadership in a manner that will secure both the peace of the world and the maintenance of the interests of the West. Such doubts arise generally from the wide differences between what American policy really is and what various spokesmen for the United States say it is. Let us consider two statements by John Foster Dulles, a man who, when he became Secretary of State in 1953, was admired and trusted by professional British diplomats and by politicians interested in international affairs.