r is outgrowing the life pattern evolved by civilizations during the
past four or five millenia. As a consequence, geographical expansion by
the time-honored method of grab-and-keep has become more difficult, far
more expensive in manpower and material wealth and is in growing
disrepute among a sizeable minority of individuals and social groups,
even in the centers of western civilization. It is in notable disfavor
among the former colonies and dependencies of the European empires.

At the same time, war as a means of achieving social ends has fallen
into greater and greater disrepute. War costs, measured in terms of
human well-being and welfare had soared to fantastic heights before
1945. The devastation, during that year, of two moderate sized cities,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a foretaste of the increasingly bleak
chances of human survival with the stockpiling of nuclear weapons far
more destructive than the fission bombs used on the two Japanese cities.

Under the conditions prevailing before the great revolution, competitive
struggle between nations and empires, expanding as a result of victory
in war, had ceased to be a practicable means of gaining, holding and
increasing wealth and power. If the costs of the international power
struggle exceeded the gains, there were no longer victors who won and
vanquished who lost. Instead, everybody lost as the entire social
structure was wrenched, dislocated, wracked and down-graded. Certainly
this seemed to be the plain-as-day lesson of the two general wars and
the flurry of minor wars which swept the earth after 1910.

Expansion through armed struggle no longer paid its way. It was the
obvious lesson stressed by J.A. Hobson and Nicolai Lenin in their
respective studies of imperialism (1903 and 1916). It was the theme of
Norman Angel's _Great Illusion._ It was summarized by Arnold Toynbee's
_War and Civilization._

If the costs of expansion exceeded the income, the outcome of expansion
would be dismemberment for the vanquished and bankruptcy for the
victors. Indeed, this formula generalises the experience of the survival
struggles during the war years which began in 1911. I summarized the
experience in _The Twilight of Empire_(1929).

The catastrophic economic breakdown during the Great Depression of
1929-1938, the spectacular and fateful rise of Hitlerism in Germany
after 1927, the destructive Civil War in Spain from 1936 to 1939,
followed immediately by the war devast