M /[ ICHAEL HOWARD, in his earlier lecture in this series, confirmed what I had suspected: that the United States deserves some of the credit for Britain's decision to create a Foreign Office in the first place. The Foreign Office was founded only a few months after the battle of Yorktown. The 'politicians' of the time having just mislaid America, the need was evidently felt for some more professional machinery to run Britain's newly expanded sphere of 'foreign' affairs. Since then, Britain and America have never ceased to play important roles in each other's history. On the whole it has been a productive and creative relationship, perhaps one of the most durable in the history of nations. In the last 200 years, we have approached each other sometimes warily, and dealt with foreign affairs often from different perspectives. Still, on balance the relationship has been of considerable benefit to world peace. This has been true particularly of the period since the Second World War. All accounts of the Anglo-American alliance during the Second World War and in the early postwar period draw attention to the significant differences in philosophy between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, reflecting our different national histories. America, which had never experienced a foreign threat to its survival, considered wars an historical aberration caused by evil men or institutions; we were preoccupied with victory defined as the unconditional surrender of the Axis. Britain had seen aggression take too many forms to risk so personal a view of history; she had her eyes on the postwar world and sought to gear wartime strategy towards forestalling Soviet domination of Central Europe. Many American leaders condemned Churchill as needlessly obsessed with power politics, too rigidly anti-Soviet, too colonialist in his attitude to what is now called the Third World, and too little interested in building the fundamentally new international order towards which American idealism has always tended. The British undoubtedly saw the Americans as naive, moralistic, and evading responsibility for helping secure