The collapse of British power.
"'The summer of 1940 marked the consummation of an astonishing decline in British fortunes. The British invested their feebleness and isolation with a romantic glamour - they saw themselves as latter-day Spartans, under their own Leonidas, holding the pass for the civlised world. In fact, it was a sorry and contemptible plight for a great power, and it derived neither from bad luck, nor from the failures of others. It had been brought down upon the British by themselves.' Once...the British were thoroughly hard-nosed and aggressive about foreign plicy, but with Wellington's victory at Waterloo, there appeared the first signs of a moral change that was to leave them fatally unprepared to meet the challenges of the determined imperialists guiding other nations in the twentieth century."--Taken from book jacket flap.