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The disintegration of the Western Alliance was a predictable response to the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of a threat to the security of the entire democratic world. For most of the 20th century, first an imperialist and then a rabidly nationalist and racist Germany, and then Soviet Russia and international Communism, threatened the West, led by the Americans, British, and French, as the premier democracies. The United States provided the margin of victory at the end of World War I and furnished emergency assistance to Great Britain to keep it in the war in 1940–41. Roosevelt compared unlimited assistance to Britain and Canada to lending your garden hose to a neighbor fighting a fire, as he extended U.S. territorial waters from three to 1,800 miles and ordered the...