QotD: Alliances

Partnership implies the burden is shared more or less equally. If I bought twenty quid's worth of shares in The Spectator and started swanning about bitching that Conrad Black didn't treat me as a partner, he'd rightly think I'd gone nuts. The British in their time were at least as ruthless about such realities as the Americans are today. For example, in September 1944, in one of the lesser-known conferences to prepare for the post-war world, Churchill and Roosevelt met in Quebec City. They had no compunction about excluding from their deliberations the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, even though he was the nominal host. There's a cartoon of the time showing King peering through a keyhole as the top dogs settled the fate of the world without him.

And guess what? Militarily speaking, Canada was a far bigger player back then than Britain is today: the Royal Canadian Navy was the world's third-biggest surface fleet, the Canucks got the worst beach at Normandy — but hey, why bore you with details? In those days that still wasn't enough to get you a seat at the table.

Mark Steyn, "The Brutal Cuban Winter", The Spectator, 2002-01-26