Australia entered the Second World War with considerable experience of coalition warfare, mainly based on the events of the First World War. Reflecting its recent history as a group of separate British colonies, by the First World War the new nation had not developed a foreign service and had little capacity for independent strategic decision-making. The Australian Government learned that its troops had landed at Gallipoli four days after the event; it had not even been advised, let alone consulted. By the last year of the war, however, the Australian Prime Minister was sitting in the Imperial War Cabinet, although this was not a permanent arrangement. Similarly, at the operational level, the formations of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) became part of the wider Empire’s military forces and were deployed and employed by British commanders, who rarely consulted the senior Australian commanders. But by the last year of the war senior Australian commanders had learned to scrutinise the plans of their British superiors. Coalition warfare is therefore essentially about strategy and command.

The brilliantly successful but nonetheless hard-fought and bloody campaign in New Guinea in 1943 received considerable publicity at the time and has been the subject of a series of historical accounts over the succeeding decades. The story of the development of Australian strategy in the context of Allied strategy during this period has, however, received less attention. But no military campaign is conducted in a political and strategic vacuum. The New Guinea campaign was the outcome of strategic decisions by American and British political and military leaders made in conferences on the other side of the world. The nature of Australia’s contribution was determined, within Allied strategy, by political and military leaders meeting far to the south in Canberra and Brisbane. This chapter examines Australia’s role in trying to influence Allied strategy and how it decided its own strategy in 1943.

The enshrining of religious freedom in international law has long been a Protestant project. Whether as theoreticians, advocates, or policymakers, Protestants played a significant role in securing the right for religious worship’s inclusion in major international treaties and conventions, and in explaining why it could trump national sovereignty. This was true in the era of “high imperialism” and brutal European expansion, most notably in the 1885 Berlin Final Act, which divided Africa between the leading colonial powers. Representatives of Protestant missions from Britain and Germany and Protestant scholars of international law were important in drafting a clause that guaranteed “freedom of consciousness and religious toleration” to both Africans and Europeans, and which allowed missionaries of all denominations to freely preach without state restriction. Protestant visions were also central to the establishment of the League of Nations’

Drawing upon the case studies of Ilford, Epping, Birmingham Moseley and Liverpool East Toxteth, this chapter explores the relationship between the National Government and popular Conservatism in suburban, predominantly middle-class constituencies. In the 1920s, as chapter 2 argued, suburban Conservatives rejected Baldwin’s attempts to appeal to voters along apolitical lines and instead urged a robust party stance; however, their own struggle to rehabilitate the conspicuous partisanship that had characterised the civic culture of Edwardian Conservatism – and which they interpreted as apathy among ‘known’ local Conservatives - led many activists to doubt the future prospects of Conservatism in the face of Labour competition. Chapter 5 argues that 1931 proved a turning point. The experience of the general election of that year initiated Conservative activists to the advantages of articulating a non-party variety of anti-socialism that matched the cross-party makeup of the National Government. It also encouraged them to cultivate an ostensibly non-party presence in the associational life of the suburbs, including in the new housing estates. Yet, as the chapter demonstrates, the National Government continued to challenge the suburban Conservative activist in some ways: National anti-socialism could be as much a source of competition as cooperation between local Conservatives and Liberals, and the government’s policy of Indian constitutional reform antagonised elements within the party. Even so, by 1935, the Conservatives’ suburban grassroots, so often the voice of diehard Conservatism, remained wedded to the National Government and looked enthusiastically to Baldwin as both the embodiment and facilitator of its ‘national’ appeal.

Chapter 5 investigates my counter-example, the rogue diplomat whose indiscipline harmed U.S. interests. Joseph P. Kennedy, a contributor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1932 and 1936 election campaigns, demanded Embassy London as a reward, and FDR obliged. Upon arriving in Britain, Kennedy concluded that Adolf Hitler's Wermacht was invincible, that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's strategy of appeasement was correct, and that America had to remain neutral. Kennedy repeatedly misrepresented the Roosevelt administration's anti-fascist policy. Whereas FDR and Secretary of State Cordell Hull were endeavoring to bring American--and world - opinion around to a posture of resistance to Hitler, Kennedy proclaimed that America had no stake in the conflict and that, moreover, he expected Germany to win any war that might break out. No matter how often FDR ordered Kennedy to hold his tongue, he would not comply. Germany's 1939 invasion of Poland horrified the ambassador, who forecast an end to democracy in Europe and America. At the close of Kennedy's thousand days in London, Anglo-American relations were in tatters and Britain stood alone against the Nazi juggernaut. Few did more than Kennedy to bring about this hideous state of affairs.

The idea of bringing into being supranational organizations to resolve disputes between states has a distinguished lineage, going as far back as Dante Alighieri’s On World Government, Rousseau’s A Project of Perpetual Peace and Kant’s proposal for a federation of nations operating under the rule of law, and eventually evolving into “a perfect civil union of mankind.” The League of Nations was a first attempt to pool national sovereignties together to deal with the problem of war, a milestone in a long process intended to strengthen the effectiveness of mechanisms of international cooperation. The UN was initially conceived as an international entity founded on federalist principles, with substantial powers to enact laws that would be binding on member states, but it emerged as a rather less ambitious entity with two fundamental flaws: the principle of one country–one vote in the General Assembly and the veto within the Security Council, both undermining the democratic legitimacy of the organization. The chapter also reviews the concerns raised by Grenville Clark and others who thought that if member countries could not agree upon well-defined powers that they would be willing to yield, no global authority adequate to maintain peace would arise in our time.