"The determining factor in international politics after the second world war-was the coup d'etat at Prague, the disappearance of a democratic progressive policy and its replacement by a totalitarian government with a Communist minority. It will have a singularly important place devoted to it when the time comes to write the post-war history of international politics. The coup d'etat at Prague, the disappearance of Czechoslovakia as a free democratic State, was the last straw on the camel's back, or, if you prefer, the flash of lightning which opened the most stubborn eyes. Everyone understood in Western Europe, and fortunately also in the New World, that if we wanted to prevent the continuing unbounded development of Soviet imperialism, if we wanted to prevent its repetition in other capitals or in other more or less similar ways, yet following the same pattern, the same political procedure, that if we wanted to avoid the repetition of the events of Prague, then the Western countries had got to unite, to draw together and give Soviet Russia clearly to under- stand that Prague represented the last manifestation of this imperialism which we could permit without far more important and serious results."