[I]t was the shortage of resources – economic and financial – which posed by far the gravest question of all for the British Government after the fal… - Correlli Barnett

It hardly needs emphasising that this wartime technological revolution marked a complete departure from Victorian and Edwardian laissez-faire orthodoxy. Given time for consolidation and further development – probably under some form of protection such as fostered the growth of American, German and Japanese industry – Britain's wartime achievements might have served as the starting-point for a root-and-branch modernisation of Britain as an industrial society. Indeed, the 1918 report of the Committee on Commercial and Industrial Policy virtually recommended this.
More fundamentally still, the wartime revolution could have served as the prototype for a new British "total strategy", based on Britain's own technological strength: in other words, the German and Japanese version of capitalism, a partnership between state and industry, rather than the Anglo-Saxon version. But instead Britain tried after the war to revert to her Victorian and Edwardian total strategy based on laissez-faire, the City of London, the gold-standard pound sterling and the Empire – with consequences which would only be fully revealed when the Second World War submitted Britain to yet another audit of industrial capability.

The war embraced infinitely complex elements and motives. The most important single one of those elements was the struggle for power in Europe, and the world. Between 1870 and 1914 Britain and France had been stagnant and declining in comparative industrial vigour. They nevertheless owned great territories and enjoyed vast traditional overseas markets. Germany...had been comfortably and steadily taking over the markets before 1914; she would have liked the possessions as well. No wonder France and Britain had been so much in favour of defending the political status quo. Yet, as the endless surges and recessions of power throughout history indicate, a fixed status quo is an absurdity because static. The problem of the world of nation states before 1914 was the eternal problem of continually adjusting political structure so that it always fits and expresses the reality of power.

The French, in their attitude to making peace, were...preoccupied with the question of Germany's power in the future; a future which they saw as one of continued rivalry between nations.
The British and the Americans, on the other hand, had no such hard, clear-cut policy; felt no such overriding concern with German power. In the first place they shared the liberal assumption that the normal human condition was what they called "peace"; a natural harmony in which "war" was simply a meaningless and regrettable breakdown. They did not agree with the Clausewitzian view that "peace" and "war" were alternating aspects of a perpetual conflict of interest between organised human groups, a conflict which can express itself in mere economic and diplomatic rivalry; in threats of force; in covert violence or open pressure; in local use of force; in limited war; or finally, in total war. The notion that the Allied victory in the Great War was just one episode in a continuing struggle, from which the maximum advantage must be derived for the next episode, was therefore alien and repellent to them.