Our quarrel is not with Egypt, still less with the Arab world. It is with Colonel Nasser. He has shown that he is not a man who can be trusted to kee… - Anthony Eden

[W]e cannot ignore that, while increasing anxiety in Europe and elsewhere has resulted in many countries increasing their armaments, our own armaments have shown no comparable increase. On the contrary, when compared either with the immediate post-War period or with the period before the War, it will be found, I am confident, that whereas the trend of the armaments of the nations as a whole shows a definite increase, our own armaments show a reduction. I will give you one example. The tonnage of our Navy in 1914 was 2,160,000. This month it is 1,180,000. The personnel in our Navy in August, 1914, was 152,000, whereas today it is 92,338. At the close of the War there was no air force in the world superior to ours. Today we are only fifth among the air Powers. Our Army, as the world knows, is little more than a police force. Those facts do not justify any suggestion that we as a nation have rearmed, or are rearming, excessively; still less do they afford the flimsiest basis for the fantastic charge that we are leading an armaments race. On the contrary, the truth is that we have for long delayed the most elementary measures of national defence in the hope that international agreement would eventually make them unnecessary.

Results bad...whole tone and temper very different to a year ago, rearmed and rearming with the old Prussian spirit very much in evidence. Russia is now the bogey.

He had been sorry to see during the last few weeks the re-emergence of such phrases as "pro-German" and "pro-French". In the modern world such phrases had no meaning whatever. The British were not "anti" any nation in Europe. They were not hostile to any people, nor did they regard any as antipathetic to them. The British people had never been good haters. Their inclination had always been to forgive and forget at once. Sometimes, indeed, this readiness had even seemed a little incomprehensible to those who had been our comrades in arms, but it was an essential element in the British character. As in the past, so today.
We were not "anti" nation, but we should be; we must be "anti" any who might seek by force to break the peace. We should always be found arrayed on the side of the collective system against any Government or people who sought by a return to power politics to break up the peace, which by that system we were seeking to create. And they should not forget that the Covenant itself provided the machinery by which the peaceful settlement of international disputes could be secured.