At the end of World War II, the Americans and the British ruled, or heavily influenced by traditional right, or occupied, or sustained by force of arms righteously exercised, almost all the world except what was under the hobnailed jackboot of Stalin’s Red Army (largely supplied by the United States as it was). The masses of the world were generally uneducated and didn’t speak English, but most of their local leaders did.
Latin America admired the U.S., as Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy gave back a good deal of sovereignty and ended the practice of having the United Fruit Company and other American corporations deploy the U.S. Marines around Central America. Most of the Latin American countries joined the war effort, if only to be in at the founding of the United Nations, and the whole hemisphere — except for Canada, a dominion of the British Commonwealth and autonomous but in close alliance with Great Britain — sheltered under the shield of the Monroe Doctrine, which under its more vigorous espousers had purported to authorize the U.S. to intervene anywhere in Latin America for almost any reason.
The British Indian empire (now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Nepal) was restless, but it, and the spine of Africa from Cairo and Alexandria in a thick red line on the map to the Cape, all South Africa, most of Australasia and the Middle East, and other chunks of territory (including Nigeria, Malaya, Cyprus, and much of the Caribbean) were British. American and British forces occupied most of Germany and Italy, and were much in evidence as liberators of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, and Greece. The U.S. occupied Japan, half of Korea, and maintained a lifeline to the Nationalist government of China. The U.S. owned and occupied the Panama Canal, and the British owned and held the Suez Canal, and the countries together had 95 percent of the naval forces in the world and controlled every sea and ocean beyond any possible dispute.
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