The Twilight of Empire: Starting from Dunkirk

Chapter 161 The Liquidator's Dinner and the Backlash of Capital

August 2, 1940, 5:30 p.m., Buckinghamshire, Cheguers Court (the official country house of the British Prime Minister).

The polar cold air mass over the Atlantic Ocean and the warm Gulf Stream converged violently in the waters west of Ireland, forming a thick, low-sounding reflective cloud covering tens of thousands of square nautical miles.

A Boeing 314 Clipper, a large passenger plane painted with the Stars and Stripes, is powered by four Wright Twin engines on its wings, each producing a power output of 1600 horsepower.

The Cyclone's fourteen-cylinder radial air-cooled engine struggled to penetrate the thick cumulonimbus clouds.

On either side of this giant passenger plane, which represents the pinnacle of American civil aviation technology, two Royal Air Force Spitfire Mk.I fighter jets are maintaining an extremely tight escort formation.

Compared to the massive fuselage of the Boeing airliner, which gleams with the luster of aluminum alloy, the Spitfire fighter jet, with its slender body painted in dark green and sea gray camouflage and armed with eight .303 Browning machine guns, exudes a pure killing aura forged in the meat grinder of long-term, high-intensity warfare.

Inside the luxurious first-class cabin of the Boeing aircraft, Harry Hopkins sank deep into the leather seat. He was wrapped in an extremely thick wool coat, and even though the cabin's steam heating system was working properly, he still felt a bone-chilling cold.

This close confidant of US President Franklin Roosevelt, and an informal cabinet member who effectively held the highest level of strategic resource allocation authority within the White House, was currently in an extremely poor physical condition.

This doesn't mean he's not in good condition; it means he's actually sick.

The severe aftereffects of his gastric cancer surgery meant that his digestive system was almost unable to absorb enough nutrients from food. His emaciated body, reduced to just a skeleton, was kept running entirely by an astonishing willpower and large doses of painkillers.

But beneath that frail body, Hopkins' brain was working like a top-of-the-line mechanical calculator on Wall Street, operating at breakneck speed.

On his lap was an open black briefcase containing a top-secret document jointly written by the U.S. Army, Navy, and Strategic Intelligence Department—"The Assessment Report on the War Potential and Current Value of the British Empire's Bad Assets."

Hopkins' gaze passed through the porthole, looking down at the leaden-gray Atlantic Ocean below, where German U-boats might be lurking at any moment. A barely concealed, arrogant smirk, belonging to a creditor, curled at the corner of his mouth.

As Roosevelt's chief private envoy, Hopkins was acutely aware of the purpose and mission of his trip, and knew better than anyone how much infighting and scheming was hidden inside that super factory called America across the ocean.

The United States of America has never been a monolithic entity.

Inside this massive state machine, the friction between the gears has reached an extremely unpleasant level.

The old financial magnates on the east coast, with pure Pangaea-Saxon blood flowing through their veins, families with deep-rooted ties to London through marriage and capital since the Mayflower era, genuinely wanted to save the British Empire.

Or rather, they were extremely eager to preserve their enormous sunk costs in the City of London. These people were the core driving force behind Roosevelt's bailout plan.

But apart from these old-money families, the other factions were like hungry wolves eyeing the corpse of Europe. The newly rich industrialists in the Midwest and the agricultural tycoons who controlled massive amounts of votes had no sympathy for the fate of the other side of the Atlantic; they wished the Old World would be completely reduced to ashes so that their domestic products could completely monopolize the world.

Aside from the interests of the various families, the war between the U.S. Army and Navy has also reached a fever pitch. The internal struggle over heavy industrial capacity and war resources has escalated to the point of being almost a brutal hand-to-hand battle, with both sides behaving in an extremely unseemly manner.

Led by Major General George Patton, the radical Army generals were fixated on the German Wehrmacht's armored forces sweeping across Europe like a steel storm. The entire Army high command was gripped by a profound sense of insecurity and a fear of insufficient firepower. The day before their departure, they roared at the Washington conference table, slamming their fists on the table with extremely vulgar language, demanding that every Springfield rifle fresh off the assembly line, every bulky but indispensable M3 medium tank, and every quantity of high-explosive ammunition produced on the assembly line be firmly held in the Americas. They desperately needed these outdated yet essential weapons to fill and expand the standing army, which had been drastically reduced to a pitiful, even meager, size during peacetime.

On the other side of the appeal, the Navy high command, led by Admiral Haspen Kimmel, turned the extremely vigilant and hostile Self-Defense Force across the west coast of Japan and fixed its gaze on the vast Pacific Ocean and the Japanese Combined Fleet that was frantically launching new warships.

Under the terrifying shadow of inter-ocean warfare, these naval commanders, like misers, fiercely guarded every inch of armor plating, every high-pressure steam pipeline, and every penny of the budget in the shipyards and dry docks. They were extremely resistant, even hysterically opposed, to the idea of ​​giving away even a single rusty, World War I-era destroyer moored on the breakwater as a expendable gift to the Royal Navy, which was struggling in the bloody waters of the Atlantic.

According to the extremely cold-blooded official rhetoric of the Naval Staff: when faced with the aggressive battle lines and carrier surge of the Japanese Navy, the United States Pacific Fleet itself was not quite up to par in terms of absolute main battle tonnage.

Imperialist steel can only be used to defend the interests of their own country. Washington simply does not have any surplus industrial capacity or shipbuilding budget to "help" those British cousins ​​who are about to be completely sent to the bottom of the sea by German submarines across the ocean.

This intricate web of interests and internal constraints made Hopkins feel like his head was about to explode, but he had no choice but to grit his teeth and go for it. The calculations made his political mission and the negotiating ground extremely heavy.

In general, in the eyes of most senators on Capitol Hill in Washington and cold-blooded bankers on Wall Street, the war taking place on the European continent is not a noble holy war to "defend freedom and democracy," but merely a brutal dogfight between old-world imperialists vying for global resource allocation and redrawing the industrial map.

At least the vast majority of the powerful and wealthy who control the direction of capital and the state apparatus believe that as long as the war hasn't reached the coastline of the Western Hemisphere, how many Europeans die or how many tons of warships sink in the cold waters of the Atlantic are irrelevant to the core interests of the United States of America.

Their only concern was how to monetize America's excess military production capacity at high prices during this unprecedented massacre, and how to efficiently take over the heavy industrial heritage of the defeated nations at the final armistice negotiation table.

It was under this calculation that, in this assessment report issued by Washington, the British Empire was clearly labeled as a "giant multinational corporation that is bleeding rapidly and may face full bankruptcy at any time."

All they needed to know was that the massive French army had been utterly destroyed, and air superiority over the English Channel was undergoing an extremely costly and brutal war of attrition.

Those bankers were absolutely certain that as the war continued to escalate, the British Empire's royal treasury, which had been accumulated over centuries and remained extremely wealthy, would eventually be completely emptied.

A simple examination of the current global distribution of hard currency reveals the nauseatingly greedy appetite of Wall Street hidden behind its neutral policies.

On the European continent, the once enormous gold reserves of the French Bank, held by the Gauls, had been hastily loaded onto cruisers and scattered to overseas vaults in Dakar and Martinique on the eve of the German armored divisions' advance on Paris, completely withdrawing them from the global circulation and settlement of capital. As for the Führer in Berlin, wielding his armored spear, although he had just brutally plundered the treasuries of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, the Third Reich's underlying precious metal reserves remained extremely poor. That war machine was entirely built on the frenzied exploitation of war to sustain war and on extremely fragile credit vouchers.

Meanwhile, across the ocean in the United States of America, their underground vaults in Fort Knox, Kentucky, have accumulated a massive share of the world's gold reserves due to the enormous profits from the last World War and the recent frenzy of capital flight from Europe to escape the war. However, in the eyes of Wall Street actuaries, as long as the British Empire has not been completely drained, this century-long harvest is far from over.

Because on this planet, the one that truly holds the most massive hegemony over the underlying hard currency is still this British Empire.

From the roaring gold mining lines in South Africa's Rand mining region, which account for more than half of the world's total output, to the bottomless strategic reserves of Canada and Australia, and the global solid wealth accumulated by the City of London over the past three centuries.

In the eyes of capitalists, the British Empire was not a dying ally, but an extremely juicy, yet uncut, super-golden cake, so greasy that it could probably turn America into a super-fat man in one go.

According to their calculations, if the war continues to develop in this way, the best outcome would be for both sides to fall into a protracted war of attrition. In that case, those dazzling gold bars weighing four hundred ounces and gleaming with the lingering glory of the empire would cross the ocean at an extremely terrifying speed and flow continuously into the underground vaults of the United States of America, becoming extremely cold-blooded figures on Wall Street's ledgers to pay for the extremely high-priced orders for weapons, heavy machine tools, and raw materials issued by Detroit and Pittsburgh.

No need to send out a single soldier, no need to receive any death notices. Use the surplus industrial products from the assembly line to greedily drain the centuries-old accumulation of an empire spanning centuries.

For Americans, this was an absolutely lucrative transnational harvest.

But those people were also very clear about one thing: they absolutely could not cross the red line—the only premise for this transoceanic wealth harvest was that Europe's meat grinder had to be kept in a state of "continuous bleeding," and absolutely could not be a defeat that would end quickly.

If the British Empire's anti-submarine escort network were to completely collapse within the next three months, forcing the homeland to surrender to Berlin due to a severe shortage of industrial supplies, then all the seamless steel pipes, high explosives, and heavy machine tools currently en route to the British Isles, loaded onto thousands of cargo ships amidst the raging storms of the Atlantic, would inevitably be labeled with the swastika of the Third Reich and become a very substantial part of the Nazi war booty list.

These goods, which could have been exchanged for gold, will instead become a complete and utter loss on Wall Street's balance sheet.

A huge, unrecoverable debt.

If such an extreme strategic collapse were to actually occur, it would be a devastating disaster for the United States of America as well.

Given the extremely irrational logic of that Berlin-based Führer, once he controlled the shipyards and heavy industry base across continental Europe, from France to Poland, he would very likely have forcefully rejected the absolute liquidity of gold as hard currency throughout Europe. He could have easily used his vast steel production capacity and the bayonets of his armed forces to forcibly implement a completely new fascist settlement system, detached from the gold standard and based on labor quotas and industrial output, effectively shutting out the dollar and Wall Street capital from Europe.

After all, in this brutal century where everything was crushed by large-caliber naval guns and armored tracks, when an empire’s core sovereignty was completely lost, the heavy and dazzling precious metals piled up in underground vaults were too soft even to serve as stepping stones for tank tracks.

Once a nation collapses, the dead can never pay their dollar bills. For these American capitalists to securely take the British Empire's gold, they must ensure this major client remains alive.

As for the war going to another unrealistic extreme—the British Empire crushing the Third Reich in a short period of time and ending this meat grinder prematurely?

Sorry, but the actuaries on Wall Street and the senior staff officers in the War Department building in Washington are not blind men who are blindly optimistic based on Churchill's passionate speeches.

Their desks were piled high with European production reports and aerial reconnaissance photographs every day. The Krupp steel furnaces roaring day and night, the extremely thick heavy metal fumes in the Ruhr region, and the thousands of armored vehicles that had swept through the Gauls in the Ardennes Forest a few months earlier, had already demonstrated the terrifying efficiency of Nazi Germany's war machine.

According to intelligence assessments in Washington, the British Empire was now struggling to maintain even the most basic defenses of the English Channel and protect the Thames River from Stuka bomber incursions. The idea of ​​single-handedly and swiftly defeating the steel monster that had completely devoured the heavy industry base of continental Europe was simply a pipe dream.

Hopkins is now taking this report across the ocean in an attempt to forcibly strip the last piece of valuable flesh from the British Empire before bad debts occur.

In response, President Roosevelt proposed the Destroyers for Bases Agreement.

Agreement)

—A classic example of “profiteering” and “forced divestment” targeting the core assets of a dying competitor, while simultaneously allowing the British Empire to linger on.

The White House's calculations were extremely shrewd: the US government was willing to provide five thousand World War I-era flat-deck destroyers that had been mothballed in Boston and Philadelphia naval dockyards for twenty years. These ships had a displacement of just over a thousand tons...

Old ships with severely aged boilers and lacking any modern anti-submarine acoustic detection equipment are, for the U.S. Navy, industrial scrap metal ready to be dismantled and melted down at any time.

But the price the Americans demanded in exchange for this pile of scrap metal was outrageously expensive. The British Empire had to sign formal legal documents and relinquish the exclusive 99-year leases of the most strategically valuable naval and air bases in a series of overseas territories, including Newfoundland, the Bahamas, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Antigua, and British Guyana.

Geographically, these bases form a chain, directly controlling the entrance to the Caribbean Sea, the outer defenses of the Panama Canal, and absolute naval control over the east coast of North America.

This is essentially a strategic hedge with absolutely no risk.

In Washington's view, as long as they got the islands they wanted, even if the British Empire were to completely collapse a month later and the Royal Navy were forced to surrender to Little Mustache, the United States of America would have already used a pile of scrap metal to build an absolute defensive buffer zone in the Western Hemisphere, consisting of former British territories, ensuring the geopolitical security of the North American continent.

Hopkins closed his briefcase.

His trip to London was to carry out this bankruptcy liquidation. With the arrogance of a representative of the world's largest industrial entity, he was prepared to scrutinize Winston Churchill's face, etched with despair and exhaustion, under the dim light of an air-raid shelter, and to force the Prime Minister of the Empire, who was teetering on the brink of collapse, to sign documents that would sell off the nation's core sovereign territory.

Two hours later. Buckinghamshire, Chequers.

This Tudor-style brick building, dating back to the 16th century, was placed under extremely strict blackout regulations in preparation for the impending nighttime bombing raids by the German Luftwaffe. All the windows were tightly sealed with heavy blackout curtains, and from the outside, the entire villa was devoid of light, resembling a silent, giant tomb.

Hopkins entered the villa, escorted by a squad of heavily armed Royal Marines guards.

However, the moment he was led into the main restaurant, the preconceived scenarios of "despair," "panic," and "scarcity" in his mind collapsed dramatically.

The restaurant's lighting was functioning properly, with a huge crystal chandelier casting a bright and warm glow. A pristine white Irish linen tablecloth covered the long oak dining table, and the immaculate silver cutlery appeared cold and elegant under the light.

The scale of the dinner completely shattered Hopkins's common sense about the wartime rationing system currently in place in Britain.

The main course is a thick-cut Argentine premium ribeye steak grilled over charcoal, accompanied by fresh butter-baked potatoes and greenhouse-grown asparagus, with...

The wine served with the meal was a vintage of excellent French Bordeaux red wine, exuding a rich berry aroma.

Winston Churchill sat at the head of the long table.

The prime minister, whom they considered "on the verge of collapse," showed no signs of the gloom and anxiety one might expect in an air-raid shelter. Instead, he was enjoying a hearty meal of high-calorie beef. His complexion was rosy, his lungs were full of energy, and there was even a bit of rich black pepper gravy on his napkin.

On Churchill's right, in the guest seat usually reserved for his most important staff, sat an extremely young British nobleman.

Before the dinner began, during a brief break while sipping sherry by the fireplace in the living room, Hopkins had already noticed the young man.

He wore a black evening suit with an extremely fitted silhouette, the white shirt collar crisp as a blade, and his bow tie perfectly symmetrical. His movements were highly disciplined and rhythmic; whether it was the way he raised his wine glass or the control of his strength when cutting beef, everything was precise to the extreme, and the friction between the silver cutlery and the bone china plate was kept to a minimum decibel level.

The subtle movements of cutting ribeye steak with silver cutlery are not something that nouveau riche on Wall Street who have made a quick buck can forcibly imitate through etiquette courses.

This is an extremely profound, innate quality ingrained in the deepest part of one's bloodline. It is a breathtaking composure forged from the intertwining and tempering of centuries of old-fashioned aristocratic heritage and absolute power that controls the lifeline of the nation's heavy industry.

Arthur sat calmly in the carved oak chair, his breathing and the curve of his lips remaining perfectly still. But to Hopkins' keen senses, the young oligarch exuded an omnipresent, absolute dominance.

He even had the illusion that in this restaurant filled with great power rivalry and scheming, he was the one in control, the real mastermind behind this massive war machine called the British Empire.

In contrast, the Prime Minister beside him, who was munching on roasted meat and letting thick cigar ash fall casually onto his waistcoat, instantly stripped bare of his proud leadership. Compared to Arthur's absolute elegance and ruthlessness, Winston Churchill's demeanor was as crude as a country foreman who had just stepped out of a Birmingham steel furnace, reeking of smoke and coal dust.

He certainly knew this man—Arthur Sterling.

In the classified archives of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor of the OSS), an entire cabinet of files was dedicated to the Sterling family. Hopkins knew very well that this elegant young man before him controlled more than 60 percent of the British Empire's heavy industrial capacity, the most crucial radar tube production line, and an extremely large ocean-going shipping fleet.

He even suspected that the outrageously lavish dinner on the table had been forcibly transported from South America by Sterling's fast freighters, bypassing the German U-boat blockade.

At this moment, Arthur Sterling, seated at the dining table, listened with a smile to the meaningless and insincere small talk between Churchill and Hopkins.

His deep-set eyes coldly fixed on the American envoy across the table. Beneath the surface of polite formalities, the clash between the British Empire, the hegemon of the old world, and the upstart across the ocean had already begun.

Arthur sneered inwardly, thinking about the world order decades after the war ended.

People around the world like to call the British Empire a "troublemaker in Europe." They say that the British, relying on the English Channel as a natural anti-tank trench and the Royal Navy's insurmountable battle line, endlessly sow discord and support the weak while suppressing the strong on the European continent, maintaining an extremely bloody offshore balance of power.

But in Arthur's view as a time traveler, while the British methods were indeed somewhat disgusting, they were limited to a small European peninsula. It was precisely the Americans on the other side of the ocean who truly took this extremely dirty national strategy of "offshore balancing" to its extreme and made it a global phenomenon.

Americans are the true "world troublemakers" on this planet, utterly devoid of any moral compass.

Arthur coldly dissected the extremely insidious, bloodsucking logic of Wall Street and the White House: relying on the vast natural geographical barriers of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, they were extremely comfortable in staying far away from the core battleground of Eurasia.

Arthur knew very well that American capitalists were playing an extremely cruel game.

Using their so-called neutrality policy, they precisely controlled the rate at which both sides were bleeding during the outbreak of World War II. They wanted to completely destroy the heavy industrial bases that had been built up over hundreds of years in all of Europe, including Britain, Germany, France, and even the Soviet Union in the East, turning cities into ruins and filling the trenches with an entire generation of skilled workers and young men.

They intend to use those hastily produced, overpriced munitions and substandard canned goods to deplete the last gold bars in the coffers of all the European powers.

Then, when all the belligerent nations have bled to death, their industrial capacity is nearly paralyzed, and they face horrific postwar famine and economic collapse, the Americans will emerge as an arrogant "savior" at the very end of the war. They will wield their abundant dollars and utilize the immense financial capital of Wall Street to "invest," "provide aid," and forcibly acquire the core assets of a devastated Europe.

From German chemical patents to British aircraft engine blueprints, the United States will ultimately use this extremely despicable capitalist backlash to steal actual control of the entire world without bloodshed and establish a new order dominated by the US dollar and American aircraft carriers.

"But this time, Mr. Roosevelt, you can forget about staying out of this so easily and counting your money over everyone's corpses."

Arthur cut off a small piece of bloody beef and put it in his mouth, chewing it very slowly and firmly.

He smiled and nodded to Hopkins, who was sitting opposite him, but his eyes were full of calculation and murderous intent.

He knew full well the inevitable course of history; the Pacific War was bound to break out sooner or later. Japan's war machine, driven to extreme hunger and madness by a lack of resources, would never tolerate the American oil embargo.

Arthur had already planned it out; he was prepared to push things along at the most opportune strategic juncture.

He wanted the Japanese Combined Fleet's carrier battle group to reach Hawaii smoothly and without hindrance. He not only wanted those Zero fighters and Type 97 carrier-based attack aircraft to inflict heavy damage on the US Pacific Fleet, but he also wanted to manipulate the intelligence network in the Far East to guide or lure the radical faction of the Japanese Navy, who were in a state of extreme excitement, to extend the bombing range further.

He could picture the scene: what if those Japanese aircraft carriers not only bombed the battleships, but also successfully dropped incendiary bombs into shipyards on the American West Coast, into Boeing's aircraft assembly workshops, and even caused a spectacular fire in a residential area of ​​Los Angeles.

What kind of terrifying psychological breakdown will those Americans, who have been living in comfort for over a century, and those investors sitting in the high-rises of Wall Street who thought the war would never reach the Americas, suffer?

Arthur understood the psychology of those Americans very well. If the homeland were to suffer a direct military attack, even if it was only symbolic, the extremely fragile capital assets, stock market, and bonds in the United States would experience a catastrophic and precipitous drop due to unprecedented panic.

Just like 9/11.

And that will be the time for the Sterling family to enter the scene.

The Sterling family had long ago used an extremely complex offshore financial network to hide a massive amount of secret funds. Moreover, Arthur had even prepared the perfect springboard for the cross-border acquisition—Canada.

As the most loyal dominion of the British Empire, Canada shares a geographical border with the extremely long and undefended northern border of the United States, and the two countries are deeply intertwined in their underlying industrial systems and financial networks.

Arthur had long ago instructed his financial team to leverage the Sterling family's heavy industrial footprint in Canada, transforming Toronto and Montreal into a massive "Trojan horse" lurking across North America. They registered hundreds of shell holding companies in Canada, each with layers of interconnected shareholdings.

When the US stock market crashed because of Japanese bombs, and when the trading floors of Wall Street were filled with blood, Sterling Capital, cloaked in Canadian legitimacy, would quietly and in a highly Americanized manner acquire core heavy industrial assets, control of interstate railroad networks, and critical mineral resources in the United States at low prices under the cover of war and panic.

He not only wanted to win the current war, but also to reverse the situation and take control of these arrogant Americans who were trying to swallow up the legacy of the British Empire, starting from the most basic logic of capital and production capacity.

This wave is called "learning from the barbarians' superior techniques to control the barbarians," meaning using American methods to defeat the Americans.

As for morality and benevolence?

Since Washington has already made no attempt to conceal the fact that he has placed that rusty butcher's knife at the throat of the empire, then Arthur naturally has no obligation to show any hypocritical aristocratic benevolence to these opportunists in the New World.

Strip away the cheap facade of freedom and democracy, and those sitting at the negotiating table are essentially a group of bloodthirsty pirates trying to carve up the spoils. They are all bandits who built their fortunes on transoceanic plunder and ruthless exploitation; neither should presume to stand on some ridiculous moral high ground and point fingers at the other.

The rules of the game from here on out are quite simple: completely abandon all the bottom lines of civilized society, and see who can tighten the geopolitical noose more, and whose capital backlash is so sophisticated that the other side can't even spit out a bone fragment.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Hopkins." Churchill's booming voice interrupted Arthur's thoughts.

"The extremely long flight across the Atlantic is a severe test for the human digestive system. Hopefully, this top-quality beef, just transported from the Pampas grasslands of Argentina by the Stirling Ocean Shipping Company, bypassing the U-boat blockade, will replenish some of your essential amino acids and animal fats." Churchill raised his glass, the red wine swirling in the crystal.

Hopkins sat down opposite Arthur, his gaze darting back and forth between Churchill and the ever-present, elegantly smiling young nobleman. He felt an intense unease; things had completely veered off course from Washington's intended course.

Dinner took place in an atmosphere that, on the surface, perfectly conformed to diplomatic etiquette, but in reality, was filled with probing and confrontation.

Faced with the desserts covered in rich cream, and the espresso that was then silently served by the waiter, which emitted an extremely pungent tar smell, Hopkins' silver plate remained almost untouched.

His internal organs, which had just undergone an extremely brutal stomach cancer removal surgery and had almost completely lost their normal digestive function, simply could not withstand even a tiny bit of this high-fat, high-calorie "aristocratic fuel." As for that cup of scalding black coffee, it was no different from highly toxic industrial sulfuric acid to his riddled stomach lining; just smelling it sent a spasm through his nerves.

The poorly-weak American envoy pushed the cup away in frustration, deciding to end this futile exchange once and for all.

His withered, lifeless body contained not a single extra calorie to spare for engaging in hypocritical aristocratic games with these British politicians.

This is the British home ground.

He had to get to the heart of the matter immediately and force the dying British lion to sign a contract before the painkiller wore off.

He opened his briefcase, took out a tightly bound document bearing the White House presidential insignia, and placed it heavily in the center of the oak dining table.

"Mr. Prime Minister, thank you for providing such high-level hospitality during this difficult time. But we all know that we need to face the extremely brutal objective data on the Atlantic." Hopkins' voice carried the cold, businesslike tone of a quasi-superpower, and he didn't even try to hide the arrogance of a "bankruptcy liquidator."

"The United States of America fully understands the extremely serious shortage of escort forces currently faced by the Royal Navy. President Roosevelt had great sympathy for the survival of the free world, and we do not want to see civilization crushed by the treads of Nazis."

Hopkins pushed the document forward with two extremely thin fingers, stopping it in front of Churchill: "This is the final draft agreement personally authorized by the President. As long as you sign this document and accept those base lease terms, a full fifty operational destroyers will set sail from the Boston and Philadelphia naval bases on the East Coast of the United States within forty-eight hours, heading straight for the Atlantic. This is the most efficient and substantial military support the United States can currently provide you within the bounds of the law."

"This can save your supply lines."

Churchill did not reply immediately, but instead focused intently on using an extremely sharp sterling silver cigar cutter to slowly and precisely cut off the end of the Cuban cigar. He struck a match and slowly inhaled a thick puff of smoke.

Throughout the entire process, the Prime Minister of the British Empire never once glanced down at the document on the table that could determine the fate of the empire's overseas territories, as if it were merely a piece of extremely inferior waste paper.

"Mr. Envoy," Churchill exhaled a smoke ring, his voice low and imposing, "within the government structure of the British Empire, work involving such a massive transnational exchange of national military assets and macro-industrial valuation falls under the highly specialized field of heavy industry accounting and economics."

Churchill turned his head slightly and gestured to Arthur beside him, "This work has always been handled entirely by my chief senior advisor for industry and strategy, Brigadier General Arthur Sterling. The quotation you brought must be calculated and approved by him."

Hopkins's gaze immediately locked onto Arthur.

Faced with the Prime Minister's move to hand over the right to negotiate the core territorial sovereignty of the country, Hopkins did not feel any anger at being slighted; on the contrary, he immediately became vigilant.

Because he knew better than many others that the young man in front of him was definitely not just an ordinary "businessman" reeking of money.

As the sole heir to the vast Sterling family and heavy industrial conglomerate, Arthur Sterling possessed an absolute right to sit at the negotiating table based solely on this heavy capital symbol, which could even influence the pricing power of seamless steel pipes and radar tubes globally. He even had the terrifying political authority to walk directly into the Oval Office of the White House and personally confront President Roosevelt.

Moreover, this young man's name is already a household name.

Hopkins knew this man's story very well. He was the undisputed "beacon of the empire" in the eyes of the people of the entire British Empire. He was the werewolf who, in the ruins of the French mainland, relied on his superb armored tactics and iron will to pull the Coldstream Guards and the 51st Hill Division out of the mechanized meat grinder of the German Wehrmacht.

Hopkins's mind raced as he assessed the threat level of the other party: this guy might be an extremely rare genius at commanding armored vehicles to crush enemy lines, but how much of his ability could he actually demonstrate at the extremely complex and unscrupulous negotiating table of transnational business assets?

After much deliberation, the US envoy was still unable to provide a precise assessment model.

Because he couldn't see through the young man in front of him.

But one thing Hopkins was absolutely certain of—the young man's mere act of sitting there wiping his mouth exuded an unfathomable sense of oppression, which instinctively made him feel a deadly danger.

Therefore, he would not underestimate the other party even slightly because of his excessively youthful appearance. Faced with the terrifying power of the Sterling family, which could control the industrial lifeline on both sides of the Atlantic, and this military-industrial oligarch who had emerged from the bloodbath of Toyama, any extremely minor misjudgment could lead to Wall Street's capital being devoured alive in this confrontation.

He must be extremely vigilant.

Arthur put down his coffee cup, picked up a spotless white cotton napkin, and with an extremely elegant, even slightly affected, slow motion, gently pressed it to the corner of his mouth.

He didn't touch the documents on the table, nor did he linger on them for more than half a second. He leaned back slightly in the carved oak chair, his fingers interlaced in front of his abdomen, his gaze calm and deep, with a condescending scrutiny, as he looked at Hopkins.

"Mr. Envoy, I have reviewed the extremely detailed records of your country's Naval Equipment Bureau regarding that batch of destroyers." Arthur's voice was gentle and even, without any inflection, as if he were reading an extremely boring product defect report, yet every word was piercing.

"The fifty Wickes-class and Clemencen-class destroyers you referred to were laid down and launched between 1917 and 1919. Mr. Envoy, needless to remind you, they have spent a full twenty years in an extremely humid and salt-corroding environment. Their hull steel and load-bearing keels have undergone extremely severe metal fatigue accumulation: the outdated low-pressure oil-fired boilers used in their propulsion systems, after long-term storage, have extremely severe oxidation corrosion and blockage inside the steam pipes, and the actual shaft horsepower output will be significantly lower than the original design specifications."

"The most fatal flaw," Arthur tilted his head slightly, a hint of mockery in his eyes, "is that they lack any modern underwater acoustic detection equipment? Is Master Luo serious about sending them on anti-submarine escort missions?"

"You and your White House advisors attempted to exchange fifty ships of World War I industrial waste, lacking even the most basic sonar and with boilers that could explode at any moment," for ninety-nine years of absolute territorial control of Newfoundland, Bermuda, and the entire Caribbean Sea.

Arthur smiled, extended an extremely long index finger, pressed it against the edge of the document, and very slowly pushed it back in front of Hopkins.

"I believe the White House staff made a grave arithmetic error in calculating the exchange rate for this major power asset; they mistook scrap metal for gold. The British Empire has no interest in, and has no room for negotiation, in selling off sovereign territory—something that is extremely damaging to the nation's foundation and undignified."

Arthur's tone suddenly turned extremely aggressive, displaying the arrogance of a heavy industrial tycoon: "As for those fifty wrecked ships—if it must be exchanged for the British Empire's centuries-old geopolitical hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, then Sterling Heavy Industries' business advice is: please immediately tell your president to let them remain in the Boston Harbor breakwater, serving as extremely expensive artificial reefs and museums. The British Empire does not need this kind of opportunistic charity."

A look of utter astonishment flashed across Hopkins' withered face, which was then replaced by intense anger.

He had imagined encountering haggling, pleading, and even Churchill's angry roars born of humiliation.

But he never expected that, with the entire country's transport lines in such a state of severe blood loss, the British would give such a crisp, cold, and even somewhat disdainful rejection.

This completely overturned the White House's prediction of the British attitude!

Hopkins stared intently at Winston Churchill, who sat in the main seat, with a look of extreme shock and inquiry, trying to find even the slightest room for traditional diplomatic maneuvering or a way to stop such outrageous remarks from the face of this veteran imperial politician.

However, to the extreme dismay of the American envoy, the British Prime Minister turned his enormous head, cigar in hand, to the other side and even began to admire a medieval tapestry on the restaurant wall with great interest, completely ignoring this extremely serious "diplomatic incident."

"That old scoundrel," Hopkins cursed inwardly.

Churchill's extremely direct and shameless body language sent a political signal to the representatives across the ocean:

There's no doubt about it, and you heard correctly. Every word this young man just uttered with extreme arrogance was the very will of Winston Churchill himself. Arthur Sterling's bottom line was the bottom line of the Downing Street wartime cabinet, and also the bottom line of the British Empire.

In this transoceanic asset game, the Prime Minister has entrusted all of the British Empire's assets to this young devil with complete confidence.

"Mr. Sterling, you may not fully understand the current political reality in Washington!" Hopkins' tone suddenly rose, and he leaned forward abruptly, wielding an extremely strong bargaining chip. "Without the base lease clause, those isolationist members of Congress on Capitol Hill would absolutely not agree to give away any U.S. Navy warship, even a decommissioned one, to a country at war!"

Hopkins pointed out the window towards the Atlantic Ocean shrouded in darkness, his voice stern: "Your merchant fleets are being ruthlessly sunk by German submarines in the Atlantic every day! Your destroyer numbers are dwindling rapidly! Without these destroyers to immediately fill the gaps in your escort network, the British Empire's domestic industrial reserves and food supplies will absolutely not survive this winter! You have no right to refuse!"

Faced with this extremely blunt existential threat from Hopkins, Arthur Sterling's elegant smile gradually disappeared.

Arthur slowly turned around, his back against the massive map that encompassed the entire Atlantic Ocean, his eyes as deep as an abyss capable of swallowing everything.

The sweet dream of 200 million Americans hiding behind the barriers between the two oceans ends tonight.

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