support a strong surface fleet in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Germany, in alliance with Japan and if possible also Britain, would in the first place isolate the USA and confine it to the Western hemisphere. Then, in the next generation, there would be a "war of the continents" in which the "Germanic empire of the Germanic nation" would fight America for world supremacy. Hillgruber wrote that:These enormous schemes, and particularly their connection with racist ideology, were, to be sure, the program of a single individual. But in the case of such prominent provisions as the revision of the Versailles Treaty and the creation of a "Greater Germany", they overlapped with the aims of the old German leadership and the fantasies of a large part of the German public that had never assimilated the loss of the war. To this one must add, however, that the essence of Hitler's program "violated all standards and concepts of German foreign policy to such a radical degree that it... did not penetrate the consciousness of the German public", despite its continual proclamation in his speeches from 1926 to 1930. The American historian of modern Germany Gordon A. Craig praised Hillgruber for his "masterful delineation of Hitler's grand strategical plan". Hillgruber maintained that the strategy of Blitzkrieg stemmed largely from economic factors, namely, that for the earlier stages of the Stufenplan, Germany did not have the economic resources for a long war, and that therefore a military programme based upon quality, not quantity, was the most rational use of German economic capacity. Hillgruber argued that Hitler's desire to postpone the final struggle with the United States to the last stage of the Stufenplan was likewise determined by economic considerations, namely that only a Germany with sufficient Lebensraum and ruling most of Eurasia and Africa would be immune to the effects of blockade, and have the necessary economic resources to match the enormous economic capacity of the United States. Hillgruber believed that the interwar period was dominated by a "Cold War" between Britain and the Soviet Union, and that intense Anglo-Soviet competition for worldwide spheres of influence gave Germany the room to maneuver and to assert its interests after the defeat of 1918 as, at various times, both Moscow and London sought better relations with Berlin. In the debate between the "Continentists" (such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, Axel Kuhn, and Eberhard Jäckel, who argued that Hitler