The Rise of the American System - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 112

Five
The Rise of the American System
In the mid-twentieth century, in the aftermath of depression and war, and in the shadow of the
Cold War, the United States emerged as the world's most powerful state and set about build-
ing an international order. Through design, adaptation, choice, and necessity, the United States
shaped the governing arrangements of the Western system into an order tied together by part-
nerships, pacts, institutions, and grand bargains and built around multilayered agreements that
served to open markets, bind democracies and anticommunist authoritarian regimes together,
and create a far-flung security community. Indeed, between 1944 and 1951, American leaders
engaged in the most intensive institution building the world had ever seen. They helped launch
the United Nations, Bretton Woods, GATT, NATO, and the US-Japan alliance. They assumed
costly obligations to aid Greece and Turkey and reconstruct Western Europe. They helped re-
build the economies of Germany and Japan and integrate them into the emerging Western sys-
tem. And with the Atlantic Charter, the U.N. Charter, and the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, they articulated a new vision of a progressive international community.
The result was a hierarchical order with liberal characteristics, built around a set of Amer-
ican political, economic, and security bargains with countries in Europe and East Asia. The
United States provided security, championed mutually agreed-upon rules and institutions, and
led in the management of an open world economy. In return, other states affiliated with and
supported the United States as it led the larger order. The United States dominated the order,
but the political space created by American domination was organized around partnerships
and agreed-upon rules and institutions that facilitated restraint, commitment, reciprocity, and
legitimacy.