The Rise of the American System - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 115

gross national product was three times that of the Soviet Union and more than five times that
of Great Britain.” 1 The war diminished the other great powers—at least temporarily—while
it turned the United States into a global superpower. 2
Paul Kennedy captures this postwar reality:
Given the extraordinarily favorable economic and strategical position which the United
States thus occupied, its post-1945 outward thrust could come as no surprise to those
familiar with the history of international politics. With the traditional Great Powers fad-
ing away, it steadily moved into a vacuum which their going created; having become
number one, it could no longer contain itself within its own shores, or even its own
hemisphere. . . . There were, however, many Americans (especially among the troops)
who expected that they would be home within a short period of time, returning U.S.
armed-forces deployments to their pre-1941 position. But while the idea alarmed the
likes of Churchill and attracted isolationist Republicans, it proved impossible to turn
the clock back. Like the British after 1815, the Americans in their turn found their in-
formal influence in various lands hardening into something more formal—and more
entangling; like the British, too, they found 'new frontiers of insecurity' whenever they
wanted to draw the line. The 'Pax Americana' had come of age. 3
If wars create opportunities for order building, the Second World War did so in the ex-
treme. The interwar system had collapsed, and the old arrangements for great-power relations
were in disarray and discredited. America had become a geopolitical behemoth with new and
expansive international interests. Its power had global reach—and so it had the opportunity to
structure the wider world in a way few states ever do. As Jeffry Frieden observes: “The fact
that American power had grown and European flagged made it clear that the United States
would have its way with the rest of the world.” 4
American officials understood this opportunity. Planners and policy architects offered dif-
ferent ideas, but they generally shared the impulse to restructure the overall international en-
vironment rather than just to protect and advance U.S. national interests. That is, they pur-
sued a milieu-oriented grand strategy rather than a positional grand strategy. A positional
grand strategy is one in which a great power seeks to counter, undercut, contain, and limit
the power and threats of a specific challenger state or group of states. Nazi Germany, Imper-
ial Japan, the Soviet bloc—all provoked the United States to pursue positional strategies. A
milieu-oriented grand strategy is one in which a great power seeks to make the international
environment congenial to its long-term security and interests through building the infrastruc-
ture of international cooperation, promoting trade and democracy in various regions of the
world, and establishing partnerships. 5