The Rise of the American System - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 116

The United States was in a historically unique position to pursue a milieu-based grand
strategy. The collapse of the old order and its newly acquired global power position gave it
an opening to do what few states are ever able to do: shape the global frameworks—rules, in-
stitutions, relationships—within which postwar states would operate. The question was what
sort of environment it wanted to create.
The building of American postwar order went through several stages. In the first, the
Roosevelt administration sought to build on and update the Wilsonian vision. Like Wilson's
version, it would be a one-world system in which the major powers would cooperate to en-
force the peace. “The United States did not enter the war to reshape the world,” the his-
torian Warren Kimball argues, “but once in the war, that conception of world reform was
the assumption that guided Roosevelt's actions.” 6 The great powers would work together to
provide collective security within a new global organization. 7 Roosevelt's vision did anticip-
ate a more hierarchical system than Wilson's. It also included a more developed notion of
how international institutions might be deployed to manage economic and political interde-
pendence. Roosevelt's wartime proclamation of the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter
advocacy of a postwar order that would support full employment and economic growth gave
liberal internationalism a more expansive agenda. But if the great powers and governance
institutions would have more authority than Wilson proposed, Roosevelt's system would re-
main a unified one in which a “family circle” of states would manage openness and stability. 8
This updated Wilsonian vision of liberal order gave way to a more far-reaching and com-
plex set of arrangements. The ultimate outcome was more Western-centered, multilayered,
and deeply institutionalized than originally anticipated, and it brought the United States into
direct political and economic management of the system. The weakness of Europe, the loom-
ing Soviet threat, and the practical requirements of establishing institutions and making them
work transformed the tasks of order building. The updated Wilsonian vision of liberal order
turned into true liberal hegemonic order.
Through this unfolding process, American leaders—Roosevelt and, later, Tru-
man—sought to use the country's power advantages to create an international order that
would be open, friendly, and stable. An open order would facilitate free trade across regions;
trade would help foster American economic growth and prosperity, and it would also have
beneficial economic and political effects on other countries and the overall order. A friendly
order would ensure that no hostile and revisionist great power would rise up in Europe and
Asia and impose hegemony within these regions; the domination of geopolitical spheres
would inevitably serve to exclude and threaten the United States and its viability as a great
power with expanding global interests. And a stable order would endure over the decades,
operating as a semipermanent political system that could foster collective solutions to prob-
lems, resist the domination by hostile powers, and provide a congenial environment in which
the United States could pursue its interests.