Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
American officials and policy makers were in wide agreement that the postwar order
should be open, friendly, and stable. But the specific measures—policy steps, institutions,
commitments—remained in debate, and U.S. strategy evolved considerably over the 1940s,
through a process of action and reaction, bargaining and adjustment. At the outset, the United
States envisioned a mostly self-run system of free trade and open markets, with no country in
charge. The postwar security system, as Roosevelt envisaged it, would have the U.N. Secur-
ity Council as the central mechanism for security cooperation. The United States might play
a decisive leadership role in organizing the postwar order, but once the order was in place,
Washington would not be responsible for running it.
The practical circumstances that American officials confronted after the war made this aim
impossible. Postwar Europe's economic and political weakness, the growing threat of Soviet
power, and the ongoing give-and-take between the United States and its would-be partners all
had impacts on order building. The problems of rebuilding Western Europe and organizing
a response to the encroachments of Soviet power triggered a more protracted and elaborate
order-building process, which in turn altered the bargains, institutions, and commitments that
the United States undertook. Along the way, the management of the world economy moved
from the Bretton Woods vision to one built around the American dollar and domestic market.
Security cooperation moved from the U.N. Security Council to NATO and the other U.S.-led
alliances. And so the postwar security and economic system became less a global system and
more a Western system. Indeed, in many respects, the order itself became an international
extension of the United States.
This rolling process of order building encompassed two American-led geopolitical pro-
jects. One was the project that dominated the first decades of the postwar era: the Cold War
project, which sought to address the problem of Soviet power. The other was the effort to
unite the capitalist democracies within an open and stable system, which sought address the
problem of the 1930s. This latter liberal vision of order provided the initial inspiration for
American architects of postwar order, but as the 1940s unfolded, the Cold War came to over-
shadow all other aspects of American foreign policy—and liberal order was quietly built in-
side the bipolar system.
The Cold War order was organized around bipolarity, containment, deterrence, and ideo-
logical struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. By comparison, the order-
building strategy relating to the construction of Western liberal order was more diffuse and
wide ranging. It was less obvious that the liberal international agenda was a “grand strategy”
aimed at advancing America's national security interests. The challenge was not to deter or
contain the power of the Soviet Union but to lay the foundations for an international order
that would allow the United States to thrive. This impulse existed before, during, and after
the Cold War. Even at the moment when the Cold War gathered force, the grand strategic in-
terest in building such an order was appreciated. For example, the famous NSC-68 planning
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