The Rise of the American System - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 122

a fundamental support for an economically integrated liberal international order. 24 This was
the message that Roosevelt and Churchill communicated in the Atlantic Charter of 1941. The
joint statement of principles affirmed free trade, equal access for countries to raw materials
of the world, and international collaboration in the economic field so as to advance labor
standards, employment security, and social welfare. Roosevelt and Churchill were telling the
world that they had learned the lessons of the interwar years—and those lessons were funda-
mentally about the proper organization of the Western world economy. 25
In the background, notions about economic security and social protection in the United
States and Europe were evolving. The meaning of security—national, social, and econom-
ic—was expanding. The Depression and New Deal brought into existence the notion of “so-
cial security,” and the violence and destruction of world war brought into existence the no-
tion of “national security.” It was more than just a new term of art—it was a new and more
comprehensive internationalist notion of security. In earlier decades—and during World War
I—the idea of national security was not widespread. The term most frequently used was na-
tional defense, referring more narrowly to protection of the homeland against traditional mil-
itary attacks. Sometime during World War II, the new term emerged, and it captured the new
vision of an activist and permanently mobilized state security across economic, political, and
military realms. 26 National security required America to be actively attempting to shape its
external environment—planning, coordinating, generating resources, building alliances, and
so forth. In a “fireside chat” on January 11, 1944, Roosevelt articulated this more expansive
vision of national security: “The one supreme objective for the future, which we discussed
for each nation individually and for all the United Nations can be summed up in one word:
security. And that means not only physical security which provides safety from attacks by
aggressors. It means also economic security, social security, moral security—in a family of
nations.” 27
One aspect of this new emphasis on economic security was the Bretton Woods system of
agreements, which gave governments new tools to manage economic openness. During the
war, Britain had expressed its skepticism of the more unadorned American ideas about eco-
nomic openness. The U.S. State Department's stark free-trade ideas worried British officials,
who were concerned about the stability of their beleaguered national economy. John Maynard
Keynes's famous trip to Washington in August 1941 to discuss the terms of America's Lend-
Lease aid to Britain brought these differences into sharp relief. American officials wanted
to reconstruct an open trading system, and British officials in the wartime cabinet wanted
to ensure full employment and economic stability. In the months that followed, British and
American officials, led by Keynes and Harry Dexter White, focused their negotiations on the
terms of postwar monetary and financial relations. In this area, the two officials were able
to find common ground, agreeing on rules and institutional mechanisms that would establish
convertible currencies and tools with which governments could manage exchange-rate im-