Rise and Flaws of a New Global Order, 1947–1950

Within the span of three years between 1947 and 1950, the United States and its allies created the foundation for the global order that has existed into the twenty-first century. Dominion, European, and Latin American leaders gradually moved U.S. leaders to compromise on their insistence on free trade and implementing Bretton Woods. The U.S. commitment to European integration, too, radically changed because European leaders took the lead themselves. Internationalism undergirded the new global order but in a radically recast form. In the place of the idealism of the nineteenth century and the legalism of the 1920s, the new global order sought pragmatic goals: to tame, not eliminate great power politics, and to support globalization, not by free market fundamentalism but by a managed world economy. The pragmatic internationalism embedded in the Marshall Plan, NATO, the European Coal and Steel Community, and the European Payments Union allowed North America and Western Europe to meet the challenge of confronting the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Tragically, while the Europeans were forced to set their empires free, the United States adopted a militarist mindset that led often to tragic interventions abroad and often undermined the global order’s potential for peace.