Establishing the Pax Americana

[Hawk1981]

Pax Americana is primarily used in its modern connotations to refer to the peace among great powers established after the end of the Second World War in 1945, also called the "Long Peace". In this modern sense, it has come to indicate the military and economic position of the United States in relation to other nations.

During the 1940s, the United States constructed a system of international order that depended on preponderant US economic and military power and bipolar division of the postwar world, in the context of the Cold War. That the United States was ‘hegemonic’ became clear in the aftermath of World War II, when, the formidable presence of the former Soviet Union notwithstanding, the US was revealed to be the most powerful country on the planet. However that power was measured – military, economic, political or even ‘cultural’ – the US outstripped its rivals and dominated international affairs.

The United States had been criticized for not taking up the hegemonic mantle following the disintegration of Pax Britannica before the First World War and during the interwar period. The entry of the US into the First World War marked the abandonment of the traditional American policy of isolation and independence of world politics. The American hegemony following the Second World War was explicitly designed to avoid the ‘mistakes’ of the inter-war period when the world’s economies collapsed into Depression.

 

[Hawk1981]

The Bretton Woods institutions – the World Bank (IBRD), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) – are the most important expressions of America’s post-war dominance and the United State’s desire to create an institutionalized international order.

Early in the Second World War, John Maynard Keynes of the British Treasury and Harry Dexter White of the United States Treasury Department independently began to develop ideas about the financial order of the postwar world. After negotiation between officials of the United States and United Kingdom, and consultation with some other Allies, a "Joint Statement by Experts on the Establishment of an International Monetary Fund," was published simultaneously in a number of Allied countries on April 21, 1944. On May 25, 1944, the United States government invited the Allied countries to send representatives to an international monetary conference, "for the purpose of formulating definite proposals for an International Monetary Fund and possibly a Bank for Reconstruction and Development."

The Final Act of the Bretton Woods Conference incorporated these agreements and recommendations: An adjustably pegged foreign exchange market rate system: Exchange rates were pegged to gold. Governments were only supposed to alter exchange rates to correct a "fundamental disequilibrium"; Member countries pledged to make their currencies convertible for trade-related and other current account transactions. There were, however, transitional provisions that allowed for indefinite delay in accepting that obligation, and the IMF agreement explicitly allowed member countries to regulate capital flows; As it was possible that exchange rates thus established might not be favorable to a country's balance of payments position, governments had the power to revise them by up to 10% from the initially agreed level ("par value") without objection by the IMF. The IMF could concur in or object to changes beyond that level; and All member countries were required to subscribe to the IMF's capital. Membership in the IBRD was conditioned on being a member of the IMF.

 

[Hawk1981]

Even if the United States would arguably be the principal beneficiary of the liberal economic order it helped create, there is no doubt that others would benefit too. Indeed, the period in which the United States provided the aid and investment that facilitated post-war reconstruction in Western Europe and Japan is rightly regarded as the high-water mark of enlightened American diplomacy.

The architects of America’s post-war policies were keen to ensure that the new international order should be multilateral, and that the sort of bilateralism that was associated with the inter-war period should be actively discouraged. Significantly, the design of Europe’s nascent security architecture also had a multilateral basis.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was the first peacetime military alliance the United States entered into outside of the Western Hemisphere. After the destruction of the Second World War, the nations of Europe struggled to rebuild their economies and ensure their security. The former required a massive influx of aid to help the war-torn landscapes re-establish industries and produce food, and the latter required assurances against a resurgent Germany or incursions from the Soviet Union.

The United States viewed an economically strong, rearmed, and integrated Europe as vital to the prevention of communist expansion across the continent. As a result, Secretary of State George Marshall proposed a program of large-scale economic aid to Europe. The resulting European Recovery Program, or Marshall Plan, not only facilitated European economic integration but promoted the idea of shared interests and cooperation between the United States and Europe. Soviet refusal either to participate in the Marshall Plan or to allow its satellite states in Eastern Europe to accept the economic assistance helped to reinforce the growing division between east and west in Europe.

Although American policy toward East Asia differs from its European-oriented position, this is not to say that some parts of East Asia have not benefited from American hegemony. The earlier phase of American hegemony not only created the general conditions within which the ‘Golden Age’ of capitalist development occurred across much of the world, but it also provided a permissive environment within which many of East Asia’s export-oriented, frequently mercantilist regimes were able to prosper: the United States provided the crucial markets which underpinned much of East Asia’s post-war industrialization and turned a blind eye to political practices and economic structures of which it might otherwise have disapproved.

After 1945, the United States enjoyed an advantageous position with respect to the rest of the industrialized world. In the Post–World War II economic expansion, the US was responsible for half of global industrial output, held 80 percent of the world's gold reserves, and was the world's sole nuclear power. The largest economy in the world at the time, the United States recognized that it had come out of the war with its domestic infrastructure virtually unscathed and its military forces at unprecedented strength. Military officials recognized the fact that Pax Americana had been reliant on the effective United States air power, just as the instrument of Pax Britannica a century earlier was its sea power.

 

[Hawk1981]

At the end of his second term of office, Eisenhower warned in his farewell address of the rise of the "Military-Industrial Complex." Since the end of the Second World War the US had been compelled to fight a Cold War and create a permanent armaments industry and large military force supported by the development of a large and powerful defense establishment. Eisenhower stated that as necessary as the development might be, this new military-industrial complex could weaken or destroy the very institutions and principles it was designed to protect.

In a world perpetually on the brink of war, the military, armaments industry, legislators and lobbyists that make up the military-industrial complex could become dependent on the endless preparation for war. They would deplete rather than enhance the nation's strength, and would promote policies that would not necessarily be in the country's best interests.

 

[harmonica]

airpower didn't help in Vietnam and couldn't beat the Chinese in Korea

 

[harmonica]

....apparently communism wasn't a real threat.....China, Cuba, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam went communist--and the US is still around ..the USSR collapsed

 

[jwoodie]

....apparently communism wasn't a real threat.....China, Cuba, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam went communist--and the US is still around ..the USSR collapsed

In case you forgot, Communist China and Cuba are still around, continuously sowing the seeds of revolution around the world. In the case of the USSR, it was confrontation, not accommodation, that brought about its collapse.

 

[jwoodie]

airpower didn't help in Vietnam and couldn't beat the Chinese in Korea

Neither did having two dick wad Presidents playing politics with toy soldiers.

 

[harmonica]

....apparently communism wasn't a real threat.....China, Cuba, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam went communist--and the US is still around ..the USSR collapsed

In case you forgot, Communist China and Cuba are still around, continuously sowing the seeds of revolution around the world. In the case of the USSR, it was confrontation, not accommodation, that brought about its collapse.

so--we fought in Vietnam against communism---50,000 dead, many wounded..then Laos and Cambodia turned communist --as well as Vietnam--and how did this affect the US?

 

[Tom Paine 1949]

In case you forgot, Communist China and Cuba are still around, continuously sowing the seeds of revolution around the world.

It seems to me that China (and even Cuba) are no longer today “sowing the seeds of revolution around the world.” China may be described in many ways, but it is definitely not revolutionary. It is interested in trade relations with all countries in the world, including the most conservative and reactionary. It no longer foments revolution outside its borders, nor does it build socialist parties abroad. It competes in capitalist markets everywhere. It has made tremendous economic progress and has adopted capitalist modes of production, including stock markets. Its corrupt state capitalist one party system is anything but ... “revolutionary.”