When America Reordered the World

Take care before judging a book by its subtitle. Those expecting The Visionaries, a new work by the British historian James Holland, to contain a detailed exposition of the 1944 conference in Bretton Woods that led to the formation of the IMF and the initial phase of the World Bank will be disappointed to discover it only takes up a handful of pages. Fans of the Marshall Plan may feel short-changed too. To be sure, Holland describes his book as "a brief overview and an introduction to a pivotal moment in world history," but he waits until his postscript to do so.

Bretton Woods and the Marshall Plan do show up eventually as examples of the early flowering of the "age of US benevolence," the road to which, winding through a botched peace and a second war, is Holland's main focus. He is, however, clearly worried that that benevolent America is leaving the stage. That the West is insufficiently concerned about the consequences is his grim, not always submerged and all too necessary subtext.

In 1914, Europe, richer and more technologically advanced than at any time in its past, had avoided a general war for nearly a century, no small thing given its record. This, believes Holland, bred "mass complacency," which "more than played its part" in smoothing the way to the First World War and which, he fears, could, in its modern form, mean serious trouble ahead. Over 80 years after the defeat of the Axis, the West, he writes, has become "dulled … to the essential fragility of democracy—and of peace." He has a point, although the challenge to democracy today is more complex and multifaceted than he suggests. He refers to populism, but not to the increasingly illiberal "liberalism" that has done so much to provoke it. Both are cause for alarm.

Naturally enough, defense spending dropped sharply after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the comfortable assumptions about peace that disturb Holland have primarily been a European phenomenon. He is right to object to the current turn in American foreign policy, but he should have noted that the Europeans let their guard down a lot further than the United States, for a while the sole superpower (with all that that entails), ever did. The Europeans were so blinded by their teleological faith in "progress" and a largely illusory rules-based order, and so confident the Americans would have their backs, that most disdained to pay their fair share of NATO's bills, misjudgments that may lead to disaster.

For it is evident that, as Holland observes, we live in "a dangerous time." To steer the West through it, its leaders will, he reckons, have to relearn lessons from the Second World War and the decade or so that preceded it. Given the dismal state of transatlantic relations and the threat posed by Xi Jinping, Putin, and their associates, one of the lessons Holland singles out, that like-minded democracies should stick together, is in urgent need of rediscovery. At least one ("beware … of aggressive tariffs") is generally sound advice. But far from being forgotten, it may, until recently anyway, have been learned fully but unwisely. Was it really such a good idea to admit China to the WTO?

Other neglected lessons emerge from Holland's brisk, readable narrative, which is at its best, incisive and astute, in its sections on World War II, a topic about which he has written for years. But before readers arrive at that conflict, they will pass some familiar landmarks: Versailles, the Wall Street Crash, Smoot-Hawley's tariffs, a (rose-tinted) view of the New Deal, and Hitler in the Reichskanzlei. Then comes the spectacle of revanchism on the march, the Anschluss (Austria, not Crimea), the Sudetenland, the Czech lands, warnings to the future about the direction Putin was taking that were ignored for too long, above all, in Angela Merkel's Germany. History's little jokes can be very dark.

The Blitzkrieg soon sweeping through large swaths of Europe was not a new strategy, Holland explains, but an update of the old Bewegungskrieg (war of rapid maneuver), transformed by mechanized warfare. That's something to ponder as we hurtle into the drone age and whatever lies beyond. FDR, one of the two "visionaries" on the book's cover, understood the implications of technological change for the protection offered by ocean-moats in a way that isolationists did not. He also realized that, as Holland puts it, the U.S. "economy had outgrown its own continent." Holland stresses Roosevelt's idealism but, as he also recognizes, the president was well aware that restoring the democratic order in Europe would likewise serve American economic and other interests.

Winning the war involved, among much else, remodeling America's industrial base into the "arsenal of democracy" (and of the Soviets). To take just one remarkable statistic, the United States manufactured 235 aircraft a day in 1943, and that was not the peak. In an echo of the way the Blitzkrieg was made possible by mechanization, the Allies' enormous materiel advantage and growing technological edge enabled them, at least in the West, to, Holland recounts, "dramatically limit the number of troops in the frontline" by the use of airpower, artillery, and armor.

The arsenal's glory days have long since passed, but with the United States short of some types of munition and geopolitical tensions mounting, American arms production is expanding. But that process is made more difficult by China's grip on the supply chain for certain components or raw materials, a legacy of the freer global trading regime that FDR did much to set in motion (history likes its little ironies too).

And as Holland tells his story, postwar comes slowly into view. Germany's invasion of the USSR, until then its accomplice, turns sour, as in due course does Japan's war in the East. A few weeks after D-Day, representatives of 44 countries meet in Bretton Woods, N.H., and agree on the basis of a system designed to prevent a repetition of the economic turmoil that had contributed to the slide to war. America, the world's richest and most powerful nation, was to be its lynchpin. The Soviets refused to sign, another harbinger of the great divide to come, a divide Roosevelt had, unrealistically, hoped could be avoided.

That that divide proved, in its brutal fashion, to be manageable owed a huge amount to Harry Truman, Roosevelt's successor, a man with no illusions about Stalin, and the other visionary pictured on this book's cover. America would not return to isolationism, which as Truman emphasized offered only a facsimile of safety. The nascent new world order (to borrow an unfortunate phrase) was reinforced within its Western side by economic recovery, shared awareness of the Communist threat, shrewd American generosity (which, as was the case of the Marshall Plan, was extended to former foes too, a far cry from the spirit of 1919), and the U.S. military might that kept the Soviets at bay. NATO, a genuinely transatlantic alliance, was founded in 1949. The West, led by the United States, had learned from the failures of the past, and the result, admittedly with some bad bumps en route, turned out to be a brilliant and sustained success. We should remember that too.

The Visionaries: Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, and the Making of the Post-World War II Order
by James Holland
Atlantic Monthly Press, 320 pp., $28

Andrew Stuttaford is the editor of National Review's Capital Matters.

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