Decency, Trump and Obama.

[Dill]

(03-07-2017, 10:47 AM)JustWinBaby Wrote: I'm not so sure that's the actual reason.  Global trade, and the adoption of capitalism in large measure even in places like China. 

Maybe the US being the lone super power has a lot to do with it.  But it was capitalism that brought down the wall and the USSR.  Japan emerged into a major economic power, but still very much dependent on the US economy.

I disagree that "capitalism" brought down the USSR. Otherwise I agree with you about the importance of global trade.

In fact, your point agrees with mine in this respect.

All those treaties and economic measures were instituted to create economic as well as political stability, to prevent depressions (seen as one of the major causes of WWII). The system was designed to be very different from that system alliances which, for example, led to WWI. It was to facilitate the global trade you reference above, in such a way that formerly belligerent populations benefitted from it. The whole point of the IMF was to keep trade deficits from destabilizing states, leading to the return of fascism. Charles Hull, one of the leading lights of Bretton Woods, thought that currency manipulation by Hitler and Mussolini played a role in pre-war trade imbalances. Hence the emphasis on an international currency system pegged to gold and the US dollar.  So the goal was an international liberalization of economic policy.

Another goal was to incorporate potential future enemies like Japan and Germany--economically as well as militarily.
The thinking was that if the populations of former belligerents had a prosperous economy and liberal, representative government, then fascist-style governments would be unlikely to take root again.

Military alliances like NATO secured a "the free world" of capitalist trade from the "socialist block" of the Warsaw Pact and China/N Korea. Another round of treaties in the 70s and 90s has integrated this block piecemeal into the world economy, with some stability.

This system of treaties and international economic institutions didn't prevent some large scale wars--India-Pakistan, revolutions in China and Vietnam--but we haven't had a world war since '45. The people who put this system together were thinking long term--what was the world to look like 10, 20 or 50 years after WWII? They did not want a repeat!