ranting or IR

ranting on international relations
Post World War II

Pre World War II the United States eschewed a leadership role in the international system, especially in European domestic politics. The lesson learned from the interwar period and World War II made it clear that the United States must, by necessity and compulsion, take the laurels of western hegemon. This role was cast on the United States because its allies were in a dire need of recovery, it’s allies were unable to assume leadership, and the United States was militarily and economically superior. Additionally, with the sprouting of Soviet hostility, the United States, for its own sake and its allies, assumed it’s role.
Following the Second World War the European states were in complete ruin. The French were a defeated state, millions of people died and infrastructures destroyed. The economies and the social psychology of European states and Japan needed to be repaired; that is, Japan and the Europeans wanted to concentrate on repairing home—this left a power vacuum. The United States, though it lost a substantial amount of young men, came out a new superpower—filled the power vacuum left by Europeans and Japan. This position was illuminated by its role in the economic sphere. The United States became the international monetary leader. It financed the recovery of its European allies and Japan and provided a substantial amount of the budget for international regimes. Essentially the “[United States] became the residual source of global liquidity” (268). Why would the United States want to shoulder such responsibility? It could have easily crawled back into an isolationist state. “The United States did not actively seek global monetary leadership. Indeed, during the interwar period the responsibility of hegemony had been deliberately evaded…they soon came to welcome it, for reasons that were a mixture of altruism and self-interest” (268). This new found power allowed the United States to advance its own interest in foreign policy without much opposition, other than the Soviets. Additionally, I believe, this gave the United States much more control over the Americas; specifically it’s interest in Latin America and the Caribbean’s. Historically, South America’s and the Caribbean’s economy, resources, and political infrastructures were dominated by the European colonialist.
United State’s role in international monetary policy, that is, it’s role as the prime financier, was the response of all “governments agree[ing]…to avoid recurrence of the kind of economic warfare that had characterized the decade of the 1930s” (266). The position as the financier was solidified by its great wealth relative to the European states and Japan, and the “even more pathbreaking…decision to allocate voting rights among governments [IMF] not on a one-state, one-vote basis but rather in proportion to quotas” (266). The United States deposited one third of all the funds for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) quotas and “effective veto over future decision-making” (266).
Soviets rhetoric as an anti-capitalist state and the call for an international revolution was a threat to the United States and it’s principal allies. This threat compelled the United States to take the position as the main opposition to the Soviet Union and their international campaign. This required the United States to engage in an international strategic power game, or better known as spheres of influence. The Vietnam war exemplifies the extent the United States was willing to go in order to balance the power between itself and the Soviet Union, “We are also there [Vietnam] because there are great stakes in the balance of power” (278).
Following two great wars in the first half of the 20th century, the economic warfare of the interwar years, and the rise of a hostile super power, Russia, the United States, with its great military and economic strength, was compelled to act as the prime leader of the West, to rebuild it and oppose the Soviet Union.