The idea of American global supremacy was almost inevitable given the war in Europe between the most powerful countries at the time, a dying British Empire, a rising Soviet Union under Stalin and the French with their more than a dozen “Francophone” African countries that acted as their “piggy bank.” It is for this reason that the United States entered the war as late as 1942 in Europe at least. Arguably, if the Japanese had not been provoked by the Americans to attack them through the tactic of pernicious and a punishing sanctions regime that threatened to tank their economy, the Americans may only have joined the war effort in Europe in early 1944. They were it seems game planning all sorts of possible outcomes of the European war, including very early on the possibility of an outright Nazi victory, and Europe divided between the Third Reich and an emerging Russia.
The idea was provisionally floated that in the event of a Nazi victory, the Americans would subdue the South American countries enough for them to become de facto vassal states of a future American Empire, Africa would act as the worlds “international bank of withdrawals” only because of its vast mineral resources, (read, the large-scale resource stripping of the African countries and recolonisation of the continent), and South East Asia, much like it is today would become the manufacturing hub. The wily American government foresaw that the control of the planet has to start with the control of its money, thus the idea of the IMF and the World Bank was born at the Bretton-Woods Conference, Omni Mount Resort just outside of Washington. 730 representatives from 44 countries met, negotiated and crafted a new monetary system, thus the perfect opportunity for Washington to claim the mantle of the leader of The “new world order.” Remember, no matter how magnanimous, generous and even genteel an American President appears to the rest of the world, it is always, ‘America first” and this we have seen with their first black President, Barack Obama.
At the time of the agreement, Washington had three-quarters of the world’s supply of gold, thus no other country had enough gold to make its currency work post the war. The dollar was pegged to gold at a fixed rate and all other currencies were pegged to the dollar in effect turning the American Federal Reserve Bank into a universal bank and ushered in the ear of the dollar as the international reserve currency. The American economy expanded in its reach and virtually doubled, then tripled in size. Post the “Marshall Plan” which was a clever means of the Americans funding the Europeans and holding them hostage to their debt covenants, a type of national debt peonage, the Americans did something unusual, it allowed Europeans tariff-free access to their goods and turned a blind eye to European tariffs
With the dollar loaned goods and equipment starting to flow into Europe immediately after the war, Washington in effect became the global trading power of “first and last” resort. By the fifties, any country on the side of America during the war had the Bretton-Woods extended to them like Japan, South Korea and Australia in exchange, the receiving nations granted Washington a say in crafting their foreign policy, typically in favour of the United States at the expense of the host countries.
Basically, all international transfers of goods were facilitated by the US Navy that acted as a mercantile navy because no-one had any meaningful naval capacity as the time. This gave the Americans tremendous power, say and reach across the globe. So before Bretton-Woods, the Ottoman Empire escorted Ottoman goods across the globe and the British Empire escorted British goods, Bretton-Woods changed all that for America, but there was another event that six iron exporting Catholic countries started in Europe, the emergence of what would later become known as NATO…….
