Illustration by MICHAEL CHO via THE NEW YORKER
THE NEW YORKER: When the United States emerged from the ruins of the Second World War as the world’s richest and most powerful country, its diplomats were determined to avoid another global catastrophe. Dean Acheson, the Secretary of State under President Truman and one of the principal architects of the postwar international order, wrote later, “The enormity of the task . . . was to create a world out of chaos.” Their idea was to devise political and economic arrangements that would bind the world together through free trade and encourage the spread of Western-style liberal democracy.
In the past seven decades, this system has grown into a web of relationships, treaties, and institutions that span the globe and touch every aspect of daily life, from the protection of human rights to the conduct of global trade. Such mundane but essential concerns as the flight paths of airliners, the transfer of patents, and the dumping of waste in oceans—even the number of bluefin tuna that can be taken from the sea—are governed by international agreements.
The system came to have many crucial components—NATO, the European Union, the United Nations—but its indispensable member was the United States. The U.S. has given billions of dollars to help expand trade, fight disease, and foster the growth of democracy. It was largely through American leadership that the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo ended, that Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was reversed, that the wars between Israel and Egypt and between Israel and Jordan were brought to a close. (The American wars in Vietnam and Iraq were notable because they were carried out to a great extent in defiance of allies and international organizations.) The postwar system, for all its injustices and hypocrisies, has achieved the principal purpose that Acheson and others set out for it: the world has not fallen into a third enveloping war. MORE