The Post-War Economic Picture

23 May The Post-War Economic Picture

At the epicenter of Cold War tension was U.S. and Soviet obsession with absolute security. The lesson each protagonist had learned from WWII made strategic security preeminent. To attain this security, military and internationalist-alliance strategies were exhaustively employed. Ultimately, however, genuine security was determined by the economic doctrines each Cold War leader utilized.  A post-WWII economic framework was assembled even before the end of hostilities, when U.S. and Allied postwar planners submitted that military-strategic policies were inseparable from free-market ones. While this view was not entirely new or unique, an internationalist institutional framework for a world economy was. This blueprint for the global economy included innumerable global actors that played significant roles. The market framework dramatically transformed the architecture of the world map as nations shifted their economic perspectives and their futures. The novel economic result articulated the key convictions of American capitalism. However, it represented great anxiety on the part of the competing economic and strategic powers.  The design would directly clash with the ambitions of the Soviet doctrine, thus creating a tumultuous security challenge for the Cold War’s central characters and, indeed, for the entire globe.