What The Hell America!

Vivek Chibber

It was to eliminate the way in which colonialism interacted with global political economy. This is the key. Freedoms were a secondary affair. What do I mean by the way it interacted? The US was absolutely convinced, and I think it was probably right, that a big push for the war came from economic rivalries between blocks of capital that were closed off from each other. And that created a kind of antagonism between them to open up markets that were otherwise inaccessible.

The British didn’t have access to French colonies and their markets. The French didn’t have good access to the British colonies. And the Americans had access to none of them. So the first thing to do is to break down these colonial barriers so that capital and labor can move freely. And the US thought that this will reduce the animosities. Now, because it reduces economic animosities, it should also reduce geopolitical rivalries.

As it happens, the second pillar of this was that American capital should be given special access to all these markets, of course, because it benefits the United States. But also because they thought the United States will be best positioned to superintend — to kind of be a referee for economic and political affairs everywhere. And if it has access to all these markets, American states will have an interest in an open playing field.

This should not be surprising because England also was pushing for the same policies in the 1840s and ’50s, a hundred years prior. Why both countries? England in the 1840s and ’50s, the United States in the 1940s and ’50s were the most economically efficient and productive economies in the world. They had nothing to fear from a globalized economy.

Both countries also had some degree of interest in opening up their economies to the others. I won’t go into why the British did — that was primarily because they were the biggest lenders in the world — but in the United States, the reason they wanted to have their borders open was that they knew that after the war, the entire world would need dollars for global trade and imports and exports.

Well, how are they going to get dollars? They can only get dollars if the US is buying goods from them and paying in dollars. So if the US wanted a global economy to thrive, it had to open up its markets to importers from the rest of the world. That meant as early as 1943 to 1944, the US had an agenda for expanding into the global economy before it knew if the Soviets would even survive.

Now, what happens in 1945 is the Soviets not only survive, but they have the largest army in Europe. And that means then that communism is now a real threat inside Europe as well. So now what this does is it adds an inflection to American global ambitions. Those global ambitions were always in place. The US intended to expand its influence over the entire world, but now it has to deal with the fact that there is a potential rival, at least in one part of that world, which is in Eastern Europe. That was a problem. It had to deal with it.

The initial signs after 1944–45 were not that the US would simply start up a deep antagonism with the Soviet Union. That took about eight, ten months to develop. The reason it developed so intensely, the reason anti-communism became such an issue, was that when [Harry] Truman and his people realized that in order to be the new police for the whole world, they would have to massively ramp up their military budgets and their military resources, Congress wasn’t willing to do it. So the one way in which they could get Congress to back this was to raise this specter of Communism.

Every time Congress resists him, he raises the bogey of the communist threat in Europe. This is how the Marshall Plan is passed. This is how the funding for NATO is passed. This is how the militarization of Asia and Europe is passed. So the US starts generating this ideology — the rhetoric of a global communist threat.