| The U.S. effort to construct a postwar global economy, designed to effect mass consumption at home and abroad to avoid a postwar depression, ran up against, not just communism, but a vastly understudied economic crisis known as the "dollar gap." The dollar gap was a postwar phenomenon that found many of the world's nations incapable of earning the adequate dollars they needed to conduct trade with the U.S. Only dollar assistance, such as that provided by the Marshall Plan, the Truman administration's grand scheme for ending the dollar gap, sustained trade between western Europe, Japan, and the U.S. However, in 1950 it became apparent that the Marshall Plan would not succeed. If not overcome, the crisis threatened to bring the emerging global economy crashing down, forging protective trading blocs, greatly diminished global trade, and, ultimately, the "economic isolation" of the U.S. to the western hemisphere, just as in the 1930s. This, more than the actions of the Soviet Union, drove U.S. foreign policy in the immediate postwar era. U.S. elites in and out of government were terrified that a closed world economy would spell the end of capitalism and democracy in the U.S., whether communism existed or not. Unwilling to consider alternative economic schemes to U.S. reliance on foreign markets and sources of investment, U.S. leaders opted for massive rearmament under NSC 68. Sold to the public and congress in terms of the Cold War, rearmament served as the means to prevent the incipient global economy from breaking apart, thus allowing an American-dominated global economy to emerge. The study's most important contribution is the reinterpretation of NSC 68, revealing it to be a program of political economy far more than one of geostrategy, as is generally assumed. In another major contribution, the study demonstrates deeper linkages among U.S. foreign policy, postwar prosperity, consumer culture, and the Cold War than have previously been shown to exist. |
