The making of American hegemony from the Great Depression to the Korean War

Based upon archival research on rearmament during the Korean War and an interdisciplinary perspective on the ontology and the dynamics of modern international relations, this dissertation constructs a coherent theoretical and historical perspective on the rise of American hegemony from the Great Depression to the Korean War.; The intertwining of industrial capitalism and the European nation-state system founded the modern international realm, which Britain controlled by its navy, structural power as the center of world trade and finance, and the ideological currency of economic liberalism. The Great Depression discredited economic liberalism, spawned economic warfare and empowered fascism; World War II uprooted the political and economic system of the nineteenth century world order.; The period from the Great Depression to the Korean War constituted a single historical conjuncture, in which American internationalists devised a new organizing ideology of capitalism and reintegrated core capitalist economies into America's economic and political orbit. Business internationalists in particular spearheaded the Second New Deal's social reforms and international economic cooperation, American intervention in World War II, and wartime planning on multilateralism.; Systemic chaos abroad and partisan conflicts at home predicated and besieged containment. Not only the Soviet Union but also Western European economies, stricken with their dollar shortage, held onto economic warfare. American nationalists opposed multilateralism and strove to roll back communism. By subscribing to anti-communism, containment policy was expected to secure American hegemonic costs to resuscitate and reintegrate Western European and Japanese economies into America's free world. The “fall” of China to communism and the 1949 recession drove American nationalists to reduce American aid to Western Europe, aid that was necessary to finance the dollar gap and integrate West Germany into NATO.; Rearmament resolved the 1949–1950 crisis of containment, on which NSC 68 issued an apocalyptic warning, by forging a new American state with huge “national security” budgets. Rearmament defined both the military and economic stability of Western Europe as vital to American “national security.” While driving Japanese economic development, rearmament built interlocking institutional webs of the Atlantic community through which the United States could integrate and control Western European allies.