...Control the Worlds Oceans The two world wars of the early 20th century constituted a watershed in human history for a number of reasons. For the United States the wars effects can be summed up with this simple statement: They cleared away the competition. Global history from 1500 to 1945 is a lengthy treatise of increasing contact and conflict among a series of great regional powers. Some of these powers achieved supra-regional empires, with the Spanish, French and English being the most obvious. Several regional powers -- Austria, Germany, Ottoman Turkey and Japan -- also succeeded in extending their writ over huge tracts of territory during parts of this period. And several secondary powers -- the Netherlands, Poland, China and Portugal -- had periods of relative strength. Yet the two world wars massively devastated all of these powers. No battles were fought in the mainland United States. Not a single American factory was ever bombed. Alone among the worlds powers in 1945, the United States was not only functional but thriving. The United States immediately set to work consolidating its newfound power, creating a global architecture to entrench its position. The first stage of this -- naval domination -- was achieved quickly and easily. The U.S. Navy at the beginning of World War II was already a respectable institution, but after three years fighting across two oceans it had achieved both global reach and massive competency. But that is only part of the story. Equally important was the fact that, as of August 1945, with the notable exception of the British Royal Navy, every other navy in the world had been destroyed. As impressive as the United States absolute gains in naval power had been, its relative gains were grander still. There simply was no competition. Always a maritime merchant power, the United States could now marry its economic advantages to absolute dominance of the seas and all global trade routes. And it really didnt need to build a single additional ship to do so (although it did anyway). Over the next few years the United States undisputed naval supremacy allowed the Americans to impose a series of changes on the international system. The formation of NATO in 1949 placed all of the worlds surviving naval assets under American strategic direction. The inclusion of the United Kingdom, Italy, Iceland and Norway in NATO granted the United States the basing rights it needed to utterly dominate the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean -- the two bodies of water that would be required for any theoretical European resurgence. The one meaningful European attempt to challenge the new reality -- the Anglo-French Sinai campaign of 1956 -- cemented the downfall of the European navies. Both London and Paris discovered that they now lacked the power to hold naval policies independent of Washington. The seizure of Japans Pacific empire granted the Americans basing access in the Pacific, sufficient to allow complete American naval dominance of the north and central portions of that ocean. A formal alliance with Australia and New Zealand extended American naval hegemony to the southern Pacific in 1951. A 1952 security treaty placed a rehabilitated Japan -- and its navy -- firmly under the American security umbrella. Shorn of both independent economic vitality at home and strong independent naval presences beyond their home waters, all of the European empires quickly collapsed. Within a few decades of World War IIs end, nearly every piece of the once globe-spanning European empires had achieved independence. There is another secret to American success -- both in controlling the oceans and taking advantage of European failures -- that lies in an often-misunderstood economic structure called Bretton Woods. Even before World War II ended, the United States had leveraged its position as the largest economy and military to convince all of the Western allies -- most of whose governments were in exile at the time -- to sign onto the Bretton Woods accords. The states committed to the formation of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to assist with the expected post-War reconstruction. Considering the general destitution of Western Europe at the time, this, in essence, was a U.S. commitment to finance if not outright fund that reconstruction. Because of that, the U.S. dollar was the obvious and only choice to serve as the global currency. But Bretton Woods was about more than currency regimes and international institutions; its deeper purpose lay in two other features that are often overlooked. The United States would open its markets to participating states exports while not requiring reciprocal access for its own. In exchange, participating states would grant the United States deference in the crafting of security policy. NATO quickly emerged as the organization through which this policy was pursued. From the point of view of the non-American founders of Bretton Woods, this was an excellent deal. Self-funded reconstruction was out of the question. The bombing campaigns required to defeat the Nazis leveled most of Western Europes infrastructure and industrial capacity. Even in those few parts of the United Kingdom that emerged unscathed, the state labored under a debt that would require decades of economic growth to recover from. It was not so much that access to the American market would help regenerate Europes fortunes as it was that the American market was the only market at wars end. And since all exports from Bretton-Woods states (which the exception of some Canadian exports) to the United States had to travel by water, and since the U.S. Navy was the only institution that could guarantee the safety of those exports, adopting security policies unfriendly to Washington was simply seen as a nonstarter. By the mid-1950s, Bretton Woods had been expanded to the defeated Axis powers as well as South Korea and Taiwan. It soon became the basis of the global trading network, first being incorporated into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and in time being transformed into the World Trade Organization. With a single policy, the Americans not only had fused their economic and military policies into a single robust system but also had firmly established that American dominance of the seas and the global economic system would be in the interest of all major economies with the exception of the Soviet Union... stratfor/analysis/geopolitics-united-states-part-1-inevitable-empire#axzz3F3vRQSiU
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 06:59:30 +0000
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