Architects of Globalism: Building a New World Order during World War II (review)

The thesis of Patrick Hearden's book is right in the title. His impressively researched, well-written study attempts to demonstrate how during and even before the United States entered World War II U.S. State Department officials—the "architects"—planned and implemented their economic and geopolitical vision for the postwar world. This "new world order" was to be shaped by free trade and capital movements around the globe, averting a return to the depression at home by creating markets abroad for surplus American goods. This liberal "open door" would also prevent both social revolution overseas and the reemergence of the type of authoritarian, economically autarkic regimes that these planners believed had caused World War II.

In detailed, well-organized chapters, Hearden reveals how U.S. officials wrestled with enormously complicated questions as they planned to realize their globalist vision. Should Germany be destroyed and permanently deindustrialized, or should it be rebuilt and peacefully reintegrated into a democratic, market-oriented Europe? What should be done in the turbulent Middle East, where valuable oil reserves were complicating the already messy dynamic of post-Ottoman religious and political turmoil? Could East Asia be stabilized so that Japan and China coexisted while opening their valuable markets to U.S. trade and investment? Could the United States successfully build international organizations that would ensure security and guarantee a liberal world trading order? What would be the relationship between the big three—the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain—after the conflict ended?

Hearden is at his best when detailing the well-known battles both within the State Department and between the department and the rest of the U.S. government to move postwar planning in a globalist direction. He has exhaustively mined a wide range of both private and governmental papers in the United States to tell how these planners set out to build their market-oriented new world order to America's economic advantage. His narrative is full of useful information, but his arguments and methodology are not without flaws.

First, there are obvious limits to what planning can tell us, and Hearden often conflates the architects' vision with what actually happened. Important as postwar planning was, we know that Franklin D. Roosevelt time and time again made winning the war a higher priority. When postwar planning threatened to weaken America's wartime alliance with Great Britain (i.e., on matters relating to decolonization or postwar trade policy) or with the Soviet Union (i.e., the political status of Poland), Roosevelt almost always chose the route that ensured the quickest defeat of Germany and Japan, regardless of the consequences for "building a new world order." This guaranteed that regardless of what State Department officials hoped to bring about, most of the actual policies would not be decided until after the war was won.

Second, by focusing solely on the American side of planning, Hearden provides only a small and distorted part of the story. What were Soviet and British leaders thinking about the postwar world? What were politicians in India, Egypt, and China planning? How would the defeated powers respond? How would the dramatic changes in each country's domestic political and social order affect U.S. officials' attempt to enforce their "new world order"? Did U.S. policymakers even begin to understand these changes and to adapt their plans accordingly? A more international and comparative approach to these questions would have made the book much stronger.

A more fundamental problem arises with Hearden's argument that U.S. planners saw World War II as an opportunity to reshape the globe to reflect American values and interests, especially in the economic realm. Hearden builds on the old revisionist claim that U.S. policy was driven by the desire to create a liberal capitalist world system. The United States certainly cared about the shape of the global economic order after the war. But Hearden takes this argument...