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Product Description Between 1941 and 1946, in response to the devastation caused by World War II, memories of the Great Depression, and the prospect of Soviet expansion, a group of politicians, diplomats, and economists in the United States and Great Britain sought to repair the ruined economies of Europe and secure economic prosperity for America. Their program, which became known as multilateralism, called for reduced quotas on imports, lowered tariffs, the abandonment of currency exchange controls, and economic decision making by international bodies. Randall Woods explores this attempt to create an interdependent world economy and sets it against the broader political and strategic backdrop of the period. In the United States, multilateralism attracted New Deal liberals because it proposed to help not only the established economic interests but traditionally disadvantaged groups such as farmers and industrial workers as well. Moderate socialists in Britain also lent their support to a liberalized trading system, as did many conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic, believing that the program would preserve some degree of free enterprise in the international economy. Unfortunately for its disciples, Woods argues, multilateralism was so modified by the forces of isolationism and economic nationalism--and by bureaucratic politics in the United States--that it failed to achieve its economic and strategic goals. The international economy that emerged after World War II was not an equitable partnership and merely finalized the fifty-year process by which the United States supplanted Great Britain as the arbiter of Western Capitalism. In the end, modified multilateralism hampered rather than facilitated the free flow of goods and capital, and it did little to promote social democracy. From Library Journal Woods contends that while the Anglo-American Financial Agreement of 1946 enabled the United Kingdom to survive its short-term problems, it brought Britain to the verge of bankruptcy, thereby retarding its long-term rehabilitation and its capacity to oppose Soviet expansionism in Europe unaided; this necessitated a "changing of the guard." This work is more than just the tale of the arrival of the United States as a superpower and the decline of Britain. Rather, it concerns itself with power and elites, the efficacy of money and markets, personalities and bureaucracies, machinations diplomatic and imperatives political. It is the story of a nation politically, ideologically, and bureaucratically ill-suited to function as the arbiter of Europe's affairs thrust into that situation. Woods writes with verve and clarity, as well as a talent for acerbic analysis, particularly on the personal level, which is as refreshing as it is irritating. His work will undoubtedly prove definitive on this subject. Essential for academic and larger public libraries. - J.K. Sweeney, South Dakota State Univ . , Brookings Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review Masterful. . . . This book will benefit historians of diplomacy, international finance, modern Britain, recent America, World War II, and the early Cold War.-- Journal of Modern History About the Author Randall Bennett Woods is John A. Cooper Professor of Diplomacy at the University of Arkansas. His books include The Roosevelt Foreign Policy Establishment and the "Good Neighbor": The United States and Argentina, 1941-1945.