The End of World War II and Pax Americana
The United States maintained its power and prevented full-scale wars by doing something unique, truly innovative, and very American.
They promised its allies within the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation founded in 1949 CE that any nation wishing to join the Western block by being part of the United States sphere of influence would get rich.
The Americans created a system called globalisation rather than the nation’s only trading within their captured market within their empires.
Each country embraced the Adam Smith philosophy specialisation. Each nation will specialise in a product or service that would lead to greater prosperity worldwide.
The United States could only guarantee the security framework during the Second World War in 1945 because, by that point in American history, it had not been around long enough to have poor relations and bad blood with its neighbours.
For example, a nation like Great Britain fought the French from at least 1066 until the battle of Waterloo 1815 CE and the Germans twice within 20 years.
This is replicated in all continents apart from the United States in North America.
America is unique because they historically faced off against three main rivals: the Mexicans, whom they defeated in 1848 CE during the American-Mexico War of 1846 CE to 1848 CE.
The British, who were their old colonial masters, and the Americans had political and social fear.
Finally, the great enemy was the Soviet Union, which threatened the United States with total annihilation from 1945 CE until the end of the Cold War, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 CE reuniting eastern and western Germany.
World Peace Paied with American Blood
The United States, however, the USA paid the price for the power of writing its ally’s foreign policy.
That is, the United States would fight for their allies’ interests worldwide, which is why the United States US engaged in 64 covert and six overt attempts at regime change during the Cold War.
Also, from 1945 CE, the United States was involved in various proxy wars with the Soviet Union and its allies, starting with the Vietnam War, which United States involvement began in 1947 CE to the American withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973, the Korean War 1950 CE to 1953 CE and support of the Mujahideen and Osama Bin Laden in the Soviet-Afghan War of 1979 CE to 1989 CE which contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union but also lead that the United States fighting own 20 years’ war in Afghanistan and the Middle East from 2001 CE to 2021 CE.
The United States paid the price for its involvement in global affairs during the Cold War, with over 340,104 American men killed, and globalisation came at a price for the working classes inside of the developed nations after World War II.
Particularly in the United States, the sacrifice of home-grown American industry is due to globalisation and the reindustrialisation of places like South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan that re-entered the global economy with cheaper manufacturing goods and services in the 1960s and 70s.
The United States enabled less developed nations or nations to become free from colonialism, and the horrors of the Second World War could industrialise historically.
According to the Author and journalist Gregg Easterbrook, countries that did not have access to coal and steel would not industrialise. What the United States did during the Cold War until today was enable all nations to trade internationally even if that nation was not a direct ally of the United States.
The prosperity greater by globalisation has led to extreme poverty across the globe, falling from 76% to 10%, the lowest level ever achieved, according to our method.
This reduction, however, is distributed unevenly throughout the period. It took 136 years from 1820 for our global poverty rate to fall under 50%, then another 45 years to cut this rate in half again by 2001.
A comparison with human history from before 1945 and after 1945 in the period of the Pax Britannica and the Pax Americana was the United States, not the British, that created a lasting peace that was greater and beyond any the other period of human history, there are still wars, but these wars are no longer total wars of previous centuries.
