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The legacy of the gold standard and the Great Depression continued to influence both the economic behavior of individuals and the policies of governments through the remainder of the interwar years. That influence persisted into World War II, into the postwar period, and indeed to the end of the twentieth century. This concluding chapter describes some of the implications of that persistence for the postwar international economic order.

This chapter examines the institutional logic of order building and variations in its manifestation. The aftermath of major war presents the winning state with choices. The destruction caused by war and the breakdown of the old order provide opportunities to establish new basic rules and organizing arrangements that are likely to persist well into the future. At such postwar junctures, the leading state has three broad choices. One is to use its power to dominate the weaker and defeated states. A second choice for the winning state is to abandon the other states and simply go home. A third choice is for the leading state to use its commanding power position to gain acquiescence and participation in a mutually acceptable postwar order.

This chapter discusses the order-building strategies of the leading postwar states and variations in the character of postwar order. Across the great historical junctures, leading states have adopted different strategies for coping with the uncertainties and disparities of postwar power and, as a result, have built different types of postwar orders. Variations in the extent to which leading states attempted to build order around binding institutions are manifest in the divergent order-building efforts of Britain in 1815 and the United States in 1919 and 1945. The chapter then distinguishes three types of order: balance of power, hegemonic, and constitutional. Each represents a different way in which power is distributed and exercised among states—differences, that is, in the basic organizing relations of power and authority. They also differ in terms of the restraints that are manifest on the exercise of state power and in the sources of cohesion and cooperation among states.

This concluding chapter evaluates the implications that emerge from this book's theoretical and historical analysis for American foreign policy. The United States begins a new century as an unrivaled global power. American foreign policy makers need to be reminded what characteristics of the postwar order have made American power reasonably acceptable to other states and peoples during and after the Cold War. American power is not only unprecedented in its preponderance, but it is also unprecedented in the way it is manifest within and through institutions. This helps explain why it has been so durable. If American policy makers want to perpetuate America's preeminent position, they will need to continue to find ways to operate within international institutions, and by so doing restrain that power and make it acceptable to other states.

Stalin’s vision of the peace was complex, contradictory, and multifaceted, with ideological, ethnic, and realist dimensions. Stalin expected the war to be transformative, but he also foresaw large elements of continuity, including the restoration of a Europe made up of independent sovereign states—albeit one divided into Soviet and non-Soviet spheres of influence. Stalin’s vision of the peace met with mixed results. The Grand Alliance broke up after the war, but the ensuing Cold War proved to be a relatively stable and peaceful international order. The communist advance into eastern Europe was considerable, but the communist challenge in western Europe had faded by the late 1940s.

This chapter surveys current law and politics, revealing a period of ferment and stagnation: the postwar order in its late, classical decadence. By the 1970s, the world had settled on the classical model of self-determination—a formal set of rules, elegant and stable in its principles and assumptions. Of course, in reality such models and moments are anything but stable, and ever since there has been almost continuous ferment and change. Indeed, one could say that as the classical model was announced, even while it was still forming, the world entered into the postclassical era, in which the classical model persists, still dominant but increasingly indeterminate, insensible, decaying, unable to explain its own premises or operate effectively: an age of self-determinative decadence. The chapter then explores the elements and operations of the classical model, including recent challenges.

This chapter assesses President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. By 1941, FDR and his key advisers were distilling some hard-won wisdom from their trial-and-error approaches in devising what had become known as the New Deal, and applying them to the world's burgeoning international crises. The key, for Roosevelt, was a New Deal–inspired set of ideas and institutions that animated a capacious reframing of the national interest. Internationalizing the New Deal meant reconfiguring the playing field of world politics in three broad, institutional realms: collective security, economic stability, and rule of law institutions. These three institutional pillars are usually what contemporary international relations specialists mean when they refer to “the postwar international order.” What made this institutionally focused scaffolding into “grand strategy” was the way any resulting improvement to the functioning of the international order was dependent on negotiation and diplomacy.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Allied occupation of Japan. Between 1939 and 1945, American policymakers decided to reorient rather than punish postwar Japan. They hoped to transform the current enemy into a “responsible” international actor through a short American-led military occupation. The political, religious, and even linguistic makeup of an ancient and deeply patriotic nation would be changed; Imperial Japan's colonial possessions would be liberated or redistributed. American intervention was expected to remake Japan into a pacifist economic power supportive of a postwar American order. However, President Franklin Roosevelt, congressmen, popular media figures, and high-level officials all opposed the plan at different points.

This chapter argues that the core problem is not ideology or corporate self-interest but rather the rise of a right-wing populism that feeds on racism and xenophobia. When workers suffer from stagnating or declining incomes, loss of benefits and pensions, declining health and health care coverage, and increased job insecurity, the right gives them an answer: blame black people, Latinxs, immigrants, Jews, or Muslims; blame the media elites, academics, or experts, not your employer; embrace the rich in the hope that someday you can be one of them; and condemn powerless people as the cause of your problems. The chapter describes how populism draws its energy from a racist, sexist, and xenophobic framing of the impact of the economic crisis on working-class Americans while also rejecting the postwar global order in favor of a return to American isolationism. It laments the Left's failure to offer plausible solutions and to create lasting solidarity across gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. This chapter explains that no revival of labor will be possible without engaging union members about race, gender, immigration, and the true nature of right-wing populism.

This chapter shows the postwar social order Kentuckians faced that bore little resemblance to the world they had known before. As Kentucky Confederate Basil Duke wrote decades later in his memoirs, “No such metamorphosis, perhaps, has been produced in so brief a period,” with the exception of the French Revolution. “The life of the postbellum South,” he concluded, “no more resembled that of the [antebellum] than the life of the early settlers of this continent was like [that] they had left on the other side of the ocean.” Kentucky at the war's close was a world of disorder. Fields, farms, and infrastructure lay in ruins, as did the social and familial relationships of families and neighbors. There was the human cost as well. Nearly 30,000, or one in five, Kentuckians who fought had lost their lives.