Also from Alan Greenspan’s latest work:

“America laid the foundations of a liberal trading regime by slashing tariffs on dutiable imports from an average of 33 percent in 1944 to 13 percent just six years later. It also laid the foundations of global economic management with the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank at a conference at a hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (later the World Trade Organization) followed in 1947. It laid the foundations of global political management with the creation of the United Nations in 1944–46.

The Marshall Plan provided Europe with some $13 billion for rebuilding in the years 1948 through 1952, more than all previous foreign aid combined. Ernest Bevin, Britain’s foreign secretary, described Marshall’s speech at Harvard on April 28, 1947, as “one of the greatest speeches in world history.”

The architects of the new world order were hardheaded men, not starry-eyed idealists. They realized that a new struggle was on the horizon, between capitalism and communism; they understood that U.S. companies needed global markets to sell their goods. “The Plan presupposes that we desire to restore a Europe which can and will compete with us in the world markets,” Allen Dulles, the CIA director, wrote, referring to the Marshall Plan, “and for that very reason will be able to buy substantial amounts of our products.”8 The U.S. share of world trade in manufactured goods increased from 10 percent in 1933 to 29 percent in 1953, providing millions of jobs for American workers. There was no doubt as to who was in charge of the new world.”