The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze

Economics was the pre-eminent medium of American power, military force was a by-product.

The true logic of American power was articulated between 1899 and 1902 in the three ‘Notes’ in which Secretary of State John Hay first outlined the so-called ‘Open Door’ policy. As the basis for a new international order these ‘Notes’ proposed one deceptively simple but far-reaching principle: equality of access for goods and capital.

What American strategy was emphatically directed towards suppressing was imperialism, understood not as productive colonial expansion nor the racial rule of white over coloured people, but as the ‘selfish’ and violent rivalry of France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Russia and Japan that threatened to divide one world into segmented spheres of interest.

Only a peace without victory, the goal that he announced in an unprecedented speech to the Senate in January 1917, could ensure that the United States emerged as the truly undisputed arbiter of world affairs.

When Germany faced defeat in the West, it was, as we shall see, the Reichstag majority that dared, not once, but three times between November 1918 and September 1923 to wager the future of their country on subordination to the Western Powers. From 1949 down to the present the Reichstag majority’s lineal descendants, the CDU, SPD and FDP, remain the mainstays both of democracy in the Federal Republic and of their country’s commitment to the European project.

What the war gave rise to was a multisided, polycentric search for strategies of pacification and appeasement. And in that quest the calculations of all the great powers pivoted on one key factor, the United States.

Through the private business contacts of J. P. Morgan, supported by the business and political elite of the American Northeast, the Entente was carrying out a mobilization of a large part of the US economy, entirely without the say-so of the Wilson administration.