Heg bad – leads the world to the brink and consumes excessive resources. WWII empirics proves

A preliminary step should be that of tracing out the main motives lying behind the post-WWII creation of the American led global order (or international liberal order). The American government was pushed by the desire to place order and continuity in three main intertwined issue areas: economics, politics and security. The outbreak of WWII highlighted how a fragmented global political arena in which each actor was concerned with preserving its own privileges and pursuing its own interests at each other expenses was not sustainable. The lack of a political guidance, embodied by the failure of the League of Nations, showed well how such a system could easily break down leading the world towards the brink, and over.

The first issue-area, concerning world economy, was perhaps the most important area of intervention. The American idea for the future of world system was the creation of an open, interconnected world market economy able to prevent the rebirth of imperial aggregation, as it used to be under the British, German and Japanese empires between the second half of the nineteenth century and 1945. The rationale for such a project was twofold: to inhibit imperial temptations and to link the other world powers to the American economic system.

The United States was conscious that the existence of imperial preference systems, regional blocs structured around isolationism and regional trade dynamics would inhibit its ambition to exert the role of global power, a status it already possessed the end of the WWII. The United States’ strategic aim was to gain worldwide access to resources and to push the greatest possible amount of countries to trade with them, in order to extend the American economic presence to all the regions of the world.