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Book Review
| Architects of Globalism: Building a New World Order during World War II. By Patrick J. Hearden. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2002. xvi, 418 pp. $39.95, ISBN 1-55728-730-9.)
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| Patrick J. Hearden's Architects of Globalism is a carefully researched and argued examination of U.S. efforts to construct a framework for postWorld War II world order during the course of the war itself. The protagonists, State Department planners under the direction of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, were motivated by the presumption that the United States could not withdraw from world affairs at war's end but rather "must be prepared to help shape the eventual peace settlement to suit American interests and aspirations" (p. 10). Hearden attempts to demonstrate that from the attack on Pearl Harbor onward U.S. policy was directed by a State-led consensus on postwar goals, summarized as the construction of "a liberal capitalist world system" (p. 39) based upon the principles of equal commercial opportunity, multilateral trade, and collective security. The author uses state archives and personal papers to reconstruct the ways in which this consensus was shaped and sustained within policy circles and applied to U.S. strategic choices. By looking closely at a vital but often neglected dimension of American policy at a critical juncture, Architects of Globalism makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of the evolution of the U.S. approach to foreign and security affairs. |
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