After World War II, the United States contributed largely to the formulation of the basic principles of the international trade regime, which determine its overall shape up to the present day. At the same time, it is the United States, represented by Donald Trump, that perhaps poses the main threat to these principles, seeking to gain unilateral advantages through protectionist measures and the revision of trade agreements. In order to provide a better understanding of this transformation of the U.S. foreign economic priorities, this paper examines the domestic political debates that unfolded in the United States back in the late 1940s on the ratification of the Charter of the International Trade Organization (ITO), which was supposed to become the main tool of international trade liberalization. The first section of the article examines the history of negotiations on various drafts of the Charter. The author concludes that the final version of the ITO Charter, agreed upon in Havana in 1948, cannot be considered a U.S. landslide victory — the American delegation failed to defend the basic principles of trade liberalization that it advocated, with the document containing a large number of loopholes and reservations eroding its initial concept. This fact was well understood by ITO supporters among the American political and business elites, who, as shown in the second and third sections of the article, respectively, made significant efforts to secure the ratification of the Charter. To this end, a special Committee for International Trade Organization, which included dozens of major American businessmen, was formed. All these efforts, however, could not overcome the resistance of the opposition to the ratification of the Charter, which included both staunch protectionists and those advocates of international trade liberalization, who did not welcome the version of the Charter adopted in Havana. Under these conditions, the support for the Charter, including from the Truman administration, began to fade away. The author concludes that the U.S. inability to ‘push through’ its draft Charter had negative political and reputational consequences, which, however, were largely offset by the successful signing of the GATT. At the same time, the most serious consequence of the ITO failure was the aggravation of international tensions, which could have otherwise been mitigated by an organization regulating world trade.

During World War II, the United States gained superpower status, which implied the active participation of American diplomacy in the establishment of the post-war world order. In this context, one of the cornerstones of U.S. foreign policy was the strengthening of relations with the countries of Western Europe, which found themselves on the front lines of the nascent Soviet-American confrontation. This article attempts to place the evolution of American approaches to the economic development of Western Europe in the 1940s–1950s into a broader context of the U.S. plans to build a global liberal economic order. The study of the American post-war policy toward Europe is particularly relevant, as it can help to better comprehend the current logic of trade and economic relations between the United States and the European Union. The first section of the article outlines the main milestones in the history of post-war international trade and financial institutions: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The author notes that during this period, the United States, taking advantage of the weakness and dependence of European countries, was able to effectively impose its vision of a global economic order on them. At the same time, the U.S. leadership soon realized that the active engagement of Western European countries in building a new economic order requires the establishment of regional organizations to promote free trade between them. To a great extent, the Marshall Plan was aimed at solving these problems, as discussed in detail in the second section of the article. The author emphasizes that the United States deliberately used economic assistance to stimulate consolidating trends in Western Europe as part of this plan. The third section of the paper thoroughly analyzes the motives behind the U.S. support for European integration. As the author shows, the United States was interested in creating a large regional market for American exports. Therefore, the United States supported the establishment of the European Communities (ECSC, EEC, Euratom). According to the U.S. plan, the liberalization of trade relations between Western European countries should subsequently be extrapolated to their trade with outside partners. While the first part of this plan was successfully implemented, problems arose with the second one: the foreign economic policy of the European Communities followed the protectionist course. Thus, the American leadership faced a new challenge, i.e., to achieve the liberalization of Western European trade with external partners.

Keywords: USA, Western Europe, World War II, world economic order, Bretton Woods System, IMF, IBRD, GATT, Marshall Plan, OEEC, European integration, ECSC

The issues of post-war settlement have always attracted the attention of researchers, yet this agenda is becoming particularly relevant amidst the ongoing dramatic transformation of international relations. In this context, the study of the mechanisms and logic behind the advent of the Yalta-Potsdam order is especially relevant. The paper aims to trace the evolution of French strategic and diplomatic assessments regarding the key parameters of the security system in Europe following the Second World War. The case of France can serve as an illustrative example of the process of a former great-power’s painful adaption to the new international realities, associated with the loss of its status. To this end, the paper not only draws on a wide range of rare archival documents, but also adapts a new theoretical framework to explicate the evolution of the French foreign policy during the formation years of the Yalta-Potsdam order — the concept of ‘hysteresis of habitus’. The latter helps to highlight the extent to which the French policy makers at that time tended to reproduce traditional practices, disregarding the changing international context. The first section shows that this political inertia was particularly common to French foreign policy planning in 1943–1944. However, it was already the period of 1945–1947 that the ‘habitus’ transformation began: French diplomacy abandoned attempts to weaken Germany as much as possible in favour of rapprochement with Great Britain and the United States. Meanwhile, the French military increasingly began to focus on the ‘Soviet threat’. The beginning of the Cold War confronted Paris with the need to integrate into the ‘Western consensus’, yet without becoming a satellite of the Anglo-Saxon powers. In these circumstances, French diplomacy in 1948–1949 focused on Western European integration. This conceptual transformation of the foreign policy ‘habitus’ manifested itself in the active engagement of France with the Western military-political blocs: the Western Union and NATO. At the same time, it revealed the fundamental inconsistency of the French foreign policy aspirations. On the one hand, France sought to ensure its independence and avoid becoming the U.S. satellite, on the other, it was in dire need of military and political guarantees and loans from the United States. Finding a balance between these components of France’s new foreign policy ‘habitus’ remained a difficult task for Paris throughout the Cold War. The author concludes that although it is possible to observe the ‘hysteresis of habitus’ effect in the French foreign policy planning during the period under consideration, the country’s leadership also demonstrated the ability to tailor its plans to the logic of the intensifying Cold War. At the same time, a number of basic components of the country’s foreign policy identity, primarily the imperative of restoring ‘greatness’, remained constants of French politics.

During World War II, the colonial issue was at the forefront of both the fight of the anti-Hitler coalition against the Axis powers and the inter-allied discussion of the prospects for the post-war world order. In this context, the perspectives of the U.S. experts affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations deserve special attention. Having brought together government officials, bankers, industrialists, Wall Street lawyers, and Ivy League professors, the Council turned into a unique expert platform that exerted a significant influence not only on the course of public discussions about the future world order, but also on the foreign policy decision-making in the United States itself. This article identifies the specific features of experts’ perspectives on the prospects of the development and transformation of the colonial system after World War II. The first section profiles the Council’s members who actively participated in the discussion of these issues. The second section outlines the two main approaches of the Council’s experts to resolving the colonial issue, which involved either reforming the existing colonial system or significantly revising it. At the same time, as the author notes, all experts recognized that the positions of the European colonial powers would be inevitably weakened by the end of World War II and emphasized the need for the U.S. to play a more active role in the colonial issue, not least to counter a possible threat from the USSR. That said, some experts also voiced certain concerns that the inflow of American capital into the former European colonies would be fraught with economic risks that could exceed potential benefits. The author concludes that although most of the forecasts and recommendations considered were fairly general and vague, the Council in general was able to correctly predict the decolonization trend and during the war years reaffirmed its status as one of the most authoritative expert platforms on international relations.

For almost 80 years after the end of World War II, the U.S. military and political alliances formed the core of the regional order in both Western Europe and East Asia. Nowadays, the post-war network of American alliances remains a key component of their international security policy, aimed at ensuring military superiority over existing and potential rivals on the Eurasian continent. At the same time, the U.S. approaches to alliance building in the Pacific had certain peculiarities from the very beginning. In order to better understand them, as well as to identify the general principles of U.S. regional policymaking, it seems appropriate to study the genesis of the so-called San Francisco system, a complex of military-political arrangements between the United States and Asian states that developed in the early years of the Cold War. The core of this system is a series of agreements between the United States and a number of regional actors, including Japan, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, and Taiwan. The article examines the course of negotiations and the content of agreements between the United States and each of these countries. According to the author, these agreements can be roughly divided into ‘guarantee’ and ‘reinsurance’ treaties. The former can be exemplified by the triple Pacific Security Treaty engaging Australia and New Zealand, which provided the allies with U.S. guarantees in the event of resurging Japanese militarism; mutual security agreements with the Republic of Korea and Taiwan stand for the latter. By concluding them, the United States sought, on the one hand, to guarantee the security of the allies crucial for the ‘Roll-back of Communism’ strategy, and, on the other, to ensure against any reckless steps by their leaders, minimizing the risk of the U.S. involvement in a nuclear war with the ‘Communist bloc’. The image of a ‘wheel with a hub and spokes’ was used to describe the established structure of allied relations. This ‘geometry’ of the links within the Pacific Rim appeared to be quite stable and, as a result, the San Francisco system, which was initially ad hoc, continues to exist today, albeit in a somewhat modified form.

The U.S. policies toward the Korean peninsula during the Cold War are usually considered within the framework of the bipolar confrontation and the Soviet-American struggle for spheres of influence. Meanwhile, international interactions at the level of the Korean regional subsystem were not limited to a strict separation of states into two opposing camps and were characterized by greater complexity and unpredictability. This study attempts to show that U.S. policy was a determining, but by no means the only, factor in the formation and development of the regional subsystem of international relations on the Korean Peninsula and was flexible enough to adapt to the actions of other actors. The first section of the article examines how a relatively peaceful situation around Korea in the aftermath of World War II transformed into an intense superpower rivalry and division of the peninsula into two adversarial Korean states. The author notes that this export of bipolarity to Korea was actively promoted by the United States, seeking to prevent the excessive strengthening of the Soviet positions in the region. The second section examines the role of the United States in the Korean War and its subsequent settlement. It is emphasized that already then, contrary to its expectations, the United States faced opposition from a number of regional actors and realized the need to search for alternative strategies to participate in Korean affairs. The third section identifies specific steps undertaken by the United States to reduce its presence in South Korea and analyzes the response of regional actors to the changes in American foreign policy. In particular, it shows how the U.S.-Chinese rapprochement in the 1970s influenced the evolution of the regional security system toward multipolarity and détente. It is concluded that the U.S. regional policy in the 1940s and 1970s tended to be deliberately and gradually decreasing the degree of its involvement in Korean affairs due to the redistribution of commitments between allies and the engagement of new actors in the Korean settlement process. At the same time, the author notes that the strategic approach to Korean policy, chosen by the United States during the Cold War and based on a system of multilateral alliances, has remained relevant so far, helping the American leadership to effectively maintain its presence on the Korean peninsula.

This review examines ‘History of the Soviet foreign policy in 1918–1941’, the monograph by O.R. Airapetov, published in 2024. To date, it represents one of the most detailed studies of Soviet foreign policy during the interwar period.

Building on a vast historiography, both domestic and foreign, and using a variety of sources, the author covers a wide range of issues, accompanying the emergence of the Soviet Union on the world map and its transformation into a key international actor. The author identifies four stages in this process: 1917–1922 (the period of the Civil War and Allied Intervention), 1920s — early 1930s (the formation of the Soviet foreign policy, marked by a series of international crises), early 1930s — 1939 (the USSR’s struggle against the military danger in Europe and its participation in the collective security system), 1939–1941 (the preparation of the USSR for a military clash with Germany). A distinctive feature of the monograph under review is its deep contextualization of the considered phenomena and events. In this regard, the reviewer notes that the subject matter is not so much the foreign policy activities of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs as the Soviet Union’s ‘grand strategy’, embracing diplomacy as only one of the tools along with economy, military planning and intelligence work. In his work, the author airs a number of views unconventional for Russian historiography, arguing, in particular, that the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s was only underway to claim the great power status, without being recognized as such at the international level and without having a corresponding leverage on global developments. Another important idea is a critical assessment of M.M. Litvinov’s activities as the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs. The reviewer shares this opinion and argues that during the pre-war decade, the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs overrated the potential of the collective security policy and the possibility of its alignment with the Soviet national interests. As this contradiction became evident, M.M. Litvinov’s political and administrative positions shed, which eventually led to his resignation in 1939. In conclusion, the reviewer notes that the period considered in the monograph was crucial for establishing a new Russian/Soviet foreign policy strategy, and therefore deserves further reflection within academic community.