AMERICAN POLITICS SINCE 1945
Introduction
Early 1945 as the allied powers were close to the victory in Europe and in the pacific British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said "America stand at this moment at this summit of the world". Indeed the US had emerged from World War II not only victorious but supreme. It's true that the US had been the world's most powerful nation for many years before WWII but until the 1940's that power had not been accompanied by international responsibilities. The war provided this opportunity in its wake (sillage) most Americans no longer coincided their power as a means to isolate themselves from the problems of other nations. They coincided it as a right to become involved in trying to resolve those problems.
The reasons for the dominants of US at the outcome of WWII were numerous. First they were economic for 10 years before the war the country had remained stock in a deep economic depression. But the war and the massive public spending (deffence publique massive) it needed put the country on the rails of economic growth (croissance) again. The vast new abandons that was created, affected every domain in American life and raised the general level of effluents (richesse).
This general picture offered a real contrast with Europe, a continent that had been totally devastated by the conflict. The fact that the American territory had not been hit by the war except for Pearl Harbor was also one of the sources of American dominants and of the international prestige of the American way of life. In July 1944 the Breton Woods conference indeed on an agreement concerning a new financial order with the creation of the international bank for reconstruction and development and the international monetary fund. The American point of view prevailed during the negotiation. Accounting for the influence of the American economy in the western world, then the reasons were military. The US emerged as the great beneficiary of the conflict because its