149 But the actual postwar settleme

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But the actual postwar settlement reflected a more mixed set of lessons and calculations. Realist lessons from the League of Nations debacleof the 1920s were combined with liberal lessons from the regional imperialism and mercantilist conflict of the 1930s. The United States did show more willingness to use its military victory and occupation after 1945 to implement its postwar aims in Germany and Japan. But those aims, nonetheless, were manifestly liberal in character.
Finally, there was an explicit presumption among American and European officials that binding postwar institutions NATO in particular, but the other multilateral institutions as well would only operate effectively to provide restraints and assurances if the participating states were democratic.
British Foreign Minister Bevin’s appeal to Secretary of State Marshallin December 1948, that the Atlantic countries should act to create a spiritual federation of the west,” implied that it was the commonality of democracy that ultimately was the basis for security cooperation. Later, when the allies deliberated over the manner in which western Germany would be integrated into the West, John McCloy argued that Germany would need to be a willing participant and eventually a full partner with the other countries in the emerging concert of democratic powers.”
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A democratic Germany would be necessary to ensure its full participation in a noncoercive and legitimate Western order. Likewise, when Germany negotiated the return of its sovereignty in 1954, it had an incentive to embrace its new democratic institutions recognizing that the western allies could only be relied upon to defend Germany if it embraced democratic values.
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Democracy was both an end and a means.Western officials justified
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the unprecedented degree of institutional cooperation and integration as necessary, in the words of John Foster Dulles, to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of our people,” but it was precisely because these countries were democratic that their governments could make these binding commitments.
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In these various ways, the huge asymmetries of power were rendered
acceptable to America’s partners, both because of the binding institutions that were employed and because of the structural features of the American polity. American officials went out of their way to reassure postwar partners and to cultivate a sense of legitimacy in the alliance and economic institutions they were creating. But in a larger sense, the United States was doomed to reassure.” Even if it did not actively seek to find agreement of mutually acceptable postwar rules and institutions, the operation of a large, pluralistic, and penetrated polity tended to produce those same results. The open system facilitated the collaborative search by American and British economists to find a Keynesian middle ground in the postwar economic order. The open American polity created opportunities for allies to lobby actively and engage American officials and influence the policy process.
The institutions and alliances that were created were rendered more credible because they were based on treaties ratified by a democratic state, which means that they were commitments that would be difficult to overturn. If the United States would have been as powerful as it was after 1945, but not a democracy willing to employ a range of international institutions to bind itself to other states, it is difficult to envision its postwar partners willingly buying into such a postwar order