This American postwar preeminence was recognized by observers at the time. The U.S. was in the position today where Britain was at the end of the Napoleonic wars,” noted British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin in June 1947.8 The British scholar, Harold Laski, also writing in 1947, captured the same sense of overarching American power: Today literally hundreds of millions of Europeans and Asiatics know that both the quality and the rhythm of their lives depend upon decisions made inWashington. On thewisdom of those decisions hangs the fate of the next generation.”9
THE SETTLEMENT OF 1945 169 American foreign policy officials also understood that this extraordinary asymmetry in power was a defining feature of the postwar situation.
George Kennan, in a major State Department review of American foreign policy in 1948, pointed to the new reality: We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. . . . Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.”10 The United States found itself in a rare position. It had power and choices.
Moreover, unlike the end of the First World War, the victory by the allies was complete. Unconditional surrender and postwar occupation of the defeated powers was an absolute condition for ending the war with Germany and Japan.11 As early as April 1942, a subcommittee in the State Department that was set up to study postwar security problems concluded that war in Europe had reignited a second time only because Germany had not been driven to absolute defeat in 1918. The German people had been led to believe that they had been tricked into accepting a punative peace agreement even though the German military had not been beaten on the battlefield. The committee concluded that On the assumption that the victory of the United Nations will be conclusive, unconditional surrender rather than an armistice should be sought from the principal enemy states. 12 Roosevelt immediately adopted the goal of unconditional surrender and, at the allied conference in Casablanca in January 1943, the allies agreed to this resolution of the war.13 In both Europe and the Pacific, this was in fact how the war ended.