5. Rebuilding the World
From the 1st to the 22nd of July, 1944, 730 delegates from all 44 Allied nations gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, resulting in the signing of the Bretton Woods Agreement. This would become the foundation for a new global financial system and would birth the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, cementing America’s involvement in global affairs. However, not everyone was on board.
Despite allying themselves with the western nations to defeat Hitler, the world’s second-largest power, the Soviet Union, was far from eager to play second fiddle to America’s new vision of the world. Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe and elsewhere was a major concern to America’s view of a democratic and free-trading world. As a bulwark against the Soviet Union’s spreading of communism, and at the behest of the Truman administration, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was created in 1949 as a military alliance designed to stop Russia from invading other countries in Europe.
