The battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the making of a new world order, by Benn Steil

Abstract

Benn Steil The battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the making of a new world order Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. 472pp., $19.75 (hardcover) ISBN-1 3: 978-0691 149097The popular narrative holds that the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, held at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944, was a mutually beneficial partnership between Britain and the United States to create a stable global monetary order. As the Council on Foreign Relations' Benn Steil shows in this historical account, however, such thinking has been a convenient fig leaf covering emergent American global ambitions and the British Empire's precarious international position. Steil also uses the conference as a canvas upon which to paint the larger picture of transatlantic relations, exploring the diplomatic and economic context for an emerging multilateral vision for monetary and trade governance. His work plays upon this myth of Anglo-American partnership, critically examining its usefulness to both parties, but ultimately offering a more nuanced portrait of partisanship, politics, and the high-stakes game of economic diplomacy played to great effect against the uncomfortable relationship between the great British economist John Maynard Keynes and the head of the American negotiation team, Harry Dexter White, who was later revealed to be a Soviet mole.White was a consummate political insider, a man of limited means and significant ambition who worked his way up in the US Treasury after failing to land a tenure-track position at Harvard University. A policy wonk, his mastery of the technical details that would become the new global monetary order rivalled even that of Keynes himself. Keynes, on the other hand, was a man of wealth and privilege his name a byword for genius. Even so, throughout the Second World War, Keynes would overestimate American sympathy for Great Britain. London might have been perceived popularly as a repository of culture and an incubator of democracy, but it was also an economic rival whose colonial relationships interfered with American exports and undermined monetary stability (96 97). Keynes did not fully comprehend the public antipathy for perceived British highhandedness in global economic affairs, and this as much as White's political skill proved to be his undoing.At the Bretton Woods conference, both Keynes and White determined to carve out for their respective governments the maximum amount of freedom for creating and enacting domestic economic policies to their future political advantage. White assured the dominant place of the dollar in the postwar economic order. Keynes manoeuvred for political space between the contractual details of lend-lease, the US Treasury's ambitious goals, and the proposed international financial institutions, which would either help or hinder Britain in the reconstruction of its war-ravaged economy (133). …