ABSTRACT
No one looking at the twenty-five year period 1947-72 in its entirety, the period running from the end of the Second World War to the beginning of the end of the postwar economic and monetary system, can withhold his admiration, admiration in the dual sense of approval and surprise. The Marshall Plan in Europe and certain reforms in Japan (such as the agrarian reform) may legitimately be credited to American diplomacy. The United States' behavior as a benevolent ally in the one case and as a generous victor in the other contrasted all the more brutally with that of the Soviet Union, because the Soviet Union had emerged devastated from its trials and could not have rivaled the United States in liberality or generosity even if it had so wished. To identify liberalism and free trade with a devious form of imperialism seems to me, therefore, too broad a generalization.
