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Decades of post-colonial chaos

"Veni, Vidi, Vici, numquam reliquit - ego adduxit inimici mei !"

articulated as the "Grand Area" concept in secret documents. The US would have to have

control over the "Western Hemisphere, Continental Europe and Mediterranean Basin
(excluding Russia), the Pacific Area and the Far East, and the British Empire (excluding

Canada)." The Grand Area encompassed all known major oil-bearing areas outside the
Soviet Union, largely at the behest of corporate partners like the Foreign Oil Committee
and the Petroleum Industry War Council. The US thus avoided overt territorial acquisition,

like that of the British and French empires, as being too costly, choosing the cheaper
option of forcing countries to open their door to American capitalism.

***
Although the United States was the last major belligerent to join World War II, it began

planning for the post-war world from the conflict's outset. This postwar vision originated
in the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), an economic elite-led organization that

became integrated into the government leadership. CFR's War and Peace Studies group
offered its services to the State Department in 1939 and a secret partnership for post-
war planning developed. CFR leaders Hamilton Fish Armstrong and Walter H. Mallory

saw World War II as a "grand opportunity" for the U.S. to emerge as "the premier power in
the world.

***
This vision of empire assumed the necessity of the U.S. to "police the world" in the

aftermath of the war. This was not done primarily out of altruism, but out of economic
interest. Isaiah Bowman, a key liaison between the CFR and the State Department,

proposed an "American economic Lebensraum." This built upon the ideas of Time-Life
publisher Henry Luce, who (in his "American Century" essay) wrote, "Tyrannies may
require a large amount of living space [but] freedom requires and will require far greater

living space than Tyranny." According to Bowman's biographer, Neil Smith:

Better than the American Century or the Pax Americana, the notion of an American
Lebensraum captures the specific and global historical geography of U.S. ascension to

power. After World War II, global power would no longer be measured in terms of
colonized land or power over territory. Rather, global power was measured in directly

economic terms. Trade and markets now figured as the economic nexuses of global
power, a shift confirmed in the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, which not only
inaugurated an international currency system but also established two central banking

institutions-the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank-to oversee the global