Before the Second World War, the United States was not a superpower. It was barely a military power at all. In 1939, the US Army numbered fewer than 200,000 soldiers — ranking it seventeenth in the world, smaller than the army of Portugal.¹ Its troops trained with broomsticks standing in for rifles and trucks labelled “TANK” in chalk. Congress had spent two decades slashing military budgets, and the country’s political class was overwhelmingly isolationist, still haunted by the memory of the First World War — a conflict most Americans had come to see as a profitable mistake.²

The bestselling book of 1934, Merchants of Death, had accused American banks and arms manufacturers of engineering US entry into that war for profit.³ Between 1935 and 1937, Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts designed to prevent America from being dragged into any foreign conflict again.⁴ When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, ninety percent of Americans wanted to stay out of it.⁵ The oceans, they believed, were protection enough. Let Europe burn. It wasn’t their problem.

Europe did burn. Not the polite kind of ruins — the kind tourists photograph on holiday. These were the real thing: cities flattened, populations halved, entire generations of young men buried in fields from Normandy to Stalingrad. Britain alone had bankrupted itself fighting a six-year war it had entered two years before anyone else showed up. By 1944, fifty-five percent of British GDP was devoted to war production.⁶ By 1945, the national debt stood at over two hundred percent of GDP.⁷

America, by contrast, had used the war to transform itself. The country that entered the conflict with a seventeenth-ranked army emerged from it controlling three-quarters of the world’s monetary gold and commanding an economy that had overtaken Britain’s as far back as 1872 but had never, until now, been weaponised for global dominance.⁸

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The deal came quickly. In July 1944, even before the war ended, delegates from forty-four nations gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and built a new financial order. The US dollar would be pegged to gold at thirty-five dollars an ounce. Every other currency would be pegged to the dollar. America would become the world’s central banker.⁹

Then came the loans. Under the Lend-Lease Act, America had supplied Britain with food, oil, weapons, and materiel during the war — not as charity, but as a strategic calculation to keep Britain fighting while America stayed out.¹⁰ When Washington abruptly terminated Lend-Lease the moment Japan surrendered, Britain was left scrambling. A new loan was negotiated: $3.75 billion from the US, plus $1.9 billion from Canada. Britain would not finish paying it off until December 2006 — sixty-one years later.¹¹

The conditions attached were instructive. In exchange for financial help, Britain had to abandon imperial trade preferences, make sterling convertible, and accept what amounted to economic client status. As one British historian characterised it, the Americans sought extended leases on military bases in British territory and preferential access for US corporations to aviation routes and telecommunications networks.¹² America was not rescuing Britain. America was buying it.

The arrangement was never one-sided. It was never charity. It was a deal, and both sides got what they wanted. The difference is that only one side got to write the story.

The Marshall Plan followed in 1948 — over thirteen billion dollars pumped into Western Europe.¹³ It was generous and it was transformative. It was also, explicitly, an investment. American policymakers understood that rebuilt European economies meant markets for American goods, bulwarks against Soviet influence, and a continent politically aligned with Washington. The plan was named after a general for a reason.

And with the money came the bases. Europe would host American military infrastructure — not primarily to protect Frankfurt or Paris, but to project American power into the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Europe was an aircraft carrier that happened to have cathedrals. Ramstein wasn’t built to defend Germany — it was built to run operations across the globe. The Mediterranean fleet wasn’t protecting Italian fishermen — it was securing shipping lanes for American oil interests.

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Then there was the money — the deeper architecture of the arrangement. Every nation that bought US Treasury bonds was, in effect, lending America the money to outspend everyone else. The US could run deficits that would have collapsed any other economy, because the world had no choice but to keep buying. If you stopped buying dollars, your own currency would destabilise. It was an empire built not on conquest but on accounting.

The Bretton Woods system formally collapsed in 1971 when Nixon suspended the dollar’s convertibility to gold.¹⁴ But by then it didn’t matter. The dollar’s dominance had become self-sustaining — a structural dependency that persists to this day.

Meanwhile, America used its position to reshape the world in its image — and not always gently. In 1953, Iran elected a prime minister who wanted to nationalise his country’s oil. America and Britain removed him and installed a dictator. In 1954, Guatemala elected a president who wanted land reform. America removed him too. Chile, 1973. The list grew. Each time, the justification was the same: communism, stability, national interest. Each time, the people who lived there paid the price.

In Afghanistan, America funded holy warriors to fight the Soviets. It worked. The Soviets left. The holy warriors kept their weapons and their ideology, and eventually they turned up in New York on a Tuesday morning in September. America then spent twenty years and two trillion dollars trying to fix what it had helped create, before leaving the same people in charge anyway.

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And through all of this, Europeans were told to be grateful. Grateful for the bases they never asked to keep. Grateful for the debt arrangement they couldn’t exit. Grateful for a security guarantee that served American interests as much as their own.

Now, when Europeans hear Americans say “You’ve been freeloading off us for decades,” they don’t hear a fair complaint. They hear a landlord who’s been collecting rent for eighty years suddenly pretending he’s been doing you a favour by letting you live in his house — a house he only built because he wanted to keep an eye on the neighbours.

The country that couldn’t field a bigger army than Portugal in 1939 used Europe’s catastrophe to become the most powerful nation in human history. That isn’t a secret. That isn’t a conspiracy. It’s just history — the part that gets left out when Americans talk about what they’re owed.

The arrangement was never one-sided. It was never charity. It was a deal, and both sides got what they wanted.

The difference is that only one side got to write the story.