Eastern European developments caused much apprehension over Russian intentions and a general hardening of United States policy toward the Soviets. Even more urgent was the rise of the Left, for which the Americans were certain the Russians shared a heavy responsibility. In France, Italy, Belgium, and virtually all of Western Europe (the Americans) had stopped the threat of the Left only because military control of civil affairs permitted a suspension of normal civil liberties that might lead to the transformation of the Old Order. Such rule would sooner or later have to come to an end, (opening the question) of what the Left would do at that time. In France the British were convinced they had found their answer in De Gaulle, whom the Americans opposed with unabashed hostility until the very months before Yalta, when their posture became one of watchful reserve. In Greece the British used the club and the knout to stop the Left. Since the Russians understood that they would assume responsibility in the eyes of their allies for any revolution in the Western sphere of influence, and their influence might suffer because of the acts of foreign revolutionaries, the Soviet Union by 1945 energetically attempted to help the United States and England check the tide of revolt. The British understood and appreciated this fact in Greece, and thought it a part of their spheres-of-influence agreement they believed they has won from Stalin in October 1944, but neither the English nor the Americans perceived its significance elsewhere to the extent of incorporating it into their overall assessments of the future of European politics. They continued to hold Russia accountable for each rash editorial, each riot, each hungry crowd seeking to bring an end to the miseries and leaders of the Old Order, an order both England and the United States in their own ways were determined to preserve and stabilize via arms, or at best, modest reforms.
The Americans never understood that the Communist parties by virtue of Russian influence were safest in politics, and the only group capable of aborting the Left by deluding it. The Anglo-Americans considered it sufficient to stop the Left by dictating to small nations, friends and foes alike, the form of internal social and political systems they preferred, a precedent the West began and the Russians immediately accepted as the Allies divided Europe into spheres of influence.
To the United States, especially in its postwar economic objectives, Britain posed a monumental question that Americans hoped to resolve through both diplomacy and the manipulation of levers of power via Lend-Lease and possible post-war financial credits. The entire war had revealed a frightful, exacerbating dispute between the two Western allies on almost every issue. They continuously disagreed over military strategy, and in Italy and France they intrigued over who should rule. The British scored decisively when De Gaulle emerged triumphant and threatened to bring France into a planned Western European political, economic, and military bloc frankly intended to counter overwhelming Russian and American power in Europe. In Eastern Europe the Anglo-American differences on political strategy were sharp and continuous, with no consoling victories for the American position, but only a series of defeats for the British, save in Greece, where the United States supported the ruthless and bloody English suppression of the ELAS.
Yet Anglo-American rivalries were sharpest in the economic sphere. The Americans wanted Great Britain to come out of the war neither too weak nor too strong, but receptive to United States objectives. Continuous haggling over Lend-Lease and dollar balances, then export markets and England's obligation under Article VII of the Lend-Lease Agreement, were dissolving all trust and mutual confidence in the alliance built on common language and necessity. The frightful crisis over Saudi Arabian and Iranian oil, escalating in the latter case to a source of serious dispute with the Russians as well, ultimately caused the English to suspect the worst concerning postwar American goals. By Yalta the vital unity between the two nations depended largely on their mutual enemies and the common Anglo-American fear of Russia and the threat of the Left.
The United States was fully aware of all these frustrating and difficult elements but hoped to compensate for them, confident that it would emerge from the war preeminent on the political and industrial level and able to define the structure of the postwar world. However, it had not yet resolved all the steps toward this end, and it still had to formulate Germany's role in the future. But in essence the American vision of the future, as the English well understood, was clear. On a political level the United States hoped to become the center of the contemplated United Nations, with a special status among the Great Allies on the Security Council equal to its real power, in the expectation the United Nations would become an instrument in the attainment of American political objectives. Washington had heavily loaded the membership of the United Nations to favor American control of the forthcoming San Francisco Conference and the contemplated General Assembly.
Such political vision was broad, but on an economic level the goals were even broader and the instrumentalities for their attainment much more specific, for Hull and American planners had allocated a special place to foreign economic war aims. They saw the structure of the postwar economy as a key lever in determining the nature of the peace, and America would employ its economic power for the mutual benefit of the common weal as well as provide needed outlets for a vast industrial capacity at home. Bretton Woods, Hull's trading goals, and the like were the key means for constructing a common world economic structure. Washington envisioned a "normal" world economy at this level of planning, one that had not existed since 1914 but which the United States might create, one whose basic problem would be surplus and abundance rather than scarcity. It uncritically assumed these objectives were entirely obtainable rather than mere aspirations. The English, however, knew the Americans were advocating policies for others but not for themselves, especially when they examined how the Americans translated such principles into an oil or tariffs policy. After hard and bitter experience many skeptical Allies suspected that the American brand of economic internationalism was synonymous with American hegemony over the world economy.
American definitions of war aims postulated an ideal world order that would emerge from the chaos of the war, one not wracked by social and economic disorder, hunger, and radical changes in the conditions that had defined the prewar world. In developing constant objectives and desired structures on the economic level the planners in Washington did not anticipate radical frustrations in the immediate postwar realities, did not sense the possibility that after a decade of sustained violence and terror it might be altogether beyond American capabilities to restore and reform the era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century - to undo the social impact of two world wars. Above all it had yet to convince allies essential for the success of the undertaking that the new internationalism it advocated was something more than American power and domination masking itself under a new label.
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