A Changing of the Guard: Anglo-american Relations, 1941-1946 Randall Bennett Woods
In the United States, multilateralism attracted New Deal liberals because it proposed to help not only the established economic interests but traditionally disadvantaged groups such as farmers and industrial workers as well. Moderate socialists in Britain also lent their support to a liberalized trading system, as did many conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic, believing that the program would preserve some degree of free enterprise in the international economy.
Unfortunately for its disciples, Woods argues, multilateralism was so modified by the forces of isolationism and economic nationalismand by bureaucratic politics in the United Statesthat it failed to achieve its economic and strategic goals. The international economy that emerged after World War II was not an equitable partnership and merely finalized the fifty-year process by which the United States supplanted Great Britain as the arbiter of Western Capitalism. In the end, modified multilateralism hampered rather than facilitated the free flow of goods and capital, and it did little to promote social democracy.