Friday 3 July 2015

The business of America is our business

As the race for the White House in 2016 begins in earnest this summer with big hitting Republican and Democrat candidates lining up for their party’s nominations, Will Mooney, Carter Jonas partner and head of commercial in the eastern region, takes his cue from a past-President

In quoting the 30th President of the United State of America, it must be acknowleged that what Calvin Coolidge actually said in a 1925 speech was, “the chief business of the American people is business”. In being misquoted for the best part of a hundred years, the essence of what he said has remained true in characterising the clout with which the USA has dominated global relations, particularly those with Europe, for the past century.

Even when positions of international isolation and economic protectionism were taken by successive presidents after 1919, there were US treaties which looked to its Pacific and Central America interests and negotiations which resulted in several formal ‘payment plans’ so Europe could begin to settle its World War One debts.

Edging towards the Second World War in the late 1930s, saw Franklin Roosevelt attempting to move Congress towards an understanding of ‘collective security’. By September 1940, it authorised the spending of $10.5 billion on arming the nation and, in the first quarter of 1941, the Lend Lease Bill was enacted which enabled Britain’s continued participation in the war. On 07 December that year, Pearl Harbour was bombed and isolationism was no longer an option.

The last repayment on the Lend Lease agreement was £45 million pounds and was made under the Blair government in 2006. Tony Blair wasn’t born until 1953.

When that post-1945 period of European history could still be called ‘modern’, any ‘O’ level scholar of the subject - and of the day - would be able to reel-off successive speeches and policies of the period in which the United States’ willingness and ability to be at the centre of things was crucial.

No longer the Prime Minister when he made it, Winston Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech of March 1946 was made in Missouri in the presence of President Truman. In September that year, albeit in Zurich, Churchill referenced the creation of a ‘United States of Europe’.

NATO – the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – is an alliance which stands to this day with considerably more member countries than its original set of north western European nations, the USA and Canada when the Treaty was signed in 1949.

Foreign policy wise for decades post-1945, ‘the domino theory’ prevailed in those countries who did not want others or themselves to succumb to European communism and the expansion of the Soviet Union and the influence of Chinese communism across Indo-China. It was President Eisenhower who gave voice to this as the policy driver in a landmark speech in 1954.

Crucial to backing up any policy position in any stage of history is economic might and, for the USA in the 20th Century, this was built on the supremacy of its industrial and business wealth. The £13 billion dollars’ worth of aid - worth circa £120 billion in modern times – made available by the USA in form of the 1948 Marshall Plan saw many European countries avail themselves of it in re-building and modernising after the Second World War.

As to what our ‘O’ level selves might have made of where we are now? Well, in writing an essay about the nature of the USA’s influence on the European and wider world stage in the first decades of the 21st Century, we would have to consider the importance of trade and aid and could argue the supremacy of the former.


Will Mooney MRICS
Partner

Commercial, Cambridge

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