A Tale of America’s Hegemonic Exigencies Recounted Through the Undulations of the US Balance of Payments (1946–2015)
ABSTRACT
This piece offers a long-term account of the main dynamics of international political economy, within
which one could intelligibly locate, in an orderly sequence, all the major economic events of the past 70 years and thereby acquire a crisp vista of the fundamental economic dilemmas and controversies of our time. The article attempts this grand synthesis through the statistical and graphical projection of a single economic variable, the US Balance of Payments, which indicates the commercial and financial position—positive or negative as it may be—of the leading economy, America’s, vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Traced and annotated over time, this measure yields a peculiar narration of events from the system’s post-World War II infancy to the present day. The picture that emerges from this sequential collation of data, policies, crises, and serial cycles of transformation suggests that everything seems to be revolving around two US imperatives: viz., to maintain and promote international trade exclusively as a means to binding allies closer to Washington; and to manage financial strategy in such a way as to obtain foreign direct investment and the upkeep of foreign U.S. military bases abroad for free.