James Holland: Visions for Peace, Gebunden

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Although the Second World War was still a long way from being won, even by early 1941, US President Franklin Delaney Roosevelt was already planning for peace. America's entry of the war may still have been almost a year away, but he could already see the new world order that needed to emerge from the smouldering ashes of Europe. The business of war was very quickly going to have to become the business of peace.

The seminal speeches Roosevelt made and the policies he initiated lead first to the Atlantic Charter and then the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 and the subsequent setting up of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Three years later, under the guidance of his successor, President Harry S. Truman, the Marshall Plan would emerge, a forward-thinking combination of global philanthropy and canny self-interest, rooted in a profound sense of Christian and moral duty, and which, through low tariffs, free trade and international bailouts, kickstarted unprecented European growth and a chance for the world as a whole to rebuild after the ruinous catastrophe of war.

Ultimately the opportunities it offered, to victor and vanquished alike, would deliver to the world a sustained period of economic stability and indeed peace to the western democracies for over eighty years and shape the geopolitics of the late Twentieth century. James Holland's knowledge of the Second World War and its aftermath gives him unique insight into its far-sighted and profoundly influential consequences which were to safeguard the freedoms that extended prosperity and which stand in stark contrast to our transactional approach to the world.