The period from 1914 to 1940 is one of the most crucial and enigmatic in modern world history, and in the history of modern U.S. foreign policy. World War I catapulted the United States into international economic and political leadership, yet in the aftermath of the war, despite grandiose Wilsonian plans, the United States quickly lapsed into relative disregard for events abroad: it did not join the League of Nations, disavowed responsibility for European reconstruction, would not participate openly in many international economic conferences, and restored high levels of tariff protection for the domestic market. Only in the late 1930s and 1940s, after twenty years of bitter battles over foreign policy, did the United States move to center stage of world politics and economics: it built the United Nations and a string of regional alliances, underwrote the rebuilding of Western Europe, almost single-handedly constructed a global monetary and financial system, and led the world in commercial liberalization.

The past fifteen years have seen two important developments in the international economic system: the rapid industrialization of many less developed countries (LDCs) and their increasing indebtedness to private financial institutions. Massive bank loans have been used to fund industrial growth in many LDCs; international financial markets have replaced multinational corporations as the Third World's most important source of private foreign capital. In four major borrowing countries—Mexico, Brazil, Algeria, and South Korea—the process of indebted industrialization has its roots in the internationalization of finance, the increasing role of the state, and the use of funds raised on the international capital markets to finance industrial development. The results include rapid expansions of LDC industrial production and LDC exports of manufactured products, as well as the formation of an implicit partnership between private financial institutions and state-capitalist elites in the Third World.

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