STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Eighty years ago this week, Americans began celebrating the end of World War II.
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INSKEEP: An old-style newsreel, a short film showed in theaters, captured the scene in New York's Times Square in May 1945.
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UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: Throughout the world, throngs of people hail the end of the war in Europe.
INSKEEP: Although victory over Japan was still to come, President Harry S. Truman spoke to the nation.
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HARRY S TRUMAN: General Eisenhower informs me that the forces of Germany have surrendered to the United Nations.
INSKEEP: Truman's last phrase there is a clue to the story we mean to tell. The winners of the war called themselves the United Nations. They then gave that name to one of the new global institutions that have been part of our world ever since. As we mark this year's multiple anniversaries, we'll examine the world America made then and ask how we're changing it now. We begin with Walter Isaacson, whose many books include one that he co-authored about the years when the U.S. helped to rebuild Europe. The U.S. sent billions of dollars of investment in what was known as the Marshall Plan.
WALTER ISAACSON: What it did was it created markets for American goods and manufacturing. It helped stop or arrest the spread of Soviet-backed communism. But it was also one of the most generous, least selfish acts in history because it took a war-battered Europe and got it back on its feet.
INSKEEP: It launched a new period of U.S. engagement with the world.
ISAACSON: In the period after World War II, we create a bunch of institutions that are so innovative, the world had never seen it before. But you have the United Nations. You have, coming out of the Marshall Plan, the Bretton Woods agreements that do the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and the general agreement on tariffs and trade that eventually becomes the World Trade Organization. And all of these organizations were designed to help protect free markets and protect democracy, especially when the threat of communism arose further.
INSKEEP: You wrote a book called "The Wise Men." It's about some of the architects of America's policies after World War II. And they're the very kinds of people that many people are suspicious of today - went to elite universities, in and out of government, Wall Street figures, very smart guys. Dean Acheson is one who comes to mind, who was a secretary of state and an adviser to multiple presidents. What was his vision of the world?
ISAACSON: Dean Acheson was the one who came up with the idea of the Marshall Plan, along with George Kennan, who was one of his friends in government, all part of this group called the Wise Men. And their vision was really to stop the spread of Soviet communism, because Acheson was a realist. After World War I, in the Treaty of Versailles, there was harsh punishment meted out against Germany and the nations who had been defeated in World War I. We decided that that was a problem, not to do that again, and the rebuilding of Germany, the rebuilding of Japan, would make the world safer. And so you've had, for 80 years now, a very tight alliance in which Germany and Japan are part of an alliance with the United States and Western Europe.
INSKEEP: OK. So the building blocks here, as I understand you're telling me, are U.S.-led alliances, global institutions and encouragement of free trade and global trade. Those are some of the basic building blocks. What have some of the downsides of those building blocks been over the last 80 years, and what's the case been against them consistently?
ISAACSON: There was a crack in the foundation, which is the idea of free trade, free immigration, free movement can create quite a bit of wealth in society. But a lot of people get left behind, and you get a nationalist backlash after a while. And we're seeing that happen, whether it be in Hungary or with Brexit or with Donald Trump, against this sort of multinational system based on free trade. And it was because some of the people involved in protecting that world order, including people like myself, who believed in it, did not understand how many people were being left behind and how nationalism was such a strong force.
INSKEEP: You just put that in the past tense - people like yourself who believed in it. Do you still believe in it?
ISAACSON: My views have changed somewhat, because I was very much a believer in the glories of free trade. But as I saw, starting 15 years ago, a populist nationalist backlash, I realized that those institutions allowed people, say, to go to Walmart and buy a flat screen TV very cheaply on a Sunday night, but maybe there wasn't a job at the Maytag factory on Monday morning for them to go to. And I think people like myself sometimes underestimated people being left behind - the harm and resentments they would feel.
INSKEEP: Was America any less polarized in the late 1940s, when these institutions were being created?
ISAACSON: America was less polarized in the 1940s because the greatest generation had come back from the war. My father had come back from serving in the Navy in the Pacific and was able to buy a house in New Orleans, you know, with federal grants. And I think there was a closer sense of community. However, you needed to have a civil rights movement because a lot of people were being left out of that consensus.
INSKEEP: Because you wrote a book about that era, you got to live there, in a sense - or in your head, anyway. What did that feel like, being in that America for a moment?
ISAACSON: There was something glorious about writing about people who put country above party. The Wise Men that Evan Thomas and I wrote about were three Republicans and three Democrats. But they always kept the national interests but also the national values in mind. I think that's been so lost today that everything has become partisan and polarized and ideological.
INSKEEP: Do you feel that you can perceive what is supposed to replace the world America made?
ISAACSON: I don't think we've come up with the creativity of the people 80 years ago to say, here's the next set of institutions that we need. And those would be institutions that make sure that we not only have prosperity, but everybody gets to be a part of that prosperity, gets to share in the prosperity that they help build - that we have trade, but we also try to protect, to some extent, domestic commerce and domestic manufacturing because that makes for a stronger democracy. So I wish we could be as creative as the people 80 years ago were and say, what are we going to do on climate? What are we going to do on terrorism? What are we going to do on national pride and the ability for people to find work and find meaning in their lives, rather than just rely on the institutions of 80 years ago?
INSKEEP: Walter Isaacson, it's a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much.
ISAACSON: Hey, thank you, Steve. This has been very interesting.
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INSKEEP: Isaacson, the author of many books, helped us to understand the world America made in the aftermath of World War II and where we're taking it now. We will have reports and conversations in the weeks ahead during this anniversary year. In days to come, how did post-war foreign policy shape American society at home? Where did we get the military-industrial complex? And how did the U.S. reshape Germany, which is now a U.S. ally?
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