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Comment by arbuge | Hacker News Reader

Who would you say the Bismarck equivalent for the USA is/was?

What gave the US the power it's now throwing away was an array of successes that made the US an example of good governance for the entire world: New Deal, Bretton Woods agreeement, victory in WW2, Marshall Plan and NATO. There wasn't a single person in charge of that all, but I think 3 stand out:

* Henry Morgenthau Jr.: secretary of Treasury during Roosevelt, one of the main designers of the New Deal, of financing the US war machine during WW2, and also one of the US negotiators at the Bretton Woods conference

* George C. Marshall: chief of staff of the US Army, organized the victory in WW2, came up with the eponymous plan and carried it forward politically. secretary of State after the War

* Dean Acheson: main designer of the Marshall Plan and of NATO, and one of the US negotiators at the Bretton Woods conference. secretary of State after Marshall

Yeah, the Marshall plan was a master stroke.

Shame the US didn't manage to reproduce it in Irak.

I wouldn't put it on one person, it was basically everyone between Roosevelt and Obama. Not that any of them were exactly geniuses, but we've gone from mostly sober drivers to someone blowing a 0.5 BAC.

do you mind qualifying this? it sounds like you mean dollar hegemony, which I might accept, but if you mean foreign policy in general, I can think of many invasions , financial crises, cold wars, lost prosperity for most of those Presidents.

I think we're talking less about the aspect of Bismarck where he won 3 big wars and lost none, and more about the part where he set up a delicate system that was maybe too complex for his successors to maintain, especially under idiosyncratic leaders. We're not talking about financial crises. Bismarck did not stop the Panic of 1873 (in fact, you could wave your hands and argue he indirectly caused it).

As far as "who set up the US empire, in all its complexity?", I'd argue for the 4 guys I named in my other comment, but your list might differ. And if you're just interested in the dollar system per se, I'd probably go with Harry Dexter White, who strangely enough turned out to be a Soviet spy.

Oh, and if you want a pretty clear analogy from Bismarck's system to earlier US monetary history: Benjamin Strong got the Federal Reserve System up and running and figured out a bunch of the right tricks, but he died in 1928 without getting his successors up to speed on how to run things. They failed miserably in next couple years. Bad timing!

Your list and the one above (e.g. with General Marshall, etc) are more illustrative & aligned with developing US Hegemony than the 20th Century Presidents. It seems to me the US presidents have been drawing down hegemony assets since JFK.

It's just that the USA was so dominant after WW2 that it took about a century for the structure to collapse.

A better model than seeing Trump as a wrecking ball, is seeing him as a high stakes gambler, with middling skills -- in the same way that George W Bush made a big bet on the middle east and lost the chips.

JQ Adams, Elihu Root, George Kennan, and Henry Kissinger.

Joe Biden.

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