The United States emerged from World War II as the leader of the Allied armies that defeated Nazi Germany. Confident of its power, the US was the main architect for the reconstruction of Europe, and a proponent of market economics in the post-war period. In carrying out that role, the US had its own set of principles about peace and prosperity around the world. The American way of peace - Pax Americana - began before the end of the World War II, when Washington and London convened their allies for a meeting at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire in July 1944 to work out a complex postwar international monetary system that could be used in rebuilding countries devastated by the war and to repair the chaos in the monetary market that existed during the period between the two world wars (1919-1939). The US dollar and gold were the main form of monetary exchange. One year after the Bretton Woods meeting, another was held in Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, at which the victorious Allied powers created the United Nations. Bretton Woods led to the creation the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It also led to the foundation of a system of trade among nations, which resulted decades later in the establishment of the World Trade Organization.

Reconstruction of Europe after World War II was a priority for the US, which instituted the Marshall Plan to promote economic revival and industrial and agricultural productivity in Europe. The way of peace thus began with efforts at reconstruction. In the background, European countries and the Soviet Union were still uneasy about how to rebuild their ravaged societies. US Secretary of State George Marshall issued a call in 1947 to all countries to assist in the task of European recovery, proposing a program for reconstruction that was named after him. The program combined foreign aid and grants given to at least 16 European countries, which repaid them by buying US goods ?and services, including raw materials, food, fertilizers, machinery, equipment and technological know-how.

Jan S. Prybyla, a professor emeritus of economics at Pennsylvania State University who has written extensively on economic and political matters, provides a wide-ranging view of the decades after the war, first 1945-1991, and then 1991-2004. The fall of communism in 1991 marked a turning point. The first period was marked by the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, the Hungarian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Cuban missile crisis and the US-Soviet confrontation. The end of the Soviet empire, symbolized by the collapse of the Berlin Wall, was seen as an end of an era.

The bottom line is this. Had it not been for the American way of peace ... Europe, and not it alone, would now be enslaved in the abyss if barbarian by the Thousand-year Reich or the Soviet Union of the Gulag," Prybyla says.

China comes into the picture because it may cause problems with the American way of peace. Prybyla calls the chapter dealing with the subject "Chinese Shadows" for good reasons. He asks questions like: Will China go democratic? Does China present a long-term threat to America? And, does China threaten her neighbors in the short-term?

As a professor of economics, Prybyla says that China's proposal to form an East Asian economic community sounds like a call for an economic commune because small Asian countries fear economic dependence on and political domination by China. Japan, also a major economic power, is suspicious of China's growing power.

The September 11, 2001, attacks on the US and the war on terror were an event of global importance and constitute a threat to the American way of peace. But here Prybyla says that it is not impossible to convert people to civilized behavior, but that it has to be done from within. He uses the example of China, which had centuries of absolutist rule and probably knows nothing about democracy and would not let any countries under its rule adopt democracy. However, he notes that Taiwan is a democratic society with a thriving market economy. The lessons learned in the six decades after World War II have shown that America has conquered German Nazism, Japanese imperialism and communism. In the process, Prybyla says, America has restored liberty to millions of people in Europe and Asia and sown the seeds of democracy in many parts of the world.