In July 1944, while WWII was still being fought, 730 delegates from forty-four Allied nations met for three weeks at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and designed the international economic order that would govern the postwar world: the IMF, the World Bank, fixed exchange rates pegged to a gold-convertible dollar, and a commitment to multilateral trade liberalization. The intellectual contest was between John Maynard Keynes, representing a depleted Britain, and Harry Dexter White of the U.S. Treasury — and the creditor's plan won. Six months later, in February 1945, the Big Three — Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin — met at Yalta in Crimea and divided the postwar world into spheres of influence. Together, Bretton Woods and Yalta are the architecture of the postwar order.
Bretton Woods solved a problem the interwar period had failed to solve: how to provide international monetary stability without the rigidities of the classical gold standard or the disorder of the competitive devaluations that had deepened the Depression. The dollar-gold link (35 dollars to the ounce) gave the system an anchor; the IMF was the lender of last resort for countries facing balance-of-payments crises; the World Bank financed reconstruction and later development; the GATT (1947) progressively liberalized trade. Yalta solved a different problem — how to prevent the wartime alliance from collapsing into immediate conflict over postwar Europe — by acknowledging spheres of influence. The Red Army's presence on the ground did much of the negotiating: eastern Europe went into the Soviet orbit (de facto if not de jure); Western Europe and Japan went into the American orbit; Germany was carved into four occupation zones. The two settlements were complementary halves of a single design — Yalta drew the political map, Bretton Woods supplied the economic operating system for the Western half. The Cold War was implicit in the Yalta settlement, and emerged into open hostility within three years, by which point the IMF and Marshall aid had become instruments of the Western bloc.
The current world order is the Bretton Woods order, modified — Nixon ended dollar-gold convertibility in 1971 (the Nixon Shock), floating exchange rates replaced fixed ones, the IMF's role expanded into Latin American and African debt management, the WTO replaced GATT in 1995, China joined in 2001. The system is now under serious strain: the U.S. is increasingly ambivalent about underwriting it, China is building parallel institutions (AIIB, the Belt and Road, BRICS+), and the de-dollarization debate is escalating, sharpened by the freezing of Russian reserves after 2022. Whether a Bretton Woods 2.0 emerges, or the order fragments into competing currency and trade blocs, is the central economic-geopolitical question of the decade.