I don’t really fault Roosevelt. He was old and dying. Churchill might have wanted to press things, but he didn’t have much of a country left, so his leverage was weak. I think Stalin figured Truman was a nobody who would be a pushover. But the a-bomb tested satisfactorily about the time of Potsdam, so Truman turned out to be tougher and have more leverage than Stalin might have expected. At BrettonWoods we bribed the West with trade and economic benefits in exchange for their following our lead on the Cold War. Ike and JFK and LBJ and Nixon and Ford and Carter got us through 3 decades and Reagan realized that he could turn up the pressure to a level where Gorbachev’s economy couldn’t support keeping pace, and that ended it. Only one problem. Nobody had figured out the next step after winning it. So we are still the world’s policeman, and we still have some ofthe same one-sided trade deals in place. I agree with Ross Perot (or he agreed with me, because I was saying it long before I heard it from him), in the post Cold War era, economic dominance will be more important than military dominance.