Gavin Francis J

The current global order appears to be collapsing. Long forgotten challenges, such as the return of great power competition and the specter of nuclear war, combine with novel, complex, and menacing planetary crises ranging from climate to disease to emerging technology to threaten instability and chaos. Meanwhile, the most consequential nation in the international system, the United States, behaves erratically, seemingly willing to abandon its decades long strategy of building strong alliances, countering authoritarianism and supporting openness, and remaining deeply engaged in the world. Legacy institutions, and in particular, elite universities, seem unable to meet the moment and provide the scholarly insight and training to navigate this new world. How should we understand these distressing trends? Wonder and Worry is a collection of Francis J. Gavin's writing over the past decade on questions like: what is the state of world politics and the international system? What has been and should be America's role in the global order? And what is the most effective way to evaluate and generate insight for the first two questions? Gavin's answers are often nuanced, counterintuitive, and surprisingly optimistic. Written in a more engaging, conversational style than most scholarly treatments Wonder and Worry is an accessible contemporary history for our uncertain age.

This book describes how four U.S. administrations struggled with the legacy of Bretton Woods.How are we to understand the politics of international monetary relations since the end of World War II? Exploiting recently declassified documents from both the United States and Europe and employing economic analysis and international relations theory, Francis Gavin offers a compelling reassessment of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates and dollar-gold convertibility.Gavin demonstrates that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, Bretton Woods was a highly politicized system that was prone to crisis and required constant intervention and controls to continue functioning. More important, postwar monetary relations were not a salve to political tensions, as is often contended. In fact, the politicization of the global payments system allowed nations to use monetary coercion to achieve political and security ends, causing deep conflicts within the Western Alliance. For the first time, Gavin reveals how these rifts dramatically affected U.S. political and military strategy during a dangerous period of the Cold War.