The Cold War fears of the American people shortly after the second world war was that the economic concept of Communism was going to spread across the recovering European states. I understand that you said the answer is not communism, but you need to think of it in the terms that America did back then: Truman and Eisenhower both employed the foreign policy strategy known as "containment". This meant that the U.S. would try to prevent Communism from spreading through Western Europe. The U.S. did this because the belief was that war is a result of poverty. Poverty in a country allows radicals to take power, which was the case with Stalin in the Soviet Union. For this very reason, leaders from all over the world met at Bretton Woods, and created