Benn Steil

Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Benn Steil discusses his new book "The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War."

Benn Steil gives an account of the historic Bretton Woods accords, named for the New Hampshire town where representatives of 44 nations gathered in July 1944, in the midst of WWII, to prevent economic disorder and defuse political conflict. In The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order, Steil shows that Bretton Woods was part of a much more ambitious geopolitical agenda. At the heart of the drama were John Maynard Keynes, the renowned and revolutionary British economist, and Harry Dexter White, the self-made American technocrat.