Without a doubt, the Asian miracle has been owed greatly to the preponderance of power that the United States enjoyed during the postwar period. This dominance created a distinctive international order in Europe and Asia, which allowed the regional states to emerge from the devastation of the Second World War into the success stories that they are today. Although enlightened elites in these countries certainly contributed to this achievement through both their conscious pursuit of growthmaximizing economic strategies and their investment in appropriate national institutions, their effectiveness ultimately derived from the two complementary benefits provided by superior American power—assured security and assured markets—which when synergized had explosive systemic effects.

The United States provided assured security to its Asian and European partners through complex alliances which, despite their differences, delivered certain common dividends: Washington guaranteed the security of its smaller partners and thus enabled them to mitigate the most acute tradeoffs between guns and butter within each country while simultaneously avoiding the destructive security competition that might have otherwise arisen between them. These gains, consequently, permitted the alliances to successfully deter common external threats such as the Soviet Union (and initially China as well).

While American protection thus produced a stable security environment that allowed its allies to concentrate on internal reconstruction, economic growth, and technical innovation, its global economic policies only magnified the success of these efforts. By embedding the massive aid offered to the allies within an asymmetrically open international trading order, Washington permitted its partners to enjoy the gains flowing from continued access to America’s open markets, vast capital, and superior technology, despite their maintaining more closed economic systems at home.

The virtuous interaction of assured security and assured markets spurred the growth of America’s European and Asian partners. This outcome was clearly beneficial because it meant that America’s friends were becoming stronger faster and this expansion in capability advanced the larger U.S. geopolitical objective of containing the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc more generally. In retrospect, this grand strategy succeeded brilliantly: it accelerated the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union while reinvigorating America’s allies and important neutral states. But it also began to produce another less desirable effect over time—the relative decline of American power— which was politically tolerable only because the rapidly growing European and Asian nations were all American partners whose growth posed no serious security threat to the United States. The first iteration of the Asian miracle thus had an unambiguously happy ending.

As this success matured over time, the United States began in the waning years of the Cold War to promote an even more consequential expansion of the open international economic system by supporting China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). Just as was the case with other American allies in the first wave of the Asian miracle, enlightened internal decisions now made by the Chinese leadership—most importantly, Deng Xiaoping’s decision to liberalize the national economy from 1978 onwards—combined with the benefits offered by the U.S.-led international trading order to provoke a runaway expansion of growth in China—a continuing saga that The Economist has described as “the most dynamic burst of wealth creation in human history.” This development, along with India’s post-1991 economic achievements, has been the coruscating feature of the continuing Asian success story, and it is likely that Chinese and Indian economic expansion will remain vital drivers of global economic growth and the key components sustaining the ongoing Asian miracle for the foreseeable future.