Are we at the end of 'Bretton Woods'?: White House reconsiders post-WWII world financial system

Omni Mount Washington, Bretton Woods
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

"Bretton Woods," I said.

"Are you sure it's still on?" he asked.

That was part of my conversation with a motel manager in Carroll, N.H., a couple of weeks ago when I was at Bretton Woods for the annual meeting of the New England Political Science Association (NEPSA).

We were talking about where I was headed in the north of New Hampshire, and I answered the man that I was bound for an event at Bretton Woods. I realized later that he thought I meant the ski resort. I could see the slopes from the Omni Mount Washington Resort opposite, where NEPSA was meeting, and the snow cover was waning, yielding to rain.

I did not think he meant, but thought it would be funny if he had, that "Bretton Woods" might be over: meaning not the ski season, but the global financial system built around the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.

That system, and the twin institutions (one a predecessor of the World Bank), were conceived at the Mount Washington hotel at the Bretton Woods Conference in July 1944, before the end of World War II. It was widely understood by then that a lack of multilateral economic cooperation was a key failing of the interwar period that led to a second global catastrophe. 

Nevertheless, world leaders, including the Americans and British, were not all yet convinced in 1944 that economic cooperation, especially with a reconstituted Germany, much less Japan, would be in their national interests. Bretton Woods welcomed a who's who of the times at the intersection of economics and politics, such as the British economist John Maynard Keynes. So in the end, the conference proved persuasive to skeptics.

"The Room Where It Happened":
the Gold Room, where the Bretton Woods Agreement was signed
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

 

On a tour of the stunning, now-Omni hotel while I was there, I learned that Bretton Woods was chosen as a location for the high-level meeting in bello because its location between two notches in the New Hampshire mountains afforded it remarkable physical security. I found that that security is still a thing even in the information age, as my cell phone found signal only intermittently. I had to use the public library in Carroll to meet with my International Law class on Zoom.

The Bretton Woods Conference resulted in a system of consistent currency convertibility and installed the IMF as a kind of backstop, or currency reservoir, to help countries avert spiraling domestic destabilizations that might otherwise threaten global security—such as the collapse of the German economy that fueled the rise of Nazism. The Bretton Woods conversion system lasted as long as the gold standard, until the 1970s, and what followed, what still functions today, is a direct descendant.

And now all that might change. As a headline asked in The New Republic (TNR) on April 21, three days before I arrived at Bretton Woods, "Will Trump Finally Kill the Bretton Woods System?" 

As TNR explained, Project 2025 is not on board with the global financial system, despite its facilitation of American dominance of the world economy since World War II. The rightest wing rather sees the Bretton Woods system as part of the globalist agenda to subordinate U.S. interests to a new world order. In this telling of it, the IMF and the World Bank are just two more UN-adjacent intergovernmental organizations that suck resources from the American economy to subsidize the world's welfare-indulgent masses.

It is true that the IMF and World Bank invest in poorer parts of the world. But those poorer relations sometimes see these investments as more imperialism than charity. I studied World Bank projects as long as 30 years ago and witnessed the thorns of economic hegemony that came with the roses of infrastructure development in Latin America. There's been a lot of reform since, but nationalist critics see thoughtful multistakeholderism as an ebbing of commitment to quid-pro-quo foreign aid, rather than an all-boats-float scenario.

The IMF has long been at the middle of similarly conflicting perspectives. High-GDP contributors complain about the organization's generous loans and patient debt restructuring. Meanwhile, countries on the receiving end see IMF loans as a Hobson's choice, complemented by promises of private investment that never materializes and delivery into an addiction-like cycle of economic dependence that knows no off ramp.

Bretton Woods ski slopes
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Climate change has exacerbated these tensions. Small-island and economically weaker nations have experienced an uptick of costly, destabilizing events, increasing demand for aid from developed economies. Meanwhile, aid recipients point out, not without reason, that the loan sharks got where they are through the very resource exploitation that they seek to restrain in the developing world. And with global temperature set to rise for the near future no matter what we do, no amount of economic and governance reform can turn back the clock on the damage sustained.

So need rising and prospects dimming for a return on investment, the Trump Administration contemplates bailing on Bretton Woods. You see it in the President's infamous tariff chart, which, analysts worked out, was not calculated to impose reciprocal tariffs, but to use tariffs as a weapon against trade deficits.

I as much as the next guy want the overworked American laborer to get a fair shake in the world. For a post-industrial economy, we work too many hours, enjoy too few benefits, and suffer an outrageously high cost of living, all summing wretched prospects for socioeconomic mobility. Trump is right that the IMF could care more about trade imbalances. 

But foreign social democracies are a scapegoat. Most of Americans' economic misery is self-imposed at the beckoning of a fat corporatocracy feasting on the deepening wealth divide.

An America-first policy that requires exiting the Bretton Woods institutions gives off an eerily 1930s vibe. And that didn't work out so well the last time.

Poli sci research dazzles with deep dive on judicial bias, asylum woes, AI to police corruption

The New England Political Science Association (NEPSA) met at Bretton Woods, N.H., late last month.

I always look forward to the NEPSA meeting, as political scientists are just about the warmest crowd of academics I know. No other kind of social scientist so eagerly shares knowledge as the political scientist, who similarly embraces interdisciplinary feedback, even from a non-PhD such as me.

True, political scientists can and do argue about anything. They put law professors to shame in that regard. You make a mistake of parliamentary procedure at the political science business meeting at your peril. 

But only the political scientist compromises her or his confident disputation with a wink of the eye that acknowledges the house of cards we've built around ourselves. You won't find that kind of concession in the grim gaze of an economist.

I saw a great many fabulous papers as always at NEPSA, and I had the privilege of chairing and discussing the papers on a compelling panel on law and public policy on April 26. The panel comprised Dr. Ihsan Alkhatib, Murray State University; the Hon. Sarada Prasad Nayak, UMass Amherst; and attorney Nicole Norval, Eastern Connecticut State University.

All of the panelists, like me, are recovering lawyers. Dr. Alkhatib practiced family law and immigration law for a decade in the Detroit area, representing mostly Arab- and Muslim-American clients. Nayak was a judge in various capacities, including family court, in Odisha State, south of Kolkata, in India for 30 years, before moving to the United States for a new pursuit in academics. Norval was a real estate attorney in South Africa before she left to trot the globe as a tech exec, reg counsel, and business law professor.

In the projects presented, Dr. Alkhatib is studying U.S. immigration law, and in particular the awful consequences of failing to recognize violence against women expressly as a basis for asylum. Judge Nayak, with co-author Dr. Paul Collins Jr. at UMass Amherst, is poring over an extraordinary database of cases in India to understand religious and gender biases in judicial decision-making, with transnational implications. And attorney Norval, with co-author Sameer Somal, CEO of Blue Ocean Global Technology, is looking at the potential for AI to detect and police corruption in business and finance, testing real tech on models such as FIFA and FTX, with promising results.

These authors' paper abstracts are copied below. The full 2025 NEPSA conference program with abstracts is available for a limited time here.

The NEPSA conference was stewarded as usual by the incomparable Dr. Steven Lichtman, Shippensburg University, a friend who never fails to inspire me with his teaching and in his clear-eyed commitment to supporting colleagues and developing academic talent.

Here on The Savory Tort this coming Monday, May 12, 2025, I will write about Bretton Woods as the location of the founding of the International Monetary Fund, and how that history has come up lately in our politically tumultuous times. Stay tuned.

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Ihsan Alkhatib, Murray State University
Gender in Immigration Court: Orientalism on Trial
There are five grounds for asylum. Gender is not one of them. Gender however comes up under the grounds of Particular Social Group. Two approaches to gender claims from the Arab world are presented and compared. I argue that one approach is grounded in Orientalism and perpetuates Islamophobia. The second approach is is grounded in a global view of gender and is more accurate representation of gender reality. Immigration lawyers are bound by Rules of Ethics. Advocacy grounded in the second approach is more consistent with the ethical obligations of lawyers.

Sarada Prasad Nayak, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
Case Backlogs and Bias in Timely Justice Delivery in the Indian Judiciary
Understanding bias in the judicial decision-making process is crucial for ensuring fairness and justice in the legal system. To date, scholarship on judicial bias focuses overwhelmingly on the American legal system, focusing on case outcomes or judges’ voting behavior. In this paper, we shift the focus outside of the U.S. and beyond case outcomes. To do this, we examine judicial delays in India, where prolonged legal processes often serve as a form of punishment. We theorize that bias may infiltrate the amount of time it takes to dispose of cases based on the gender and religion of the judge who is assigned the case, as well as those of the defendants. To subject these expectations to empirical scrutiny, we analyze hundreds of thousands of criminal cases decided in India’s lower courts. Our results indicate that Muslim defendants experience shorter delays when their cases are heard by Muslim judges, providing evidence of in-group bias. However, there do not appear to be differences in the timing of case outcomes based on the defendant or judge gender. This study contributes to the literature by highlighting how judicial delays in less developed countries may reflect subtle forms of bias, mainly along religious lines. 

Nicole Norval, Eastern Connecticut State University
Can AI Reduce Business Corruption - and Prevent Another FIFA … Another FTX?
Regulators consider artificial intelligence (‘AI’) an inevitable tool for compliance with regulations such as anti-corruption laws. How should we regulate AI to improve regulatory compliance without sacrificing the right to privacy? Can we regulate AI to prevent corrupt business practices and improve human rights outcomes? Unifying existing and forthcoming AI regulation in multiple jurisdictions (primarily the United States and the European Union) in a matrix of business corruption reforms, results in a useful legal model. This paper concludes by applying the model to the decades-long Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) corruption scandal and the recent FTX cryptocurrency exchange bankruptcy to understand the benefits and limitations of this legal framework. We examine why AI is an inevitable tool for regulatory compliance, comparing, AI regulation, guidelines, and recommended practices in the United States, the European Union, and other jurisdictions, in order to extract common objectives of AI regulation such as protecting privacy rights and improving human rights outcomes. We discuss business corruption reforms in general, focusing on the financial services sector as a business sector crucial for such reform initiatives. Integrating these financial services sector reforms with common AI regulation objectives, we construct a legal model for application to business corruption events. We apply this legal model to two business corruption events with significant negative financial impact in order to establish whether the use of AI to identify business corruption signifiers would have reduced these negative financial impacts, protected privacy rights, and improved human rights outcomes. We conclude by identifying limitations and benefits of our legal model for future improvement, examining the moral imperative and impact of this research, and identifying further areas of research.

Polisci papers track Ukraine war to Arctic, UN, internet

The war in Ukraine occasioned several papers at last weekend's annual meeting of the New England Political Science Association (NEPSA) in Mystic, Connecticut.

The NEPSA meeting offers an outstanding opportunity to preview cutting edge research presented in a low-stakes and supportive setting. Long-time NEPSA Executive Director Steven Lichtman, a professor of political science at Shippensburg University, is the brilliant maestro, setting the right collegial tone while supervising a rigorous selection process that guarantees top-shelf work.

Rotating location in New England states, NEPSA has become one of those regional conferences that is so highly regarded as to draw participation from across the country and from neighboring disciplines including law. The program is open to faculty and graduate students; law students of mine have participated in the past. This year the program opened two panels to undergraduate researchers. An extremely selective submission process yielded undergraduate presenters fully capable of going toe to toe with working scholars.

Prof. Steven Lichtman, 2016
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

There is scarcely a corner of politics and its study not being reshaped by the war in Ukraine. So it's no surprise that the war motivated many of the papers at this year's NEPSA. For all that I learned from myriad presenters, I thought I might share just a taste of takeaways related to the war.

★

A Ph.D. candidate at the University of New Hampshire (UNH), Tim Hoheneder is thinking about the effect of the Ukraine war on Arctic politics. He explained that Russia assumed the rotating chair of the eight-state Arctic Council just before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The United States said it would not participate on the council during the term of the Russian chair, which ends this summer, in 2023. The United States did say it would continue to work bilaterally with other states on Arctic issues.

Now what will become of the council is up in the air. Major issues affecting global security, involving nuclear proliferation, militarization, indigenous rights, and climate change, hang in uncertainty. Hoheneder's paper is "Science Diplomacy as a Neofunctionalist Tool in a Post-Ukrainian Invasion Arctic."

★

A master's student at UNH, Sarah DeSimone is considering how the U.N. Security Council might be made functional since the Russian veto has neutralized any meaningful response to the war. She explained both the long history of attempted Security Council reform and the recent history of failed resolutions on Ukraine. 

The only reform to the Security Council to gain traction has been the recent Liechtenstein "Veto Initiative," DeSimone explained. The initiative modestly would require that a council state explain a veto. DeSimone voiced support for an amalgam of proposals that have been floated before: First, the veto should be prohibited in matters of genocide, human rights violations, and serious violations of international law. Second, in conjunction with the prohibition, an oversight mechanism should preclude countries from voting on matters in which they are directly concerned. 

Without Security Council reform, DeSimone warned, lack of credibility will render the United Nations "obsolete." DeSimone's paper is "Reforms to the Security Council: Salvaging the Liberal World Order by Examining the Crisis in Ukraine."

★

A senior at Providence College and editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, The Cowl, Sarah McLaughlin spent 46 unenviable days immersed in a Russian social media image board, Dvach (Двач). Her findings are fascinating. She discovered a world of hyper-masculine Russian nationalists almost as disgusted with Vladimir Putin as they are with Ukraine. The community evinces nostalgia for a perceived past of conservative values and faults Putin for not living up to anti-western and anti-liberal values. The community opposes the war in Ukraine and the mobilization of Russians to support it, even as participants depict the idealized Russian man as strong, hardworking, and dutiful to country. Animals, especially pigs and monkeys, represent Ukrainians, women, and Putin in demeaning memes.

McLaughlin's paper is "Russia the Bear, Putin the Pig: Russian Nationalism and the Imagined Community of Memes."

 ✪

NEPSA's next annual meeting is slated for spring 2024 in Newport, R.I.  Look for a call for papers by September with a December 2023 deadline.

New England poli sci group announces virtual meeting, extends CFP deadline for faculty, grad students

NEPSA art

The New England Political Science Association (NEPSA) has decided that its spring 2021 annual conference will be all virtual.

The call for proposals (CFP) deadline has been extended to February 19, 2021. NEPSA will convene on April 23 and 24, 2021.  The CFP is open to faculty and graduate students.  I have tremendously enjoyed this conference in past years and found it to be a collegial, inclusive, and supportive environment for scholars both junior and senior, and both political science and interdisciplinary, including law students. 

NEPSA subject-matter sections are: American Politics, Comparative and Canadian Politics, International Relations, Political Theory, Politics and History, Public Law, Public Policy, and Technology and Politics.

CFP: New England Political Science Association to meet in Mystic, Conn., April 2020

The New England Political Science Association has released its CFP for the annual meeting in April 2020, which will take place in Mystic, Connecticut.  The NEPSA program always offers a buffet of intriguing work in political science and public policy.  Though attendees are overwhelmingly PhDs and PhD candidates, they've always warmly welcomed me and my modest JD.  Find this call and read more about NEPSA at its web home.

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2020 ANNUAL MEETING

Hilton Mystic, Mystic, Connecticut

April 23-25, 2020

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

The New England Political Science Association invites proposals for papers, panels, and roundtables to be presented at its 2020 Annual Meeting, which will convene April 23-25 at the Hilton Mystic in Mystic, Connecticut. Panels will be offered on Friday, April 24, and Saturday April 25; a pre-conference welcome event will be held on the evening of Thursday, April 23.

In NEPSA’s 72^nd year, we continue to welcome a broad array of panel and paper proposals reflecting the various subfields of our discipline.  NEPSA has the following dedicated sections:

• AMERICAN POLITICS

• COMPARATIVE AND CANADIAN POLITICS

• INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

• POLITICAL THEORY

• POLITICS AND HISTORY

• PUBLIC LAW

• PUBLIC POLICY

• TECHNOLOGY AND POLITICS

Proposals from undergraduates will once again be considered for presentation.  Undergraduate proposals will be evaluated on a competitive basis by a special Undergraduate Proposals Committee.  Accepted proposals will present on panels dedicated to undergraduate research; presenters must be accompanied at the conference by a sponsoring faculty member.

Proposals for individual papers, full panels, and roundtables – as well as offers to serve as panel chairs and/or discussants – may be submitted via the NEPSA website: www.nepsanet.org. Please scroll to “2020: CONFERENCE” in the menu bar for the drop-down links to submit proposals. Except in special situations, individuals are restricted to two paper presentations.

The deadline for submissions is Friday, November 29^th, 2019.

Questions about the conference and requests for further information may be directed to NEPSA’s Executive Director and Program Chair, Steven Lichtman (Shippensburg University): sblichtman@ship.edu.