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  • Well, South American countries made multiple attempts to put their eggs somewhere else and then found their eggs suspiciously smashed and their chicken appeared to have been replaced by a fascist dictator in the morning and when they asked what happened to the eggs they were put in a plane and quietly dropped over the ocean.

    So there was that reason.

  • Yeah, it all built out of WW2. After WW2 pretty much all of Europe was in shambles. Most major cities had been bombed at least once, many far more than that. Infrastructure all across the continent was destroyed. The industrial capacity was destroyed. Armies had marched, pillaged, and destroyed first out of Germany across Europe, then back across Europe into Germany. The US was uniquely positioned as the only world power that didn't suffer massive economic devastation from the war. In fact, due to stuff like the lend-lease act and massive industrial mobilization for the war effort, the US was experiencing a massive economic boom while Europe and east Asia were in a depression.

    But in the aftermath of the war the Cold War set in. The USSR and Allied powers (led by the US) drew lines in the sand and established their areas of influence. The US instituted the Marshall Plan in Europe which essentially just shotgunned money at western Europe to rebuild as much as possible as quickly as possible. This had a massive positive economic impact on western Europe, but it also ensured that so much of Europe would be dependent on American products and companies. If your rebuilt power grid was made with American parts, then anything new would have to be compatible with that, ensuring your country is a long-term customer of American products. At the same time, the US and western Europe created NATO as a military pact against the Soviet Union, which further strengthened the western alliance. Again, with the US as the only major western power with a larger and more powerful army after the war than before, the US took the leading role in NATO.

    Another major factor that most people tend to overlook was the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944. This was an effort to stabilize the global economy and monetary system after WW2. It said that the US would readopt the gold standard (we had abandoned it during the war, and would later permanently abandon it in the early 70s), then every other western-aligned country would use the US dollar as the basis for their currency. Think of it like a gold-standard, but instead of gold, they used US dollars. This gave the US enormous economic influence because everybody needed US dollars to maintain their economies, and the only way to get them was to do business with the US.

    This created the conditions that the US expanded and exploited over the second half of the 20th century to cement ourselves as the dominant western world power. Through colonialism and Cold War dynamics, the US and USSR forced most of the global south to pick a side, and often forced regime change when they didn't like the choice countries made.

    Then the Soviet Union fell and the US was the only global superpower left remaining. Over the 90s and early 00s a lot of formerly Soviet-aligned countries hitched their wagons to the US since it was the only game left in town.

    So, yes, much of the rest of the world put their eggs in the America basket, but it wasn't recently, it didn't happen all at once, and, at the time at least, there were other factors that went into those decisions.

  • The US bombed the shit out of much of the world's manufacturing in WW2, and after the war they filled the void and dominated the global markets.

    When there was competition that threatened US profits after the war, they assassinated heads of State who didn't enact US policy.

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