We wouldn’t know where to begin recreating something like today’s system of international order because we have a flawed understanding of its history. That is Derek Leebaert’s thesis in “Grand Improvisation,” a dense reconstruction of events and leaders from 1945 to 1957 that draws impressively on many original sources.

One might quarrel with the belligerence in the subtitle, “America Confronts the British Superpower.” Leebaert, the author of several books on foreign affairs, suggests more like the reverse, with British world experience over centuries confronting an untutored Washington. He has fun with an incident in the Persian Gulf, long regarded as a British lake. In 1948 the American admiral Richard Conolly and his fleet made a grand port call on Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, the ruler of the British protectorate of Bahrain. The sheikh’s personal adviser for 22 years was the Foreign Office’s Charles Dalrymple Belgrave, fluent in the gulf’s dialects and customs. He introduced Conolly to Sheikh Salman, who proudly presented his young son standing nearby. The admiral and his retinue didn’t understand the introduction or know what to do with their hats. “They assumed the son was a slave, treated him like a cloakroom attendant and quickly buried him under their headgear.” It was one of a series of gaffes that Belgrave reported back to London. Maybe the empire would not be taking second place to the Americans after all.

Leebaert’s emphasis is necessary to demolish the common notion that after 1945 a “bankrupt” Britain and its empire faded from the scene, leaving the United States to become “the world’s policeman.” The idea that a Washington-led world order snapped into place immediately after the war is accepted by any number of renowned historians. Leebaert’s thesis should send everyone back to the original sources. His arguments are buttressed by a scholar’s scoop, the text of a National Security Council document (NSC 75) he had declassified through the Freedom of Information Act. “Historians,” he proclaims, “have never seen this 40-page document.” It was nothing less than an audit of the far-flung British Empire. Nobody before had estimated what the presumed “liquidation” of the empire would mean for American security. The resounding finding of NSC 75 was that America alone could not take on the “uncountable” expense of Britain’s “globe-girdling commitments.”

Britain was not the 97-pound weakling of the Charles Atlas muscle-building craze of the time. Leebaert is no jingoist like the flag-waving Brexiteers ignorant of history as they lead Britain over a cliff. He recognizes that paying for World War II had drained the United Kingdom of gold and dollar reserves and that devaluation of the pound was inevitable. But he stresses the countervailing points that made Britain an effective international partner, stiffening a “jittery” America in looming collisions with the Soviet Union. He offers some persuasive bullet points:

· British military and related scientific industries produced higher proportions of wartime output into the 1950s than similar American sectors.

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· Britain was ahead in life sciences, civil nuclear energy and jet aviation. The Gloster Meteor was the first jet warplane to enter the war, and the English Electric Canberra high speed jet bomber was adapted by the American Air Force as the B-57.