One of the casualties of the European war was money. Nazi-affiliated regimes in occupied countries had printed so much of the local currencies to support the Axis’s war effort that the money in Europeans’ pockets was not even worth the paper it had been printed on. And even in countries that had escaped occupation, such as Britain, the costs of war and the collapse of trade had led to a combination of government indebtedness and value destruction that rendered the currency worthless, at least in the arena of international trade. In short, the greenback was the only currency left standing and capable of lubricating world trade.

Keynes’s proposal was brimming with intellectual power; White was overflowing with the power vested in him by America’s economic and military might. Keynes advocated a global system that could stabilize capitalism for a fabulously long time; White's brief was to push through a system consistent with the United States' new-found strength but viable only as long as America remained the surplus nation extraordinaire. [...]

a closed, autarkic (meaning self-sufficient) economy [...] may be poor, solitary and undemocratic, but at least it is free of problems caused by other economies, by external deficits or surpluses

An international fund would be created to play the role of the world's central bank and issue its currency--the bancor, as Keynes provisionally named it.

On the one hand, the Bundesbank had a duty--to the Bretton Woods system, to defend the realm of Germany--to see the speculators off and hold the line. On the other hand, the Bundesbank intensely disliked printing Deutsche Marks in defence of exchange rates it had not chosen and in quantities it despised because these marks threatened to flood back into Germany later, causing domestic prices to rise and bringing back memories of the hyperinflation of the early 1920s.

[...] as long as they felt that the Bretton Woods system was sound. And the system was sound as long as America was in surplus with the rest of the world.

Thus in 1971 Europe was jettisoned from the dollar zone by a United States intent on preserving its hegemony and unwilling to turn to austerity to save Bretton Woods.