Pax Americana began when the US took its place as the Western hegemon supplanting the British Empire at the end of the Second World War, overseeing the reconstruction of a destroyed continent as it eyed the gigantic Soviet Army with suspicion. During the years of the Cold War, the collective West relied upon the protection of the US and saw it as the national embodiment of self-determination and free trade against the autocratic control of anything and everything in the Soviet Union in the ideological but also very real stare down contest between the West and the East.
