The final chapter rounds up the analysis and summarizes the main findings from all previous chapters. It concludes that the United States is indeed a sheriff, but a shrewd sheriff. The chapter contextualizes the main conclusions in the book within the current debates in academic and policy circles about the upending demise of the US world order. The chapter discusses the prospects of the US world order in light of the status of US domestic politics. That is the decisive debate: at the end of the day, that is where the sheriff gets its mandate. Regardless of whether the US world order is fading into the past or it is bound to endure in the future, the institutional logic of a consensual leadership will remain an original feature of how a democratic nation can manage and enforce a world order.

Two main factors allowed the much wiser Marshall Plan to supplant the vindictive Morgenthau Plan. The first stemmed from an enlightened self-interest. Occupation was proving exceedingly expensive. The costs would be lessened if the German economy were revived. But the second factor stemmed from empathy. The scale of child deaths from malnutrition was growing increasingly difficult for American observers to stomach. Elderly Germans as well could scarcely withstand the freezing winters without heat or fuel, nor the near starvation rations that Hoover and his team were struggling to raise. This chapter follows Will Clayton, the unsung hero and arguably the true father of the Marshall Plan, as he experienced a change of heart. Initially supporting aspects of the harsh Morgenthau Plan, he now reversed course and persuaded his country to do the same.