What Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars effectively does is place fiscal policy as the inductor in macroeconomic policy, without mentioning the necessity of a central bank to run accommodative monetary policy.

It’s essentially a sales pitch for Keynesian economics.

Keynesian economics will naturally lead to ballooning deficits, because any government that realistically saves during the good times will be booted out in the next election. consequently, debt piles will grow with time, and governments will become increasingly dependent upon their local central bank.

However, for Keynesian economics to function, you need debt-backed currency; a gold-backed system is far more inflexible. Debt-backed currency offers the ability to manipulate the time factor of spending - pushing spending forward (or backward) in essence. That’s extremely handy when you want a monetary framework that enables countercyclical fiscal policy - which is expressly what the RIIA pushed post-1930.

First, the RIIA recommended abandoning the gold standard (mid-1931), which the BoE did in September 1931. Then they recommended a cooperative monetary-fiscal policy framework, laid out in detail in reports from 1933 and 1935, including early balance-sheet/market operations (proto-QE logic via open-market purchases).

When Keynes (1936) introduced his countercyclical fiscal framework (The General Theory), the monetary framework was already in place, and the BoE was off gold - enabling countercyclical fiscal policy. What followed was Bretton Woods, which placed major currencies on a quasi-gold arrangement via the USD as the intermediary (until Nixon broke convertibility in 1971).

With the BIS coordinating central banks, the IMF handling balance-of-payments and macro conditionality, and the World Bank advancing Zimmern’s call for ‘international social justice’ through conditional aid, the final ingredient was a high-level sales pitch for Keynesian economics.

That’s where Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars fits.