I guess he means the Bretton Woods system, where the US dollar was backed by gold and everything else was backed by the US dollar, wouldn't have existed. Everything would have been backed by gold, instead.
If America had not forced the gold standard we might have gotten an international currency as proposed by Keynes.
The idea was soundly rejected because it would have led to rapid post war reconstruction with a loss of American power (they wanted to play at empire).
