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Story starts with FDR’s vision for One World post WW2 dying with him, and Stalin playing along with new orgs like the IMF and UN to ensure they’d be set up not to interfere with USSR. He hopes to dominate a weak postwar Western Europe. But Truman has other plans.
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George Marshall as Secretary of State leads the plan. Stalin hates it because he can’t veto it and it aims to create a strong Western Europe. Stage is set.
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“...given the enduring passion for creating “new Marshall Plsns” to solve the worlds problems, the story of the old, original one is,I believe, well worth telling.” Amen. Let’s go.
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I feel seen.
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New thought is to maybe track this with sort of a recovery ooda loop focused mainly on rapidly identifying and imitating successful local recovery patterns. An integral (as in calculus) OODA loop that accumulates rebuild patterns. A pattern inventory. Bottom-up DIY Marshall plan.
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This book feels contemporary in a way pre-WW2 books don’t. Discussion of how Stalin reneged on promises at Yalta, pissing off FDR and then Truman.
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Soviets say no to Bretton Woods, leading to 3 inaugural markers of Cold War: Stalin address at Bolshoi theater on Feb 9, 1946, George Kennan long telegram 2 weeks later, Churchill Iron Curtain speech s2 weeks after that.
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The OS is not enough since it is predicated on political stability, so Truman admin kinda sidelines it to do a much more proactive Western Europe rebuilding predicated on a Cold War with Soviet Union. So Marshall Plan is the big initial strategic piece of the Truman doctrine.
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Funny how this does not feel like history but living reality. Partly because I was alive and old enough to pay attention for the end of the Cold War, and partly because consequences are still unfolding.
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Didn’t realize the extent of postwar civil conflict in Europe after 1945. 100s of thousands killed in reprisal for collaboration, lots of political purging. Big population movements especially German minorities. Coming on the heels of 35m civilian dead it must have seemed small
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There’s a blind spot in my sense of this history between the end of the war and true Cold War events like the Berlin airlift. The 3 years 1945-48 must have been crazy.
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“All told, Stalin and Hitler forcibly displaced some 30m people between 1941-43” ... and vast numbers “sent home” to horrible fates after the war. 40% of German housing destroyed. This was one huge messy cleanup job. We rarely hear about the postwar era.
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People had learned during the war that patriotic duty meant lying, cheating, and black marketeering during the war so couldn’t get back to lawful behavior after easily. Not that they could, since the economy was a shambles. By inflation etc.
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Dean Acheson and George Kennan both saw it all coming as the war would down. Without a serious rebuilding by America, Europe would have turned into a long-term disaster area. World War 3 would have started from the nascent continental civil war.
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Gotta admire the American idealism that drove a rebuilding in the face of Stalin’s desire to keep the region weak, basically accepting the war effects as a strategic gift. Gotta remember: “don’t rebuild” is always a major viewpoint after every tragic disaster. Including Covid.
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Interesting. Apparently Truman loved maps and frequented the map room at the White House (paper and pins era... I imagine it was large screen monitors by Obama time and is now sold to Kodak for $3.50) He apparently had autodidact mastery of the maps and history.
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1947. Britain retreating from Empire and abandoning obligations to Turkey and Greece provokes Stalin ambitions for expansion. The US scrambled into a response. Truman is a map hawk. Kennan is a grand strategy guy. Dean Acheson seems like an operator. What will they do?
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Already a big learning just 3% into book. The Marshall plan was about containing Stalin first, filling vacuum of retreating Britain second. Altruistic-idealist reconstruction of Europe was a distant third reason. I thought it was the first.
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Acheson thought Stalin would take over Greece and Turkey to cut off East from West, then advance into Asia to take over India and then China. Surreal how much colonial spheres were still seen as NPCs rather than agents. Not wrong. It took another 30 years for them to agentify.
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FDR treasury apparently put a lot of pressure on Britain to unravel its empire financially (through Bretton Woods I guess) while supporting it in WW2. I guess he was indirectly a factor in decolonization 🤔
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Kennan was a Russophile but hated soviet leadership. Melancholic intellectual who preferred Russian culture. His boss Ambassador Harriman thought he understood Russia but not the US.
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Heh Kennan effectively memed the US into the Cold War with the Long Telegram, the first viral documented blog post in history
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Interesting. The US awakened into awareness of itself as a political superpower relatively late but quickly over just about 15 weeks in early 1947 when both the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan came together, precipitated by the Greece/Turkey crisis caused by British withdrawal.
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Britain went bankrupt as an empire really quickly in 1947 via financial crisis, and the US got sucked into the power vacuum. I’d like to read the view of this period from the Kremlin perspective. Wtf were they thinking. Did Kennan read them right?
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“FDR had been too forthright in highlighting the evils of empire for his accidental successor to appear to be creating one” So Truman speech to Congress kinda finessed an empire into existence.
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‘In dealing with Congress, in Acheson’s view it was sometimes necessary to make arguments “clearer than the truth”’ 😂 OG alt facts?
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Hmm. Both the pro-Soviet left and isolationist right favored acting through the UN over Truman’s direct intervention approach to Greece and Turkey.
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