Next pandemic live read. The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War by Benn Steilhttps://www.amazon.com/Marshall-Plan-Dawn-Cold-War/dp/1501102370 …
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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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Fascinating. Marshall plan and NATO in part grew out of a sense that the UNRRA which existed 1943-47 was being used by hostile countries to take advantage of the US which provided the bulk of the funding. Ironic given similar charges by Trump against NATO https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Relief_and_Rehabilitation_Administration …
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‘In dealing with Congress, in Acheson’s view it was sometimes necessary to make arguments “clearer than the truth”’
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“Cartohypnosis” apparently shaped mid-century geopolitics. Guy named Halford Mackinder was apparently considered father of geopolitics and suffered from cartohypnosis as did apparently everybody back then. The falling dominoes type metaphor started then. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halford_Mackinder …
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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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The US made the mistake of “conflating an ally’s failings (Britain’s) with an opponent’s strategy.” Stalin did not care about Greece and Turkey and was focused on Germany. He in fact stuck to 1944 spheres of influence agreements with Churchill.
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New character enters story: William Lockhart Clayton. UN skeptic and firmly anti-Soviet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_L._Clayton …
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Clayton was Southern businessman/free trader “King Cotton” turned political appointee running war stuff under FDR and Truman who wrote influential memo arguing that UN and IBRD wouldn’t work, and aid had to be linked to political reforms favoring US.
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I’m impressed with bipartisanship that seemed to be the norm, and relatively individualist political stances. These people also wrote a lot of memos and things and actively worked with each other despite differences, much more than today. Then again, all white males, so easier.
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I didn’t realize the Marshall Plan was so much more about Cold War geopolitics than about humanitarianism. March 1947. Geopolitical stage set. Rationale crafted. Marshall’s headed to Moscow in a C-54. It’s not even a jet wtf. I suspect this B&W movie won’t end well.pic.twitter.com/DshbVIuSv7
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Aside: Unlike premodern history with no AV material, 20th century history creates incongruous juxtapositions of textual and audiovisual memories. The people in this book are a lot smarter and more modern than their campy avatars in 16-18fps b&w footage and tinny radio broadcasts.
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And damn, they had nukes and did more moving and shaking than Davos set, but they used paper communications, wore silly hats, and ride around in primitive vehicles barely a generation removed from horse-drawn carriages. And flew in antique death trap propeller airplanes

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Yet in text they come across as people you might deal with comfortably as contemporaries today. Basically modern despite funny accents and no WiFi. Which societal memory is more accurate? Textual or AV?
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Marshall had a BATNA in negotiations with Molotov: unilateral disengagement from the fragile Potsdam talks which proved impossible to implement. The impasse was Soviets wanted capped and weakened Germany being milked for reparations and the US wanted Germany self-sufficient first
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