“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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Replying to @vgr
Wasn't Britain in ruin and unable to hold on the Empire? In "The Wise Men", it's said they were in a hurry to depart their colonies in Asia (such as Malaya and Singapore), as well as to diminish their presence in Greece for instance. Then the US had to fill in the void.
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According to the book this was because the US forced them to balance the books differently with Bretton Woods. They might potentially have financially engineered a way out using colonial resources and Sterling regime if the US had allowed it.
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Replying to @vgr
OK, interesting—"The Wise Men" (and Lee Kuan Yew's writing from a Singapore perspective) really gives the impression that Britain had just had enough of the Empire.
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