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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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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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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.
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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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Reparations-first logic would have made Germany a pass-through entity for American aid as reparations to allies, which would have repeated WW1 mistakes. But Potsdam called for a unified economic plan. So breakdown into East and West was inevitable.
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But pass-through grift aside, intentions were different. The West wanted an economically strong unified Germany though France had doubts. The Soviets wanted a weak unified Germany. Subsistence level with all surpluses going towards reparations.
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There’s a lesson here on reparations in general. The economic math doesn’t work even if the moral math does. The Soviets wanted essentially a kind of indefinite reparations-debt slavery Germany would never have exited. Moral debts of the past cannot be repaid with future bondage.
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Unclear what the answer to the blood money question is, but it isn’t reparations. That’s just vendetta math with a moral UX overlaid. It can never end.
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This setup to the partition of Germany in 1946 is giving me 4d chess headache. Trying to balance reparations, trade deficits, imports, rebuilding, economic integration but with political weakness, with US aid balancing the equation. That’s even before getting to doctrinal diffs.
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This problem goes back to Napoleonic wars. Keeping Germany economically strong enough to pay reparations but politically weak enough to not be a threat and under the control of competing adversaries. The US was a new boundary condition of aid that kinda eventually solved it.
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It’s a bit painful to read this intricate play-by-play since with 20/20 hindsight, partition of Germany, the wall etc seem inevitable. But it was not a death march. All parties were vying for other outcomes. Stalin was playing for all of Germany. Nobody wanted a 43 year impasse.
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Interesting, 40% of German housing stock was destroyed in the war but 80% of the industrial capacity survived and there were more machine tools after the war than before, most new. Dumb bombing, but lucky for after. That’s why it was a prize worth playing for.
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This whole thing seems bizarre now. They were trying to do hopelessly ill-posed Potsdam math and kinda finesse the cost of the war so nobody had to foot the bill. Still our own era has its own funny math.
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6 futile weeks in Moscow with irreconcilable differences that only became really clear towards the end. Strong or weak Germany? Stalin proposed a plebiscite. Anyone who ever proposes a plebiscite has a plan to manipulate it. Stalin had done it in Poland already. FDR let him.
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Many Covid reboot plans look like this 😬 Sidebar: a lot of the logic of the Marshall plan was selfish, focus on boosting aggregate European demand for American exports which faced a sharp slump if Europe didn’t recover. The plan was basically a Keynesian fiscal stimulus.
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Goals for the Marshall plan were, in order: 1. Prevent communism spread 2. Prevent humanitarian crisis 3. Stop threat to American economy These elements were there in frankenplan. Just missing the blueprint for how.
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Marshall appoints Kennan to head up the new Policy Planning Staff. He has to come up with a plan in 2 weeks. Moral of the story: if you rewrite a Long Telegram heralding a Cold War, you’ll get stuck with the thankless job of planning it.
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Intermission with some history on US economic interventionism around the world starting around turn of the century. Free traders ruled and protectionists were on the retreat through the 20s and 30s. Motives for Marshall plan weren’t that different from banana republic policies.
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It’s easy to forget just how international American businesses became after the civil war. The US might have been politically meek and reluctant until WW2 but not economically. Isolationism in geopolitics and connectionism in economics. Germany policy design was a microcosm.
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