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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 6
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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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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 10
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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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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 10
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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?

      4 replies 0 retweets 23 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 10
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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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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 15
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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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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 15
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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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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 15
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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 …

      1 reply 0 retweets 9 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 15
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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.

      1 reply 0 retweets 11 likes
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 15
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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.

      1 reply 1 retweet 20 likes
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    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 15
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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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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 15
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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.

      11:56 PM - 15 Aug 2020
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      • Old New Dad Bob Kerns (No PhD, but I know what one is, WSJ) Warren Koch Rafal Konopka ☘️🎃 Evan Meagher elspeth Alex Schleber 👽😷 ₿olo🇰🇷
      2 replies 0 retweets 26 likes
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        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 15
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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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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 16
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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?

          3 replies 0 retweets 22 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 19
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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

          1 reply 1 retweet 16 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 19
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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.

          1 reply 1 retweet 15 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 19
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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.

          1 reply 2 retweets 16 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 19
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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.

          2 replies 7 retweets 46 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 19
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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.

          1 reply 2 retweets 21 likes
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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 20
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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.

          2 replies 0 retweets 16 likes
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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 20
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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.

          3 replies 2 retweets 24 likes
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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 21
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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.

          2 replies 1 retweet 16 likes
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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 21
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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.

          1 reply 1 retweet 18 likes
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        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 21
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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.

          2 replies 1 retweet 14 likes
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        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 22
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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.

          1 reply 3 retweets 20 likes
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        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 22
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          Marshall concludes that Stalin was negotiating in bad faith and intended to let the German situation fester unresolved and recovery stall. Returns to US intending to announce the unilateral plan. Receives the v0.1 Frankenplan, this SWNCC committee report https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1947v01/d386 …

          1 reply 2 retweets 21 likes
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        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 22
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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.

          1 reply 2 retweets 28 likes
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        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 22
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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.

          1 reply 1 retweet 28 likes
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        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 22
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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.

          2 replies 1 retweet 16 likes
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        19. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 23
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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.

          1 reply 0 retweets 11 likes
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        20. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 23
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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.

          1 reply 1 retweet 18 likes
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        21. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 23
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          ‘[Morganthau and White] had, [Acheson] lamented, “envisage[d] a victory [in war] where both enemies and allies were prostrate — enemies by military action, allies by bankruptcy” A dark view of the US participation in WW2: That the US did bail out Europe but at a price.

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        22. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 23
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          Shades of Chinese belt-and-road initiative. If a rising superpower is both materially supporting you and underwriting your financial capacity to pay for that support, it looks like a free lunch but you’re signing away freedom. Europe wrt US in 1940 = Africa in 2020 wrt China.

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        23. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 23
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          Peeking ahead, post-war European reconstruction and return to prosperity *could* be viewed as a deal with the US devil, with the cost being becoming a US protectorate. Truman doctrine was an imperial boundary as much as a containment boundary.

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        24. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 23
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          Luckily the Marshall Plan was enlightened enough to at least aim at win-win unlike the Morganthau plan which was cartoon villainish. FDR was accused in 1934 of finding “the only Jew in the world who doesn’t know a thing about money” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Morgenthau_Jr ….

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        25. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 23
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          Wonder if being Jewish made Morgenthau an extremist in wanting to impose a “hard peace” on Germany. Hitler and the Nazis are curiously missing in this whole discussion. I guess the economists wanted to forget that and move on.

          2 replies 0 retweets 10 likes
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        26. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 23
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          It’s clear that after Yalta it was already US vs USSR. The last phase of WW2 was about laying out the cold war positions, and cleaning up the Nazis was just a minor loose end. I knew this already but book makes it clear the extreme degree to which that was true.

          4 replies 1 retweet 17 likes
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        27. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 23
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          The last 3 months after Yalta must have been surreal. Feb- 11 - May 8 1945, the world was still focused on Nazis but powers-that-be were already continuing the infinite game. The mop-up really was a minor detail.

          1 reply 0 retweets 21 likes
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        28. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 23
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          Something similar might happen with Covid. Post-Covid world configuration will be worked out somewhere when the end is in sight but the war is not yet won. Big lesson right now is: Trumpism is more Morganthau than Marshall 😬 Bidenism might be too. And Xi = Stalin role? Crap.

          3 replies 1 retweet 28 likes
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        29. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 24
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          By the time Kennan turned his long telegram into an article, he’d shifted from a perimeter containment to a strong-point defense model that demanded much lower economic burden. Congress was suspicious Soviets would drain the US economy through entanglements all along perimeter.

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        30. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 24
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          Military shrank from 83B in 1945 to 42.7 in 1947 to 12.8B in 1947. Armed forced went from 12m to 1.6m personnel. Army secretary wanted 20% more budget if economic aid was voted down. The plan had to be an economic one. Literal butter over guns choice. Arm

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        31. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Aug 24
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          Truman and his Republican senate ally Vandenberg were both born in 1884. Freaks me out how such modern events were shaped by people born just before industrial modernity. Electricity was new in 1884. Airplanes didn’t exist. Humans hunted mammoths. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Vandenberg …

          2 replies 2 retweets 22 likes
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