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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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‘[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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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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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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
Key doctrinal points: - No requirement to trade with East - Grants, not loans (contra Morganthau, lend-lease, IMF) - Anti-Soviet strings attached - (W) Germany to be made strong; France would have to deal - (W) Europe to be integrated; UK would have to deal
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Western Europe was clearly an American creation. Stalin May have created the Iron Curtain but the US created the difference across it very deliberately
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Will Clayton returns from Europe with a sense of urgency over Europe on the brink of economic collapse. He’s aligned with Kennan mostly but wants a more assertive US role, not merely financial and advisory.
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As befits a free trader capitalist, he wants proper reconstruction of corporatized, nationalized economies along more laissez-faire lines. Free market via command actions to dismantle command economies.
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‘In Acheson’s words, Clayton wanted the plan merely to “appear to come” from Europe...The United States, he said, “must run this show.” Kennan/Clayton = good cop/bad cop. Acheson = ADA Marshall = DA
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There was basically bipartisan drive towards a “United States of Europe.” Besides Clayton, others like Dulles, Truman, Vandenburg (formerly an isolationist) all got behind it. The EU was the result of the US intentionally reshaping Europe in its own image.
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Ken Anderson final PPS/1 navigates a subtle shift away from communism as cause of problems and focus of plan to core economic/cultural issues, with communism as an opportunistic infection of weakened state. And thus did Truman doctrine finesse Marshall plan into existence.
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Okay, Kennan has laid out doctrine and strategic logic. Clayton has defined required posture of command. But who’s going to work out the execution model? 🤔
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Clay was son of a 3-time senator, but chose to go into the military. Star student but with conduct problems. Liked authoritah. Cartman, but straight-As type. Rose through logistics and engineering hierarchy without seeing combat until he was running Berlin by... my age right now.
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Clay’s orders were to run Berlin by the punitive/vindictive Morganthau Plan, which was both impossible in a devastated economy and something he didn’t want to do. So he used “disease and unrest” appropriations to run the show in more humane ways, thwarting the plan’s intent.
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“There is no choice between becoming a communist at 1500 calories and a believer in democracy at 1000” — Clay in a 1946 cable to Washington.
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Clay blamed the French more than the Russians for the recovery quagmire, and thought Kennan was a dangerously dogmatic theory guy. Interesting tension there since he himself was on the theory side of the military in a way (didn’t get to see combat despite trying)
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Marshall unveils plan in a carefully drafted commencement speech at Harvard, centering humanitarian aid and inviting Europe to make an opt-in cooperative request for US aid. Language designed to nominally allow the Soviets to join but really intended to smoke out true intentions.
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Truman didn’t see even the draft of the speech. He stayed arms length away and called in the Marshall Plan rather than the Truman Plan so Republicans could comfortably vote for it.
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Stalin surprised by the move. He still thought cooperyon his terms was possible and that his stalling and delaying tactics via Molotov were working. The Marshall-Stalin negotiations almost look like management-labor negotiations. He didn’t think the US had a BATNA. He was wrong.
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Kremlin correctly guesses the intent to keep the Soviets out and blame them for the schism. Decides to try to join the Plan to scuttle it from the inside, which appears to have been a Stalin gambit. Molotov joins talks and signals rest of nascent eastern bloc to do so too.
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Interesting that just as the US had a tradition of Kremlinology starting with Kennan, the Soviets had a tradition of Beltwayology trying to analyze US thinking. The two sides of the Cold War did understand each other.
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The Soviet view of the US as imposing economic imperialism to control Europe is not wrong. Marshall’s crew sought to do exactly that. The plan was nominally European in origin but the content was dictated by the US. “You set the valuation I’ll make the term sheet” basically.
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The Soviets fundamentally underestimated American economic strength. They thought the US would be forced to deal to save itself from an economic crisis caused by loss of trade. They didn’t realize the US had already written Eastern Europe out of the economic calculations.
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The US needed an economically strong Germany to rebuild Europe and restart the world economy to serve American business interests, but not so badly that they’d compromise with the Soviets over it.
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The Soviets really did drink their own kool-aid. Their negotiating stance was based on the assumption that America was on the verge of economic collapse due to loss of export markets. Because of course capitalism was destined to collapse any day now as foretold by doctrine.
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Stalin was supposedly the greatest strategic negotiator of his time. Molotov was a master of stalling and other tactics. Yet doctrine compromised them.
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If the US used dollar diplomacy to force a unified economic zone in the west, and suppress bilateral ism, the Soviets used bilateralism in the East to sort of divide and conquer their zone. The description reads like a tyrannical pater familias ruling brood by 1:1 intimidation
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It’s interesting that labor leaders in UK and France reluctantly went along with the US despite communist sympathies. Stalin lost much of the ideological goodwill that Russia had earned from the global communist movement in previous decades.
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