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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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The Soviets wanted a unified Germany to milk for reparations (maximizing their share) to build their own empire, and a fragmented Europe. The US wanted a unified Western Europe and a fractured Germany, to force an economic schism, because it had kinda ceded the East already.
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Soviets bluffed thinking the US could be dragged into a long negotiation slide into a compromise that they could dominate. The US called the bluff and triggered the schism the Soviets were using as a threat. This feels familiar. Putin’s geopolitics are also “drag from weakness”
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The US does not come off looking too good here, but there was a core of generosity and goodwill behind the dollar authoritarianism. The Soviets though were fundamentally acting out of self-interest and bad faith and assumed the US was too.
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There’s a sense of “it’s okay to lie and cheat in dealings with evil capitalists” to their whole posture. We’re now at the breakdown point. Stalin has received spy intel that confirms US motives and he orders Molotov to back out of Marshall Plan talks.
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Molotov walks out of talks, accusing the U.K. and France of letting the US but it’s way into interfering in Europe, for its own economic self-interest. Not wrong but a half-truth that revealed the central failure of communist imagination to understand nonzero sum capitalist logic
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Soviets try a last gambit on July 5, 6th, cabling satellites to attend plan launch but vote against it and walk out, to undermine launch. But then reverse course on July 7, not trusting the satellites, especially Czechoslovakia, to run the play. So July 7th is real Cold War start
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Marshall has already committed to the schism mentally on April 15, so Stalin took nearly 3 months to catch on. Crucial slip that led to Soviets being successfully cast as the cause of the schism and interested in chaos over reconstruction. Which was not wrong.
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It’s amazing to think that in 1947 Soviets genuinely believed Western capitalism would collapse under its internal contradictions and prepared Soviet Inion would step into vacuum via the communist parties they were sponsoring ideologically throughout the west.
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The McCarthy era paranoia makes more sense now even if no more justifiable. The Soviets really were a grim specter of an alternative history/future looming over the imagination of the West.
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