Another lesson for post-Covid. Berlin city election, not Truman re-election, is the one to learn from.
The bad guys are the ones a) trying to build a wall b) using armed forces to interfere in elections and intimidate voters.
Good thing Berlin didn’t have electoral college.
Conversation
“Make no small plans, for they have no magic to stir the imagination of men.” — Paul Hoffman
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Today’s OECD came out of Marshall a Plan era OEEC, the org Hoffman bullied into accepting the beginnings of a common market by 1950. Barriers down. Payments union up. Brits unhappy. Seeds of Brexit planted. Also seeds of shows like Yes, Prine Minister.
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Stalin makes his own competing Eastern Bloc economic assistance plan, COMECON. With blackjack. And hookers. In fact, forget the economic assistance. It’ll just be Kremlin-directed Nazi-style bilateral barter. Hitler-Stalin economic horseshoe here.
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COMECON evolved to extract for the Soviets not assist. They also carried away 2x in German war booty industrial equipment etc than was lost to bombing in the war.
Russia suffered mightily in the war, but it’s really hard to see anything even close to good in Stalinism.
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Meanwhile, back on early 1949, Gresham’s Law is in effect in Berlin. and bad East marks are driving out good Deutschmarks. Everybody is trying to spend away East marks which is officially at par, and hoarding DMs. UN gives up hopeless currency mediation.
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With much US arm-twisting, UK and France agree to simultaneously declare East marks no longer legal tender in their Berlin zones, on March 20, 5 days after UN effort is quietly buried by a pro-US Cuban chair.
Currency schism is done. And allied airlift has survived winter.
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Shadowy negotiations begin to end Berlin standoff. Acheson emissary Jessup meets Stalin emissary Malik. Molotov out, Vyshinsky in. Marshall Plan triggers spy/propaganda game. Kennan shepherds early covert stuff. In UK, James Bond receives his 00 rating. George Smiley joins MI6.
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That’s it for tonight. This thread is turning way longer and more detailed than my previous ones.
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Marshall Plan is up and running. Now Vandenberg clears the way for NATO by initiating legislation to allow for defense treaties and non-neutral peacetime posture for the US. He believes it was 1930s US neutrality laws that allowed Hitler to emerge.
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May 12, 1949. Blockade over. Stalin fails to mess with Acheson via Jessup-Malik talks to stall the creation of the FRG. Kinda a whimper rather than a bang.
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We’re now in the post-climax. May 23 final foreign ministers council ends in a farce and the allies basically prevail. Berlin under an economic detente. FRG and GDR formed. Aging Konrad Adenauer takes office in the west. The end of the beginning.
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Kennan retreats from the stage, cut out of the last act. Gloomy and moody, ultimately resisting the natural outcomes of his own doctrines. In a way both he and Stalin saw the beginning of the Cold War as a chess game and both lost. Acheson won by treating it like tic-tac-toe.
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What led to allies prevailing was simple economic success in the West. The Soviets could not bear economic cost of holding Berlin hostage. As in 2 world wars and the Civil War, what won the conflict for the US was economics. Kennan never really developed an intuition for that.
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Kennan cuts an interesting tragic figure in this telling of the story. Object lesson for all intellectual descendants of kremlinology. It’s a futile nerd pastime beyond a point. Good for setting up the chessboard, but not for winning the tic-tac-toe game that follows.
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This is why I have zero interest in red-string Trumpology. It just doesn’t matter past a very early point of diminishing returns. Like Stalin, he fancies himself a master negotiator 4d chess guy. In both cases the solution is to ignore and build actual value outside his domain.
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Marshall Plan achieves 60% growth by 1952. Marshall eventually gets the Nobel. Total 14.3B in 1952 $ disbursed. UK 3.2B, France 2.7B, Italy 1.5B, FRG 1.4B. In today’s money, 10x, or about 130B. Or 800B as a fraction of GDP (1.1%). Not counting non-Marshall military aid.
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Loooong wonky chapter on whether the Plan actually worked as advertised and eulogized, including views of revisionists like Alan Milward.
Conclusion: it was politically decisive at a unique and fragile time under unique destabilizing forces, but not economically the driver.
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It is silly to view it as a pure economic intervention. It functioned yo prime the pump of recovery and preserve capitalist economies under the shadow of belligerent Stalinism. It had mixed results in creating US style economics, but it bent the arc of history anti-communist.
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All the European recipients reshaped it to their needs using local levers, but it avoided post WWI Dawes plan errors, and arrested the cycle of reparations bankrolled by US aid. And got Germany effect was historic.
Overall qualitatively priceless and historic.
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That spherical-cow economists doubt it did anything suggests economics is mostly bullshit.
But the fact that it’s unique effects haven’t been replicated in plans inspired by it suggest its defenders misunderstand it too. It was a unique surgery not a general model.
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Ok. Enough for tonight. A bit more left, but will wrap tomorrow.
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Whew done with final chapter on echoes of 1947-52 in 1989-2015. Not going to review in detail since it’s not about Marshall Plan per se.
But interesting commentary on why expansion of NATO and EU post-Soviet collapse made all the mistakes Marshall Plan painstakingly avoided.
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The big lesson is that without acknowledging a historical Russian sphere of interest and thoughtlessly expanding NATO and EU with confused democratization goals pursued by a military alliance, is what has led to today.
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Post-Communist weakened Russia has reverted to its historical mean: using Eastern Europe as a buffer to preserve a sense of security wrt to open land border with West that has been vulnerable since Napoleon.
NATO expansion under Clinton naively assumed democracy = peace.
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There was no Marshall Plan style economic component from the US and the EU had no interest in such a role wrt Eastern Europe. Way to pay it forward EU.
Russia under Putin simply changed tactics to cyber and info war to keep NATO confined. Strategy proved wildly successful.
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After Hungary, Ukraine, Kosovo etc, bang, he managed to Trumple over the US and own NATO. Props to the dude.
He went from burning documents in East Germany to clawing back the sphere of influence that Gorbachev and Yeltsin lost.
Total supervillain but at least a competent one.
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Historical memory of delicate, context-sensitive surgery of 1948-52, informed by the careful kremlinology of Kennan (who foresaw problems of NATO expansion before he died in 2005 at 101) was lost in the US.
Clinton made the fateful errors, smooth-talking himself into delusion.
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The book ends with a loooong cast of characters section, text of Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine speeches, and tons of data and photos. This book really badly wants to be a rich hypertext book.
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So what did I learn of relevance to Post-Covid? I’m tempted to say “nothing.” m.youtube.com/watch?v=J6VjPM
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We can’t try this in 2020.
We lack the statesmen/women capable of drawing the right lessons and using this as meaningful precedent for anything.
Post 1989 post-history suggests we learned nothing.
The Marshall Plan was a rare, lucky success among schemes of its sort.
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And even then, the loose ends and 1990s aftershocks it created scripted out present mess.
The Marshall Plan (intended) and NATO (unintended scope creep) eventually led, via a long causal chain, to Trumpism and even Covid response failure. A key cause can’t be a key to the cure.
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tldr of this live-read: If Covid-recovery needs a Marshall Plan style effort, we’re boned.
Seek inspiration elsewhere.
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