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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandenberg_resolution …
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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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Adenauer …
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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 book confirms that diagnosis powerfully
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