Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Comments

  1. Forty years ago this week Israel fought the Six-Day War and the Arab world felt the power of the Jewish State.  Even the American navy learned to tremble when they sent an armed spy ship to Israeli waters.

  2. On JUne 5, 1947, Secretary of State Marshall announced what would become a triumph of American foreign policy:  the Marshall Plan.

    • …it should be recognized that the Marshall Plan was not instituted by the US out of the goodness of the US’s  collective heart.  Indeed, the original plan, conceived by the Allies before the end of WWII, was to largely dismantle German industry, as reparations, but also as pacification.  That proved untenable, as Soviet expansionism into Europe became ever more clear.

      <

      p>
      The Marshall Plan was largely an attempt to stem Communist expansionism in western Europe following the defeat of the Nazis–the Soviets already held eastern Europe and East Germany.  And it was wildly successful in doing so.

      <

      p>
      BTW, I have mentioned here before that the West German Wirtschaftswunder largely was a result of Ludwig Erhardt’s 1948 currency reform against the wishes of the Allied occupiers.

      • That is what made the policy a triumph.  The iron curtain could easily have been further West, given the state of Europe in 1947.

        <

        p>
        You are right that currency reform–along with the elimination of price controls, which helped alleviate shortages– played a much bigger role in W Germany than did the Marshall Plan Aid.  That is because the Marshall Plan aid largey went elsewhere, and was offset in Germany by the military government’s payment of the expenses of the occupation and reparations.

        <

        p>
        These policies were opposed by the British (Even in the UK, the Labour government kept price controls for years, and thus didn’t manage to put an end to wartime rationing until the mid 50s), and maybe by some factions among the Americans, but were supported by General Clay.

        <

        p>
        I’ll leave it for others to determine if General Clay was a fan of Milton Friedman, or just liked Ehrhardt because he wasn’t a Nazi.

        <

        p>
        Nevertheless, Western Eurpoe was, and is, more than just the FDR, wasn’t it?

        <

        p>

        • …I did not mean to belittle the importance of the Marshall Plan in the recovery of Western Europe following the war.  I just wanted to put it in perspective.  It was not an act of charity, but it, like the Berlin Airlift 1948, were instrumental in the recovery of confidence of the Western Europeans, and stemmed the march of communism.

          • Good for me and good for you is a pretty good way to run foreign policy.  Beats “agree with me or you are a terrorist” anyway.

            <

            p>
            We could unearth the mouldering corpse of Marshall and his colleagues in government and they would do no worse than we have received these last few years.

              • This was a true disappointment and a real tragedy of this war in Iraq. 

                <

                p>
                I was, at the time, skeptical and not at all anti-war, and supported the invasion (or at least didn’t object) largely because I trusted the author of the Powell Doctrine not to eff up that badly.

                <

                p>
                He really was in a position to prevent this fiasco, and he fumbled.

Archives