by Benn Steil
At home in the United States, the Marshall Plan became legislation against all odds. By contemporary standards of cross-party cooperation and public support, it was a remarkable triumph. The Republican 80th Congress had been in no mood to devote vast new funds to foreign aid. But the political packaging of the program was masterful. It appealed to internationalists as well as anticommunists. It appealed to those who believed the Morgenthau and Potsdam policies toward Germany were failing. It appealed even to isolationist elements that wanted a “one and done” approach: putting Europe on its feet, and then pushing it out on its own.126
Although changing circumstances created the opportunity for radical foreign policy innovations, personalities mattered. Whereas FDR, had he lived to finish his fourth term, would almost surely have adapted his “One World” vision to the reality of clashing U.S. and Soviet interests, it is doubtful he would have empowered capable subordinates the way Truman did. Roosevelt gave the State Department little leeway for independent initiative. The slow-witted Morgenthau and fellow-traveling White at Treasury, who dominated foreign economic policy from 1934 to 1945, were no match for men of judgment and integrity such as Marshall, Acheson, Kennan, Clayton, Bohlen, and Hoffman. Officials on the ground in Europe—notably Clay and Murphy in Berlin, Douglas in London, and Caffery and Harriman in Paris—ensured that the new American strategy was implemented competently and forcefully. It is further questionable whether FDR could have forged the vital political bond with congressional Republicans through its master legislative tactician, Vandenberg. Without it, even the best-laid plan would have remained just that: a plan.
Still, there was a diplomatic cost to be paid for the packaging that got the Marshall Plan through Congress; packaging that elevated anti-Communist rhetoric to a level beyond what Marshall and much of the State Department ever found comfort with. This rhetoric served to help lock the United States onto a course of confrontation with Moscow, and Communist movements generally, by making it necessary to validate the commitment of resources and American prestige the Plan involved.
The question remains whether the Cold War could have been avoided. The Marshall Plan accelerated and intensified it, but the answer is almost surely no: given how the two sides saw their vital interests, the conflict was inevitable. “Soviet domination of the potential power of Eurasia, whether achieved by armed aggression or by political and subversive means,” stated U.S. policy paper NSC 20/4, approved by Truman in November 1948, “would be strategically and politically unacceptable to the United States.”127 Mackinder’s famous 1904 analysis had suggested that the threat of such domination hinged on Russia concluding an alliance with Germany—an alliance that would therefore itself constitute a mortal threat to the western powers.128 Moscow, too, of course, had its own red lines on American domination; and in Europe it ran through Germany. Stalin was clear when he told Bulgarian and Yugoslav allies that “All of Germany must be ours. That is, Soviet, Communist.”129 Stalin’s actions in Poland and Czechoslovakia show this was not bluster. Germany was the one European power that could destroy his hard-won buffer zone in the East, which itself could only be held together with force or the threat of force.
The blockade crisis highlighted the seriousness with which each side saw its rights and interests in Germany. The Marshall Plan, in accelerating the political division of the country, however, pushed the two sides toward what may have been the only feasible compromise to avert hot war. From this perspective, the Marshall Plan was also conducive to wider European stability.
The Marshall Plan was, of course, only one component of the early American Cold War containment strategy. Yet economic rehabilitation became a primary tool of a so-called strongpoint defense of critical geostrategic regions, in Northeast Asia as well as Europe, aimed at building up energetic, self-confident, independent centers of power capable of resisting Soviet pressure. Just as it had with Germany, the Truman administration concluded that there was less risk to U.S. interests in the rehabilitation of Japan than in negotiating its neutralization with Moscow. “Neutrality is an illusion in the context of East-West tensions,” Acheson said in December 1949. “[T]he Soviets would continue to pursue infiltration tactics, permitting them ultimately to turn Japan into an aggressive military threat.”130
Looking at the distribution of power among U.S. and Soviet allies in Europe and Northeast Asia at the end of the Cold War—considering in particular the rise of West Germany and Japan—it is difficult to conclude that the broad American strategy was not a success. Forty years after Acheson’s observation on the need for Washington to have allies, rather than trust in neutral zones, its early Cold War alliances were still intact, while Moscow’s were in tatters.131 Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., had in October 1947 written to Vandenberg, who passed his words on to Marshall, that “the recovery of Western Europe [was] a twenty-five to fifty-year proposition and . . . the aid which we extend now and in the next three or four years will in the long future result in our having strong friends abroad.”132 This insight was keen and important. Containment successfully navigated between appeasement and war for four decades, and the Marshall Plan played a principal role in bonding the West together for the struggle. Many of the institutions we now take for granted as natural elements of the liberal postwar order—in particular, the European Union, NATO, and the World Trade Organization—were forged under U.S. leadership during the early Marshall years.
BY THE END OF THE Cold war, the Marshall Plan had taken on an iconic status. “There is hardly a crisis anywhere in the world,” observed German economist Werner Abelshauser in 1991, “which in the view of the West ought not be solved by a sort of ‘Marshall Plan.’ ”133 Even among those who knew little about it, it had become synonymous with noble and intelligent foreign intervention. Indeed it is today axiomatic that when turmoil hits a critical part of the world calls pour forth for “A New Marshall Plan” to alleviate hardship, calm passions, and stir hope. Hillary Clinton invoked it in the context of the Arab Spring.134 Peer Steinbrueck posed it as the wise alternative to Europe’s austerity policies.135 George Soros pleaded for one to counter Russia in Ukraine.136 Others have proposed it for Gaza.137 Greece.138 North Africa.139 Even the United States itself.140 China’s foreign investment schemes have been called a “Chinese Marshall Plan.”141 Al Gore wants one for the environment.142 Others demand one for “global unemployment.”143 Yet the fact that nothing resembling the Marshall Plan ever emerges suggests just how sui generis the conditions surrounding it were.
One of the great challenges in replicating the Marshall Plan, aside from the sums involved, is making conditionality effective—getting beneficial policy reforms in return for aid. Broadly, the more aid involved, the greater the ability of the donor to bring to power, and sustain in power, governments committed to its policy priorities. Beneficiaries, however, can distinguish between donor priorities and mere preferences, and have their own red lines. The Ramadier, Schuman, Queuille, and Bidault governments in postwar France understood that the Americans would not concede on German reindustrialization or exclusion of the Communists from their coalitions. They therefore adapted to them, even taking control of the integration process by way of the Schuman Plan (as Acheson had encouraged Schuman to do).144 But they understood as well that they were largely free to ignore American demands on domestic economic policy.
As exasperating as this was for U.S. officials at the time, it was of little consequence. France was already a rich country with a market economy and the bureaucratic infrastructure necessary to carry out economic policy. It had done so successfully for generations before the war. Its task was essentially to fix the (many and large) potholes caused by war and occupation. That Paris might prefer asphalt, and Washington concrete, was never going to make the difference between ultimate recovery and stagnation.
Less developed countries, in contrast, tend to be run by governments that lack the capacity and, frequently, the will to deliver public goods. Foreign aid, as Nobel economist Angus Deaton
has emphasized, not only fails, all too frequently, to develop such local capacity but to undermine it. Aid can be designed to bypass governments, and to go directly to the population, but disintermediation does nothing to address the problem that effective government is necessary for development—something Marshall’s State Department took as a given.145
It should not be surprising that large-scale American aid has not had transformative effects in more recent post-conflict societies. As of January 2015, U.S. relief and reconstruction aid to Afghanistan totaled $110 billion; to Iraq, $61 billion.146 The combined nominal total of $171 billion is about $40 billion more than the present value of all Marshall aid. But the Afghan and Iraqi governments have faced vastly less favorable circumstances than those of the Marshall countries. They never achieved full control of their territory. Instead, they have been under constant siege from armed domestic and foreign opponents. While the Marshall countries were recovering on their own (weather crises notwithstanding), these economies were collapsing. Their governments were not, like Marshall governments, natural allies of the United States, which has in turn been at odds with alternative neighboring benefactors such as Iran. They further lacked committed, functioning, impartial national bureaucracies capable of implementing major new policies and programs. In short, the foundation that enabled American economic statecraft to be so successful in postwar Europe is lacking.
Historian John Lewis Gaddis has argued that George Kennan’s strategy of containment has limited applicability outside a Cold War context.147 So the strategy of massive conditional foreign aid, itself developed within a containment context, does as well. The United States has not, since the 1940s, been presented with prospective beneficiaries who are of sufficient geostrategic importance to engage legislative and popular support while, at the same time, offering capable government willing and able to implement its agenda over many years.
There is also the challenge that other nations will consider regional economic, political, or security integration initiated by a power like the United States threatening to their own interests. And when the other nation is as large and powerful as Russia, this likelihood raises the prospect of determined interference. Such interference would create dangerous turmoil as NATO and the EU began expanding eastward in the aftermath of the Cold War.
Celebration at the fall of the Berlin Wall, November 9, 1989.
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FOURTEEN
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ECHOES
ON THE NIGHT OF NOVEMBER 9, 1989, enormous crowds began surging toward official crossings on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall. Having received orders not to shoot, twenty-five-year veteran border guard Harald Jäger was running out of options. Bullhorns bellowed warnings that it was not, as a televised statement had said an hour earlier, “possible . . . to go through the border.” This failed to deter the throngs.
Jäger improvised a screening process, permitting a few at a time to pass through the Bornholmer Street gate. But this only encouraged them to press harder. With the frenzied crush shouting “Tor auf!” (“Open the gate!”), Jäger, fearing for his men’s lives, ordered them to do it. As the gates sprang open along the Wall just before midnight, the crowds erupted. Tens of thousands poured into the West. Millions would do so in the coming days.1
The division of Berlin was over.
Germany, however, was still two countries. Indeed, the East German government was determined to confront the day’s events as a horrid but reversible mistake.2 Helmut Kohl knew he had to assert his authority before the opportunity was lost.
Anxious to get to Berlin, the West German chancellor faced a hurdle: his planes were barred from flying there under forty-year-old occupation rules. So following a plea to Washington, he boarded a U.S. Air Force transport plane in Hamburg. Arriving in West Berlin shortly before 4:30 p.m. on November 10, he mounted an outdoor stage bathed in bright television lights.
“I would like to call out to everyone in the GDR!” he shouted. “We stand at your side! We are, and will remain, one nation!”3 It was the opening salvo in a campaign to reunify Germany.
The Cold War, for all the brutal hardship it imposed behind the Iron Curtain, and the nuclear terrors it posed for the world, had stabilized Europe. Once Germany was divided in 1949, both sides acknowledged the political borders between East and West. Changes in the balance of power within Germany have, however, historically had reverberations well beyond it.4 The year 1989 would prove no exception.
Europe was caught off guard by the collapse of the Wall and Kohl’s kinetic response to it. Before the month was out, the chancellor would, with no advance clearing abroad, announce a “Ten Point Program” for unification in the Bundestag. French President François Mitterrand, who had made it a priority to keep in lockstep with his German counterpart, was shocked and offended. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was furious; he would give Federal Republic foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher a tongue-lashing in Moscow a week later. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher warned Kohl that “reunification [would] open a Pandora’s box of border claims right through Central Europe” and “risk[ed] undermining Gorbachev’s position,” on which the West depended for democratization in the East.
Kohl tried to calm fears the same way Marshall and Adenauer had in the early postwar years: by pledging to embed Germany in European superstructures. “The government of West Germany would now have to agree to practically any French initiative for Europe,” Kohl aide Horst Teltschik teasingly told Le Monde on December 1. “If I were French, I would take advantage of that.” Mitterrand obliged, much as his political forebears had done in seizing control of European integration from the Americans after the war. As his price for support on German unity, Mitterrand secured from Kohl a public commitment on European monetary union, something the chancellor had been reluctant to provide until after German elections in 1990. “Mitterrand is wise,” Kohl observed. He understood how to harness the inevitable to his advantage. Thatcher’s stubbornness, in contrast, baffled him. She was, he was sure, isolating herself diplomatically.5
He was right. Though just as taken aback by the events of November 9, U.S. president George H. W. Bush offered the chancellor his support. Hours after Kohl’s dramatic flight to Berlin on a U.S. military plane, Secretary of State James Baker, speaking on network television, reminded the world that “it has been the policy of the NATO Alliance” as well as “the policy of the United States of America to support reunification for over forty years.”6 This statement hinted at where U.S. policy might be heading. With an end to the Cold War suddenly in sight, the United States had no intention of reviving FDR’s plans for an American withdrawal from Europe. It suggested instead that NATO, through which Truman overturned such plans reluctantly, might even expand into the territory of the enemy Warsaw Pact—beginning with East Germany.
An anxious Gorbachev sought to turn the clock back to the years before NATO’s founding—to the four-power occupation regime that controlled Germany after the war. Thatcher was sympathetic. Reunification, she said, would cause “all the fixed points in Europe [to] collapse. . . . We must have a structure to stop this happening, and the only one available was the Four Power arrangement.”7
The United States had been the first power to abandon this arrangement after the war, having concluded that reviving Germany was the highest priority. Now, once again, a U.S. administration was convinced that Germany would convulse, harming American economic and security interests, if its future were held hostage to Moscow’s agenda. Bush was persuaded by Kohl’s argument that East Germany was headed for political and economic meltdown, and did not want its absorption into the West stalled by Cold War politics.8 Under pressure from Gorbachev, however, Baker agreed to an ambassador-level meeting on December 11—but, just as in 1948, to “discuss only Berlin.”
Held in the same American sector Allied Control Council building used in Berlin at the end of the war, the atmosphere of the gathering was surreal. “Since we have emerged as the victors
of war,” proclaimed the Soviet ambassador to East Germany, “we have taken on the responsibility of providing for . . . a peaceful future.”9 Ostrich-like, head buried in the political sands, he could not see what was obvious to his counterparts: that only a bloody Russian military crackdown, comparable to that carried out by the Chinese Communists in Tiananmen Square, could stop Germany unifying.
As with Stalin after the war, Gorbachev wanted to forestall the emergence of a Western-allied Germany, to roll back the American military presence in Europe, and to rebuild the Soviet economy with German compensation. But the Berlin meeting accomplished nothing, other than to anger the excluded West German government. Despite Soviet insistence that the forum be open-ended, Baker promised Kohl its first meeting would be its last. One week later, on December 19, the emboldened chancellor flew to Dresden, his first trip to the GDR since the historic events at the Wall, and spoke before tens of thousands.
“My goal, if this historic hour will allow it,” he declared against the symbolic World War II backdrop of a bombed-out church, “is the unity of our country!”
The crowd cheered. “Einheit! Einheit! Einheit!” (“Unity!”)
Nearby, a nervous but determined thirty-seven-year-old KGB officer observed events. Days before Kohl’s arrival, he had been burning mounds of documents in preparation for possible attacks by angry mobs. The volume crippled the KGB’s furnace. Years later, Russian journalists would interview the former officer about his work in Germany.