The Marshall Plan And The Shaping Of American Strategy

" How the United States helped restore a Europe battered by World War II and created the foundation for the postwar international order Seventy years ago, in the wake of World War II, the United States did something almost unprecedented in world history: It launched and paid for an economic aid plan to restore a continent reeling from war. The European Recovery Plan—better known as the Marshall Plan, after chief advocate Secretary of State George C. Marshall—was in part an act of charity but primarily an act of self-interest, intended to prevent postwar Western Europe from succumbing to communism. By speeding the recovery of Europe and establishing the basis for NATO and diplomatic alliances that endure to this day, it became one of the most successful U.S. government programs ever. The Brookings Institution played an important role in the adoption of the Marshall Plan. At the request of Arthur Vandenberg, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Brookings scholars analyzed the plan, including the specifics of how it could be implemented. Their report gave Vandenberg the information he needed to shepherd the plan through a Republican-dominated Congress in a presidential election year. In his foreword to this book, Brookings president Strobe Talbott reviews the global context in which the Truman administration pushed the Marshall Plan through Congress, as well as Brookings' role in that process. The book includes Marshall's landmark speech at Harvard University in June 1947 laying out the rationale for the European aid program, the full text of the report from Brookings analyzing the plan, and the lecture Marshall gave upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953. The book concludes with an essay by Bruce Jones and Will Moreland that demonstrates how the Marshall Plan helped shape the entire postwar era and how today's leaders can learn from the plan's challenges and successes. "

Bonds closely examines the process of bipartisanship in the creation and passage of the Marshall Plan in 1947-48, as the Truman administration confronted the first Republican Congress since 1929. The significant effect of process on policy and the evolving Cold War is illustrated, offering new insights into that confrontation. Employing extensive archival research, Bonds examines the reciprocal relationship of effect between domestic and international politics, which cannot be understood adequately without examining the process of making policy. As Bonds demonstrates, this is a messy contest requiring that policy be adapted or compromised to fit the existing political alignment. It is illustrated most clearly in a situation of differentiated control of the White House and Congress, when a bipartisan consensus must be developed, as in 1947-48. Bonds also examines the development of the Cold War, and the process of passing the Marshall Plan is shown to have been a significant factor in the recognition of confrontation on both sides. The notion that the Marshall Plan was a plan to achieve world economic dominion, or to find a market for surplus U.S. goods is debunked, and Bonds disputes the charge that Truman and Marshall deliberately produced a war scare to increase defense budgets. He also contests the argument that the United States depended on the atomic bomb to deter the Soviets in the early Cold War period and demonstrates that Truman and Marshall had no concept at all of a National Security State in 1947 and early 1948. Instead, they sought a national militia system and firmly suppressed military appropriations in favor of a balanced budget. This is a provocative work for scholars and students of American politics, international relations, and diplomatic history.

Politicians of every stripe frequently invoke the Marshall Plan in support of programs aimed at using American wealth to extend the nation's power and influence, solve intractable third-world economic problems, and combat world hunger and disease. Do any of these impassioned advocates understand why the Marshall Plan succeeded where so many subsequent aid plans have not? Historian Nicolaus Mills explores the Marshall Plan in all its dimensions to provide valuable lessons from the past about what America can and cannot do as a superpower.

Politicians of every stripe frequently invoke the Marshall Plan in support of programs aimed at using American wealth to extend the nation's power and influence, solve intractable third-world economic problems, and combat world hunger and disease. Do any of these impassioned advocates understand why the Marshall Plan succeeded where so many subsequent aid plans have not? Historian Nicolaus Mills explores the Marshall Plan in all its dimensions to provide valuable lessons from the past about what America can and cannot do as a superpower.

Traces the history of the Marshall Plan and the efforts to reconstruct western Europe as a bulwark against communist authoritarianism during a two-year period that saw the collapse of postwar U.S.-Soviet relations and the beginning of the Cold War.

What is grand strategy ? What does it aim to achieve? And what differentiates it from normal strategic thought--what, in other words, makes it "grand"? In answering these questions, most scholars have focused on diplomacy and warfare, so much so that "grand"? In answering these questions, most scholars have focused on diplomacy and warfare, so much so that "grand strategy" has become almost an equivalent of "military history." The traditional attention paid to military affairs is understandable, but in today's world it leaves out much else that could be considered political, and therefore strategic. Just as contemporary world politics is driven by a wide range of non-military issues, the most thorough considerations of grand strategy must consider the bases of peace and security--including gender, race, the environment, and a wide range of cultural, social, political, and economic issues. Rethinking American Grand Strategy assembles a roster of leading historians to examine America's place in the world. Its innovative chapters re-examine familiar figures, such as John Quincy Adams, George Kennan, and Henry Kissinger, while also revealing the forgotten episodes and hidden voices of American grand strategy. They expand the scope of diplomatic and military history by placing the grand strategies of public health, race, gender, humanitarianism, and the law alongside military and diplomatic affairs to reveal hidden strategists as well as strategies. --

An Economist Best Book of 2018 New York Times Book Review Editor’s Pick “Gripping [and] splendid.… An enormous contribution to our understanding of Marshall.”—Washington Post At the end of World War II, General George Marshall took on what he thought was a final mission—this time not to win a war, but to stop one. In China, conflict between Communists and Nationalists threatened to suck in the United States and escalate into revolution. Marshall’s charge was to cross the Pacific, broker a peace, and prevent a Communist takeover, all while staving off World War III. At first, the results seemed miraculous. But as they started to come apart, Marshall was faced with a wrenching choice—one that would alter the course of the Cold War, define the US-China relationship, and spark one of the darkest-ever turns in American political life. The China Mission offers a gripping, close-up view of the central figures of the time—from Marshall, Mao, and Chiang Kai-shek to Eisenhower, Truman, and MacArthur—as they stood face-to-face and struggled to make history, with consequences and lessons that echo today.

Liam Kennedy here takes as his focus the ways in which selected photographers have sought to frame the activities and effects of American foreign policy, often with a critical perspective, and how their work engages the dynamics of power and knowledge that attend the American worldview. What is at issue in this book is understanding relations between the geopolitical conditions of visuality and the particulars of the image. Conditions of visuality, for Kennedy, are the ideologies that determine certain ways of seeing, that support actions and representations which establish (in)visibilities and which police the relationship between seeing and believing the American worldview. The individual photographers whose work Kennedy so insightfully dissects are those who have pushed the boundaries of photographic practice and who reflect critically on the contexts and scenery of war: Larry Burrows and Philip Jones Griffiths in Vietnam, Gilles Peress covering the Iranian Revolution, Susan Meiselas in El Salvador and Nicaragua, Ron Haviv and Gary Knight in the Balkans, Ashley Gilbertson and Chris Hondros in Iraq, and Tim Hetherington and Lynsey Addario in Afghanistan. These individuals expanded the conception and technical repertoire of photojournalism, receiving critical acclaim, provoking public and professional controversy, and often incurring great personal cost to themselves. Afterimages presents us with a revisionary understanding of the art of conflict photography. The images are often searing they sometimes demonize and dehumanize the enemy, but also humanize friend or victim: a focus on the human roots the range of feeling in such imagery, from horror to pity."

The extraordinary career of General George C. Marshall—America’s most distinguished soldier–statesman since George Washington—whose selfless leadership and moral character influenced the course of two world wars and helped define the American century “I’ve read several biographies of Marshall, but I think [David] Roll’s may be the best of the bunch.”—Thomas E. Ricks, New York Times Book Review • “Powerful.”—The Wall Street Journal • “Enthralling.”—Andrew Roberts • “Important.”—William I. Hitchcock • “Majestic.”—Susan Page • “Engrossing.”—Andrew J. Bacevich • “Judicious.”—Walter Isaacson • “Definitive.”—Kirkus Winston Churchill called him World War II's "organizer of victory." Harry Truman said he was "the greatest military man that this country ever produced." Today, in our era of failed leadership, few lives are more worthy of renewed examination than Marshall and his fifty years of loyal service to the defense of his nation and its values. Even as a young officer Marshall was heralded as a genius, a reputation that grew when in WWI he planned and executed a nighttime movement of more than a half million troops from one battlefield to another that led to the armistice. Between the wars he helped modernize combat training and re-staffed the U.S. Army's officer corps with the men who would lead in the next decades. But as WWII loomed, it was the role of army chief of staff in which Marshall's intellect and backbone were put to the test, when his blind commitment to duty would run up against the realities of Washington politics. Long seen as a stoic, almost statuesque figure, he emerges in these pages as a man both remarkable and human thanks to newly discovered sources. Set against the backdrop of five major conflicts—two world wars, Palestine, Korea, and the Cold War—Marshall's education in military, diplomatic, and political power, replete with their nuances and ambiguities, runs parallel with America's emergence as a global superpower. The result is a defining account of one of our most consequential leaders.

Isaiah Berlins response to the Soviet Union was central to his identity, both personally and intellectually. Never before collected, Berlins writings about the USSR include his accounts of his famous meetings with Russian writers shortly after the Second World War; the celebrated 1945 Foreign Office memorandum on the state of the arts under Stalin; his account of Stalins manipulative artificial dialectic; portraits of Osip Mandelshtam and Boris Pasternak; his survey of Soviet Russian culture written after a visit in 1956; a postscript stimulated by the events of 1989; and more.