Six months before the end of World War 2, in February 1945, stalin, the supreme leader of the former Soviet Union, invited US President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill to meet at the Yalta Palace in Crimea.
Who should dominate the post-World War II world order? Roosevelt is contradictory in his heart, he should lead it for fear of getting into trouble, and if he does not dominate, he is the strongest on the earth. In the past, the Americans relied on their superior geographical location and for a long time "gloriously isolated" themselves from the international situation, but after 6 years of World War II, the European powers were no longer able to do it, and the dominance of the new world could not be handed over to the Soviets, right?
Roosevelt's final attitude was compromised: of course the United States should dominate, but it could not be responsible for it alone. His vision was that Britain and the Soviet Union were in charge of Europe, our country was in charge of Asia, the United States ruled the Americas and elsewhere, and several important places were dominated by several great powers, and then the United States would influence and control these great powers, and the problem would be solved.
(Meso Yalta Conference)
Two months after the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt died suddenly, and Vice President Truman turned right, not continuing Roosevelt's policy of solidarity and cooperation. Post-war Europe was dilapidated and difficult, the people were dissatisfied and questioned about the government, and the Soviet model began to spread throughout Europe, meaning that the tentacles of the Soviet Union stretched out to both Asia and Europe. The Americans felt threatened that Roosevelt's model of great power cooperation would have to be abandoned by Truman and replaced by a confrontational model to get along with the Soviet Union.
To confront the Soviet Union, the United States must cooperate with Europe to allow Europe to take the initiative to draw a line with the Soviet model. The United States had this intention, and the Europeans expected American care because life was really difficult and the Soviet Union still looked scary. Of course, the confrontation with the Soviet Union was only one reason for cooperation between the United States and Europe, and another reason was the problem of the United States itself.
World War II broke out in 1939 and ended in 1945, the United States really intervened in 1942, the previous 3 years americans were busy making money, all walks of life were full of horsepower, supplying weapons and materials to the belligerents, and also lending them loans, it can be said that the virtual economy and the real economy are hot. As soon as the war was over, snowflake orders suddenly disappeared, and U.S. manufacturing faced a serious surplus.
When the war is gone, the military industry will have to turn to the civilian market for survival, but the Americans themselves cannot digest so many things, and they must find a place to deal with it. However, to Truman's despair, the former best European market was in ruins and decay, and if it was not saved, the good days in the United States would not last for two years, and then there must be an economic crisis.
(Truman, 33rd President of the United States)
After Completing Roosevelt's term, Truman ran for re-election in 1947 and named five-star General George Marshall as his secretary of state. Marshall's most famous achievement was the Marshall Plan, which was intended to revive Europe's economy and unite Europe against the Soviet Union and to resolve its own economic crisis. As for the other effects of this plan, the original designers themselves could not accurately estimate.
A well-known American historical writer once said: Foreign policy is the face of a country to the world, and the diplomatic goal of all countries is the same, that is, to protect the integrity and interests of the country. When a country designs and implements its foreign policy, it is greatly influenced by national identity. So what are the national identities of the United States?
U.S. foreign policy has always included narrow self-interest protection, while at the same time being good at using ideal moralism to cover up that narrowness, and it has a variety of practical foreign policy considerations, which together constitute the national identity of the United States. If you look at the Marshall Plan in this way, you will find that it was also packaged by ideal moralism.
Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, the United States has considered itself the protector of democratic freedoms and has a natural responsibility to support those who pursue democracy and freedom. So when Europe became depressed because of World War II, and the democracy that originated in Europe faced the threat and destruction of the Soviet Union, the United States had to stand up to protect it. In 1947, when Marshall received his honorary doctorate at Harvard University, he gave a speech describing the Marshall Plan in this way, and the packaged Marshall Plan was full of beautiful colors and very touching.
(Former U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall)
Shortly after Marshall's famous speech, the Truman administration proposed a $17 billion aid budget to Congress, an amount that lawmakers began to vehemently oppose. At the same time as the parliamentarians struggled, Europe's poor economy and high unemployment rate continued to cause social problems, a large number of unemployed workers went on strike and protested, and they pursued the Soviet model in an attempt to seize power, and the European system had a great tendency to be changed. When the news reached Washington, the attitude of lawmakers changed markedly, and the funds needed for the Marshall Plan were approved, totaling $13.5 billion.
How should such a large amount of money be spent in Europe? The Americans called on 16 European countries, including France, Britain and Germany, to go to Paris for brainstorming. At the meeting, the British felt that they had a good relationship with the United States and should share more; France wanted to restrict the Germans from taking more money, while Belgium and the Netherlands were very dependent on Germany and wanted to support Germany more so that the old drivers could take themselves, and Sweden wanted to take both money and its neutral position was not affected. The money-sharing meeting was boring and tangled, but in the end it was difficult to reach an agreement under the strong presidency of the United States.
The final version of the money-sharing principle has two things: the United States has more allies than neutral countries, neutral countries have more than Axis countries, and more countries with large numbers than countries with small numbers will receive more. With these two principles, the aid payment is finally divided, but the money is not directly sent to the recipient government, but to the European Economic Development Agency, in which the Americans participate. The Americans oversee the entire process, and recipient governments submit detailed spending reports to the White House each year.
International economic assistance is generally divided into three types, the first is pure help without expecting returns, such as disaster relief or humanitarian assistance; the second is mutually beneficial, which has obvious purpose; the third is clearly self-interested, putting one's own interests in an important position. By these three criteria, the Marshall Plan was reluctantly a mutually beneficial aid, but it also had its own characteristics.
(London, England, bombed after World War II)
After the money was allocated to Europe, the United States asked the recipient countries to sign an agreement with themselves, and the agreement wrote about the way to spend the money. The European countries that received the money at the beginning wanted to buy all kinds of daily necessities, which had to be bought from the United States; and the donor countries and the United States signed various investment and trade agreements and tariff reduction agreements, which together ensured the smooth entry of American companies into the European market.
From 1947 to the end of 1951, the Marshall Program spent a total of $13.15 billion, and a significant portion of that money went back to American entrepreneurs in various ways. Judging by the use of this money, the United States transferred excess domestic capacity to Europe through the Marshall Plan, cultivated a new post-war market for itself, and made Europe more dependent on the dollar than in the past.
However, the driving effect of this aid on the European economy is very large. In 1947, when the plan had just been launched, Europe's economy hovered at pre-World War II levels with no signs of growth at all. The four years of aid were the fastest in European history, with industrial production as a whole growing by 35 percent, agriculture surpassing pre-war levels, poverty and hunger all disappearing, and steel, coal, crude oil and other fields more than tripling.
In April 1949, two years after the Marshall Plan was launched, the United States, together with twelve European countries, founded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the well-known NATO. The establishment of NATO shows that the influence of the United States on Europe has extended from the purely economic field to the political and military fields. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, aid funds originally used for economic construction were increasingly used in the military field. By 1951, the United States and Europe had signed the Common Security Act of 1951, which had greatly exceeded the funds allocated to the Marshall Plan.
(NATO headquarters in Europe)
In the second half of 1951, the Marshall Plan ended as scheduled, and although there were still people in the Democratic Party who tried to keep the plan going, it was unreasonable for the United States to fight on the Korean Peninsula and continue to aid Europe, which had recovered, and conservative Republicans had taken control of Congress a year earlier, and the proposal to spend money was very tight.
Marshall's plan to restart the European economy was the historical basis of long-term friendship between Europe and the United States. Although the United States has a certain degree of control over Europe in the economic and military fields, as the strongest region in the world in the past, Europe is destined not to be at the mercy of the United States, so we can see that on many international issues, Europe has not blindly followed the United States, especially when Trump became the president of the United States, the inconsistency between Europe and the United States has increased significantly.
The Marshall Plan only ran for 4 years, but NATO was always there. In fact, when the Warsaw Pact dissolved the Soviet Union in 1991, NATO lost its significance, but the United States took the initiative to bear most of the costs and left NATO. Doing so is a strategic imperative for it as a world hegemon, and although Europe is an ally, it is still necessary to prevent it from becoming stronger and eventually threatening itself. Now US President Donald Trump and his ministers do not seem to care about this strategic need, they believe that NATO is protecting Europe's security, so Europe needs to pay more money.
(NATO summit)
In fact, NATO has not protected Europe's security, and Europe is actually less dangerous now. In the mouths of politicians, the biggest threat to Europe is always Russia, but with Russia's current economic strength and dependence on the European market, it has long lost the ability and necessity to invade Europe, and from the situation in the past few years, the security threats in Europe are refugees and terrorism in the Middle East.
We all know that the breeding of terrorism in some Middle Eastern countries has a lot to do with the US military operations on the ground, such as Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, and it can be said that the presence of the United States in the Middle East has made the US-EU relationship more and more fragile. The benefits of the Marshall Plan between the United States and Europe are now almost exhausted, and the uncertainty and uncertainty of US-EU relations will be a major role in the future international situation.
Resources:
JIN Hai. The Marshall Plan looks at the evolution of U.S. policy toward Europe in the early postwar period
Xia Lu. On the impact of the Marshall Plan on the economies of Western Europe
Webpedia entries: Marshall Project, Truman, Marshall
Other books and web materials