Meanwhile, most Americans were done with foreign entanglements. Its people were widely loathed and two of its conquering powers, the Soviet Union and France, were counting on reparations from their former Nazi enemy to help rebuild their own economies. While pragmatic, this proposition was, to put it mildly in the political context of the time, very controversial. And this could only be achieved by priming the German pump, and those of the other continental economies, with American dollars. In the face of this bleak situation, American policymakers concluded that the key to restoring the prewar European standard of living was restarting the German economy. Italy’s and France’s inflation rates were 62.1 and 49.2 percent respectively. The continent was in ruins, its people were starving and its economies were out of balance. The winter of 1947 was the hardest to hit Europe in a generation.

“From this moment on, it’s going to be America first.” As Benn Steil makes clear in his trenchant and timely new book, “The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War,” the architects of America’s global engagement after World War II would have been appalled that future generations - let alone a future president - might think they had been acting in anything but the national interest.Īt its core the Marshall Plan was a pragmatic approach to a tough problem. “From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land,” President Trump declared on Jan. THE MARSHALL PLAN Dawn of the Cold War By Benn Steil 608 pp.

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