Saturday, November 9, 2013
FAILURE OF FDR RE EUROPE AND RUSSIA LEAD TO ECONOMIC NEED TO GLOBALIZE
This really accelerated the decline of the West.
The Marshall Plan started out as a restoration program centered on the West, and later occupation and military arrangements, including Japan, as a defense against Soviet encroachments in the West and in Asia, but almost immediately turned willy nilly into a globalizing program under the Truman Doctrine.
Kennan in Memoirs points out his frustration, and makes the distinctions he promoted regarding aid to the West versus willy nilly economic aid to Truman doctrine anti communist claimants anywhere. Point well taken.
Nevertheless, since the Russians had been allowed to place Eastern Europe off limits economically, Western European recovery perhaps implied not merely Marshall Plan aid there, and aid to Japan, but economic globalization elsewhere, not merely to oppose the spread of communism elsewhere, but to make up the economic deficit resulting from the economic loss of Eastern Europe. This is a point which, if true, Kennan, back then, in say 1947, was not alive to. Yet, so much he says about that period is very enlightening nevertheless.
The destruction of colonial empires, advocated by the US, only hastened the process of market capitalist globalization.
My own view is we should have defended those empires, not disbanded, or appropriated, them, and permanently resisted booming the underdeveloped world.
Call it Civilizational Mercantilism, rather than the now misleading term Imperialism.
The Marshall Plan started out as a restoration program centered on the West, and later occupation and military arrangements, including Japan, as a defense against Soviet encroachments in the West and in Asia, but almost immediately turned willy nilly into a globalizing program under the Truman Doctrine.
Kennan in Memoirs points out his frustration, and makes the distinctions he promoted regarding aid to the West versus willy nilly economic aid to Truman doctrine anti communist claimants anywhere. Point well taken.
Nevertheless, since the Russians had been allowed to place Eastern Europe off limits economically, Western European recovery perhaps implied not merely Marshall Plan aid there, and aid to Japan, but economic globalization elsewhere, not merely to oppose the spread of communism elsewhere, but to make up the economic deficit resulting from the economic loss of Eastern Europe. This is a point which, if true, Kennan, back then, in say 1947, was not alive to. Yet, so much he says about that period is very enlightening nevertheless.
The destruction of colonial empires, advocated by the US, only hastened the process of market capitalist globalization.
My own view is we should have defended those empires, not disbanded, or appropriated, them, and permanently resisted booming the underdeveloped world.
Call it Civilizational Mercantilism, rather than the now misleading term Imperialism.
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