The Marshall Plan: The Launching of the Pax Americana

by Charles L. Mee Jr.

Book Overview

Book by Mee, Charles L. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671421492
• ISBN13: 9780671421496
• Release Date: January 1984
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 301 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Foundations of the post-WW2 World Order

Foundations of the (brief) American CenturyThe Marshall Plan, By Charles L. Mee, Jr., Simon & Schuster Inc., 1984. Mee's masterful book uses the Marshall Plan as window into not just the economic and political reconstruction of Europe after World War 2, but also into the ideological and diplomatic creation of a bipolar world called "containment" and Cold War. Along the way, he tells us something of the people who engineered this process, and of the maneuverings they undertook to shape it. European economic recovery and social reconstruction were not spontaneous or pre-determined. Solutions to the economic destruction of Europe had to be found in a political environment of domestic instabilities and international disagreements on questions like the place of Germany, the role of the Americans, and the relationship between Europe East and West. The Americans came to see that the best way to overcome Western European bickering was to unite those count! ries against a common Soviet foe, smoothing over the worst inter-European disagreements by orchestrating economic recovery as a political emergency requiring American leadership. This book is really a study of America's coming of age as the leading political and economic power in the world, made manifest by the insertion of the United States into the heart of European economy and "security." The Cold War was the ideological and diplomatic pavement over which American capital, ideas, and guns were made to dominate the "free" (market) world. Mee sets the scene for this pax Americana with an exposition of Kennan's "Long Telegraph" and "sources of Soviet Conduct" paper. Kennan proved to be a brilliant ideologist for the American ruling class, pointing out real weaknesses in the Stalinist system in a way that dismissed a strawman Marxism while inspiring American feelings of moral superiority and political emergency. Ignoring the Stalinis! ts' liquidation of the original Bolsheviks, Kennan turned t! he international class struggle described by Marx and Lenin into a conflict between American morals and freedom against a neurotic Russian insecurity and fanatical subversion campaign. Mee doesn't critique Kennan as I have, but he rightly places the Marshall Plan into the larger policy of "containment," which really called for "the containment of Russian expansionism, for rebuilding and containing Germany at the same time, for rebuilding and containing France and England, for rebuilding and containing a whole new array of economic relationships in such a way that the United States could exercise influence over them all.... As an extra, but by no means negligible, bonus, the policy would also --by bringing economic and political stability to Europe and saving the governments there from a crisis of confidence or collapse-- keep in power those classes that had traditionally ruled on the Continent and with whom Americans had become accustomed to doing business. & quo! t; (p.92) The Marshall Plan itse