4 ms·

And? Unless you're going to try to make the point that post-WWII American investment in Europe was done purely out of the goodness of the post-WWII American hea

• dctoedt 13y ago
  > Unless you're going to try to make the point that post-WWII American investment in Europe was done purely out of the goodness of the post-WWII American heart, I'm not sure where you are going with this. Not purely --- I would imagine that certainly American leaders had future markets in mind --- but there was definitely a large component of altruism, quite possibly more so than with the French support of the American revolutionaries in the late 1770s and early 1780s. In the post-WWII era, the U.S. had nukes, as well as two broad oceans as moats. After the Japanese surrender we demobilized as fast as we could, in response to overwhelming domestic political pressure to "bring the boys home." It might well have been feasible for us to have largely retreated to our own borders and leave the western Europeans to their fates at the hands of the Soviets. Instead, we spent billions, perhaps even trillions, to maintain forces in Europe to deter Soviet aggression and to try to help western Europe recover from the devastation of the war. (We offered Marshall-Plan aid to the Soviets and their vassal states as well, but the Soviets prevented those countries from accepting [1].) Of course self-interest was part of the U.S. motivation. But there also was altruism, and generosity. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan#Rejection_by_the_Soviets http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan#Rejection_by_the_...