General George C. Marshall, Author of the European Recovery Plan after World War II
I don’t usually do political commentary. I know it can roil even the staunchest of readers against an author, but after seeing today’s headlines and tweets from our Commander in Chief, I was so taken aback, that I had to say something. Which honestly, is a bit surprising if you know me. There’s been so many assaults on what I hold dear about America that maybe I just didn’t know where to begin.
This has been a trying 6 months for scientists. The assault on climate science has been really difficult to watch. It’s also been trying as someone who has family members on Medicare and Medicaid to watch the current plans to repeal such expansion. I have family members who will likely die due to lack of care by the time this is all said and done. These family members are all Republicans, btw. But there’s a part of me that understands the Republican mindset. Smaller government. Fiscal responsibility. Finding ways to have maximum impact with minimal spending. I get that. It’s part of each of our everyday financing, and it makes sense for our households.
But it doesn’t work for long term planning. When you are budgeting for a country’s future, especially a country that is interested in maintaining its position as a superpower, infrastructure and education are everything. Next comes healthcare, imo, but let’s stay off that subject for a moment and focus on the two things that I think everyone can agree on. Roads help commerce. Shipping aids an economy. Education creates opportunities for not just cultural expansion but more importantly research that can open up new economic opportunities. All of these are usually internally focused.
But infrastructure, education and healthcare are also important for your allies. Allies are strategic, not just in warfare, but also in economics and future prosperity. There are many strategies for how you might use allies, even how you might keep allies down to improve your own situation (e.g., keeping an ally as a buffer against a major enemy). However, there are major advantages to a plan that produces a prosperous stable ally who can contribute economically, scholastically, and politically to your overall vision.
The Marshall Plan was necessary to help us rebuild Europe in order to foster U.S. economic and military interests after World War II.
For decades, ever since the end of World War II, we have had such a synergistic relationship with Western Europe. If you are a history buff, you probably understand how amazing that outcome is, considering where all of Europe was at the end of World War II. The war had touched every country in Europe. The extermination of whole populations, especially in Eastern Europe. Infrastructure in Germany absolute ravaged. We bombed the absolute hell out of that country. Anything standing was seen as a challenge. Any resistance was squashed with clusters of bombs.
A lesser country would have left the smoldering ruin that was there and used Germany as a buffer ally. Sort of like China treated northern tribes against Mongolian hordes for centuries. But that’s not what the United States did. Instead, we instituted what became known as the Marshall Plan (also called the European Recovery Program). The U.S. invested 13B dollars in 1948 (approximately 130B dollars in today’s money) into restoring Europe. We wanted strong allies, not weak buffer allies. We wanted democratic players in Europe. We wanted Germany and other countries to participate in capitalism, to enhance our own infrastructure and prosperity through the bolstering of an old enemy into a new, strong ally. Trade barriers were lowered. Goods flowed between both continents. New businesses emerged.
This wasn’t an easy decision. It was an extremely hard decision. How hard is it to be magnanimous to a defeated enemy? Think about it. Millions of fathers and sons had been killed. Loss was everywhere. Revenge is a natural emotion, but Marshall had different plans. On June 5, 1947, he delivered a speech at Harvard that outlined exactly what Germany and Europe needed and why it was America, not Russia or Eastern Europe or China or anyone else, that needed to be there.
The modern system of the division of labor upon which the exchange of products is based is in danger of breaking down. … Aside from the demoralizing effect on the world at large and the possibilities of disturbances arising as a result of the desperation of the people concerned, the consequences to the economy of the United States should be apparent to all. It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health to the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is not directed against any country, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Any government that is willing to assist in recovery will find full co-operation on the part of the USA. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.
Prosperity was everywhere for decades, and the results were astounding. We took an entire continent operating at 83% of agricultural capacity, 88% of industrial capacity, and 59% of export capacity of its 1938 numbers and we supercharged the recovery. The famines of the post war were eliminated by 1950. By 1952, agricultural and industrial capacity increased by 35%, despite France’s requirement that German industrial productivity be reduced by 50% and maximum steel production set to 25% of its pre-war levels to prevent any future German invasion. The fact that Germany was even able to compete in a car market when restrictions championed by France forced it to operate at 10% of the automotive levels of pre-war Germany was remarkable. It spoke to the ingenuity and industriousness of the German people and the intellectual currency of the U.S. in supporting them. All of Western Europe blossomed.
France received 2.29B. Germany 1.45B. England 3.30B. Italy 1.20B. 2 enemies and 2 allies became our staunchest allies, and the beacon of democracy and capitalism shown brightly for decades, despite the Cold War. Our economy, aided by strong markets for import and export goods, blossoms more than ever before. We have more than just dead buffer allies between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. We have an amazing environment to develop as a superpower. Our allies go to war in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. whenever we ask them to. They pay it forward in a big way, even if they don’t agree with some of the demagoguery that happens in the cult of personalities that we have in the U.S.
Flash forward to Tuesday, May 29th, 2017. Trump has just lambasted the NATO alliance, demanding that the NATO countries finally pay their fair share. He literally labels them “bad” to their faces, both publicly and privately. On Tuesday, he tweets an official rebuke of Germany.
We have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany, plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO & military. Very bad for U.S. This will change. –Trump
So, what is Germany’s contribution to NATO?
While it is true that the U.S. contributes 72% of the overall defense expenditures represented in the NATO portfolio, this is mainly because so much of our annual budget is tied up into defense spending. The direct money funded to NATO operation is broken down as 22% from the U.S. and 15% from Germany. This includes “15 percent of the civil and military budgets and NATO’s security investment program for 2016 and 2017. France and the UK, the third and fourth-largest contributors, trail behind Washington and Berlin, providing 10.6 and 9.8 percent of the cost-sharing budgets and programs, respectively.”.
What other assistance is Germany currently providing the U.S.’s policy focuses? Berlin is maintaining a force of 980 in Afghanistan for the war efforts there. They have aided the U.S. with significant forces in Afghanistan for over a decade with virtually no benefit to themselves. 550 soldiers to the continued peacekeeping force in Kosovo. Germany had more than 6,500 soldiers involved in the Kosovo missions during the active war there. 450 soldiers deployed to Lithuania as part of the ongoing aggression in the Ukraine.
So where does the President’s current declaration come from?
In 2006, the NATO countries made a pledge to try to push member defense spending from current levels to 2% of their GDP. In 2014, they finalized this pledge into a more formal pledge to hit the target by 2024. Of those countries, four of them (Poland, the UK, Turkey, and Estonia) are operating at that level (7 years early). Germany is at 1.2%. The U.S. spends 3.6% of its GDP on defense.
There seems to be a major disconnect between what the President thinks NATO does and what it actually does. NATO is essentially a manifestation of a reciprocal alliance that was made possible by the Marshall Plan. Our President appears to misunderstand that relationship and the benefit our economy and military objectives have seen from NATO countries. As evidenced by his Tweet on March 10, 2017, in which he said:
Despite what you have heard from the FAKE NEWS, I had a GREAT meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Nevertheless, Germany owes…vast sums of money to NATO & the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany!
Despite these obvious strong-arm tactics, our allies have remained strong, taken the brow-beatings, and pushed onward. But two days ago, the entire tenor of European deference and reverence for the U.S. changed. After Trump’s first international visit, in which he literally pushed world leaders aside so he could be front-and-center and harangued European leaders on trade deficits, and publicly humiliated multiple countries, Germany’s Angela Merkel finally broke the happy facade and admitted: “The times in which we could completely depend on others are on the way out. I’ve experienced that in the last few days”.
As a longtime history buff who has been reading WWII books since I was a young teenager and has watched hundreds of WWII documentaries at this point, this entire chain of events is disturbing. Many of my family members have been stationed in Germany (one of the contributions of Germany to NATO is providing access to bases throughout Germany for intelligence, stationing, and exercises). A few years ago, I visited Germany and saw the bombed out churches that still stand in Berlin as reminders of how far the people have come (and how effective the Marshall Plan and infrastructure spending in allies is).
Isolationism, nationalism and strong words are what caused the problems that led to both WWI and WWII. I thought everyone else learned those lessons in World History in grade school, but we seem to have come full circle. If we reject our allies, they start looking for someone else, and the 13B (130B) initial investment of the Marshall Plan and the trillions of dollars spent since then in trade, education, infrastructure, etc. with Europe are lost. And what exactly are we asking for here?
Germany to spend 1% more of its GDP immediately instead of by 2024 on its OWN defense? This is not a contribution to NATO. It’s already paying for 15% of NATO’s expenses, as a good ally should. More trade? Germany currently imports $80B goods from the U.S., 2nd most in Europe behind only the U.K. It currently exports over $140B to the U.S. But the U.S. is also no longer manufacturing most goods. We aren’t exporting as much as we used to because we are now outsourcing most of our manufacturing and industry and focusing instead on other industries. Germany, on the other hand, has always been an industrial country that has focused on manufacturing and exports.
Does our President think that we are suddenly, as a country, going to export 60B more goods to Germany? Where would that come from? Why would they buy that? The low tarrifs of NATO and NAFTA work both ways. We are already making our goods inexpensive at our market prices for Germany to import (and 80B is a lot of money). This trade deficit also counts Germany automotive plan production in the U.S. as an import, despite the fact that the product is made in the U.S., because the company is headquartered overseas and overall profits flow there. And this is where the main deficit exists, in automative sales. 1/3 of the German exports to the U.S. are the 1.3M cars that Americans buy from German companies every year.
So, what is the idea here? Stop Americans from buying German cars by making them into new enemies due to Americans wanting to buy more German goods? How American is that? Is that how capitalism works?
This Presidential election was amazing to watch. So is the aftermath, and at this point, I can’t help but think of the ongoing crisis as such. The optimistic person in me says to not worry: that our allies will recommit to us once Trump changes his tone or a new President is elected who understands the benefits of the Marshall Plan and our ongoing mutual relationship in trade deals and NATO. But there’s another part of me that worries that the End of the Marshall Plan romance with Europe is coming to a close, and that America will be the worse for it. I love living here. I’m a proud citizen of the U.S., but I’m very worried about the direction we’re going right now. If it’s not an assault on our liberties and division of our people, it’s an assault and division of our allies. And it’s coming from the top down, which is even more disturbing.
The optimist inside of me is still winning out. I still hope for the best. I don’t even know how I would plan for the worst here. We currently have a group of supercarriers stationed off a nuclear state (North Korea) right now, and a single nuclear warhead on our continent would wipe out 3M+ from the fallout alone, especially if it hits almost anywhere in California. Same situation on the East Coast. It feels like we’re moving perilously close to the end of the stabilization we’ve seen since the end of WWII and especially the end of the Cold War. Where do we go from here?
I’m an author who loves to immerse myself in fantasy worlds. So, in a way, I understand the chilling effect of fantasizing about a world where Europe and the U.S. are no longer strong allies and where NATO is dissolved. But that doesn’t mean I want to live in that world. Let’s leave that to alternative histories. You know? Fictions! Pretty please!
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I love honest reviews. The good and the bad. Reading both are guilty pleasures of mine, but I’m going to call out a recent one because I think it does a great job of highlighting one of my absolute biggest disappointments about Lucifer’s Odyssey. Here’s the last paragraph:
Notes on Living in Portland
July 29, 2020 Leave a comment
If you’ve been following me on Twitter and paying attention to any of my sporadic posts, you probably know that my wife and I moved to Portland, Oregon in October of last year. Since then, a lot has happened in the world–from CoVID to the BLM protests to protests of modern police militarization. I won’t comment on CoVID or the ongoing craziness that is going on with the pandemic in the US in this post, but after 60 days of living 3 blocks from the federal courthouse, I do want to comment on what it’s been like living here and what exactly is going on.
In October, I came to Portland for work. Since CoVID, I haven’t been working from the office but am instead allowed to work from home, but at the time that my wife and I moved here, there was no way to know that we’d be working just as remotely here as we had been in Pittsburgh previously. Since we’ve been here in Portland, though, we’ve come to love the city more and more. And as southerner transplants originally from Nashville, we have a kind of conservative meets liberal history that makes our experience here kind of different from most that get transplanted here.
The first thing to understand about Portland is that it is a liberal city that takes protesting pretty seriously. Before CoVID, I walked to work in downtown and I would always pass Pioneer Square, one of the hubs of the city, and there was always some protest going on. Larger protests sometimes happened on Park Avenue, within the green foliage of beautiful oaks and walls of roses. In Pioneer Square, some of the protests were so simple but consistent that you couldn’t help but stop and take a picture or talk with the person or persons doing them. I remember a woman who stood within the Square with a sign that said “Babies Don’t Belong in Cages” and did so everyday on her lunch break for months.
Then there’s the naked bike ride and the fact that Portland long ago allowed nakedness within the city as a form of protest. Portland is big on social movements, especially more left-leaning ones, but it tends to respect people and their humanity. It’s also as weird and unique as shows like Portlandia show, and that’s a huge attractor and very charming to live in day-to-day.
Which brings us to the BLM protests and what has happened downtown. From the beginning, it’s been a mixture of different protest messaging. Not everyone is solely focused on BLM. Some genuinely dislike cops and policing in general. At the Safeway (a grocery store chain that is popular here in the northwest), at around 6:00 pm or later if you’re shopping there, you’ll see colorful shirts with messages that are often not politically correct. To be fair, nothing in Portland really embraces political correctness. There are taco joints that share bathrooms with strip clubs here. There is nudity from time-to-time. There’s a lot of colorful hair colors (green, purple, pink, black, bright yellow). There’s also messages of “Fuck the Police.” It’s not just a protest thing. I saw those kinds of shirts when my wife and I attended “The Ghostbusters” live orchestral performance at the Portland Symphony during their pop culture series.
Now, I’ve seen videos of people throwing water bottles and yelling obscenities at cops. And my wife and I have personally admired the graffiti around the courthouse. I’ll note that I’m using “admire”, for myself, intentionally. When I went to Berlin, I walked around East Berlin to observe the graffiti there. Tagging is an artform of the masses. It tells a story of common people, and has been used for thousands of years. We find it in 30,000 year old caves. We humans have an innate interest in drawing pictures, writing words, and telling our stories. And I, personally, as a citizen of Portland, am not offended by it, nor do I see it as violence at all. Owners are more than free to clean it up, but in cities that embrace weirdness like Portland, OR and Austin, TX, it’s more likely to become an attraction that brings in business or elicits conversation than it is seen as a blight.
And I’ve seen videos of peaceful protestors being pushed to the ground, shot in the face, chest, and arms. I’ve seen videos of the results of a woman deafened and lacerated by a grenade filled with projectiles that burst in front of her. I’m so close in proximity to these protests, that I’ve undoubtedly heard some of these events happen, but the cacophony of what’s going on in the response drowns out most individual events. The thing that sticks with me more, as a resident of Portland living just a few blocks from the federal courthouse, is the sound of the constant percussion grenades from police and federal troops, every day for the past 60 days, until 2 to 4 am. Every day. Dozens to hundreds of explosions in the middle of a concrete jungle where a woman’s normal conversation could travel blocks away. My wife, who has to get up for work between 4 and 8 am PT, depending on her job’s scheduling, receives the brunt of this effect. She’s routinely jolted out of bed by yet another grenade while she deals with a back injury that results in acute pain any time she tenses up–which happens almost every time a loud grenade pops.
I remember distinctly the days before the federal troops arrived. I remember a night of almost no bombs and no explosions. And in the morning, I asked my wife if she had been awoken at any point, and she said no. And I remember thinking, “well, maybe it’s winding down.” Then, the President ordered the troops into the city, and all hell broke loose. The videos of kidnappings in unmarked vehicles and release with no charges. No identification of the personnel taking the person off the streets. It really brought home the changes that 9/11 had made to our justice system and the organization of the Department of Homeland Security and other related agencies–how much power they have and how they view themselves in the fight against domestic terrorism. When it comes to removing constitutional rights, throwing water bottles and spraying graffiti can now, apparently, be viewed as a form of terrorism. That’s what our complacency has resulted in.
In the past 62 days, outside of the protest hours, I’ve never once had a problem with walking around Portland. And I know this is partly because of my white privilege. I genuinely am not worried, partly because I know I’ve done nothing wrong but mostly because there’s not a lot of violent activity around me and maybe I do feel a bit invincible or unworthy of notice most of the time. There is mental illness among the homeless population here. I know people who have been attacked in parks–including a gentle 6-foot-4 tall stocky guy who was attacked by a crazy homeless person. But it’s so rare for this to happen–as rare as anything like this anywhere else.
If homeless people approach me, they ask for money or food, and my wife and I have bought food for people at food carts before. We can’t give something to everyone who asks us–on the way to Safeway alone, I tend to pass at least five homeless persons in a two block walk. What’s most surprising about living in Portland and talking with homeless people has been how often they’ve been helpful. We’ve asked them for directions and even advice on where to eat or what’s going on. And it’s kind of amazing to see how friendly and nice most homeless people are and how willing they’ve been to help. With how often they’re ignored by people bustling about their day, I’m sure it’s nice to just sometimes be noticed as a human being too.
What isn’t going on here in Portland is chaos and constant looting. There have been incidents of looting, especially in the early days of the anger and protests. And there’s evidence that some of this has been instigated by outside groups who want to make it appear that the BLM protests are violent and anarchy-focused here in Portland. But what you should really know about Portland is that businesses are open, I walk to the Safeway blocks away from the courthouse sometimes twice a week, and the shelves are full of food, toiletries, frozen goods, etc. There are buildings boarded up around the courthouse as a precaution, and this makes sense with what is going on. But there’s also laughter and masked people walking around, going about their day.
The protests start here at around 7 pm PT, and they’re generally peaceful. Lots of moms, dads, children, young, old, etc. chanting together and holding hands. As the night falls, grenades start going off. You’ll sometimes see people running down the streets. Some of them are laughing. Some of them are hooting and hollering. Some idiots will park their cars and blare loud music to all the residences, because they know the police are busy elsewhere.
And at about 3 am, as the last grenades are going off–though sometimes in daisy-chains of a six or more grenades at a time–a calm and peace takes over. 3 am is about the time I go to bed, but first, I’ll sometimes go out on my deck, sit in a chair, and listen to the city in the temperate 70 degree air, just before I lie down. A siren might go off, echoing against the glass, metal, and concrete buildings. Some distant conversation. The sound of the occasional car. But not grenades. No more police helicopters overhead. No more loudspeakers telling crowds to disperse. And then the sun rises and the next day starts anew. People walk to their jobs or the stores. People shop. People play. The day continues as normally as anywhere else in America. And then at around 7 pm or so, the cycle repeats again. Peaceful chanting. Police on loudspeakers and thunderous, violent percussion of grenades.
No one in Portland wants the federal troops here. Not the mayor. Not the governor. Not people living within 3 blocks of the courthouse. Not people like myself who have voted both Republican and Democrat in US presidential elections. What they’ve done is escalated this situation to the point of absolute ludicrousness. The crowds have gone from dozens to over 5,000 a night, and the response by the feds has been to try to amplify their response to intimidate. They’ve had to use more force than before, because 5,000 people bearing down on you is even scarier than 50.
But this isn’t an “antifa-haven”. This isn’t a city of anarchy and chaos. It is at night, when the grenades start going off and people have been kidnapped off the street. But any city or town where this was happening would have a response like this from the community. And the Portland community protested injustices, as they saw them, before there were police in military gear exploding ordinance in tightly packed concrete jungles. Portland Police watched these and laughed with people in December, January, and February. That’s all changed. The police are tired. The feds are tired. The people are not. Many of them are unemployed, due to CoVID, and to them, this feels like a cause worth fighting for–worth taking a rubber bullet to the head for.
And so, a culture of protest is meeting a culture trained to combat domestic terrorism. And the news cycle is the result. But for those living here, blocks from the courthouse, we’re just tired of the explosions and tired of seeing videos of bloody people being carried down the street from confrontations with fellow citizens about graffiti on a courthouse.
Can we stop this please? Seriously?
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