US-Europe ties and the audacity of July 1948
The differences are stark, and so are the potential implications: two weeks in July, separated by exactly 70 years and by diametrically opposite visions of America’s place in the world.
In July 1948, the first of hundreds of shiploads of American goods were docking in Europe under the Marshall Plan. The most audacious such program in history, it would, over four years, send the present-day equivalent of more than $130 billion in US aid to the shattered post-World War ll economies of Western Europe. It rescued not just the victims and eventual victors, like Britain and France. It was critical to the emergence of West Germany as an economically strong, democratic state, and also helped to lay the groundwork
