Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
economic and political means. Finally:
- "To insure the peaceful development of nations, free from coercion, the United States has taken a leading part in establishing the United Nations. The United Nations is designed to make possible freedom and independence for all its members. We shall not realize our objectives, however, unless we are willing to help free peoples to maintain their free institution and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes."
- b. Marshall Plan, 1947
The U.S. Secretary of State on June 5, 1947, proposed the cooperative international economic aid subsequently entitled the European Recovery Program (ERP), but known widely as the Marshall Plan. ERP was at first explicitly designed to permit and even attract Soviet cooperation:
- "Our policy is directed, not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desparation and chaos. 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."4
But the Soviet rebuffed the Marshall Plan, turned Bloc propaganda against it as an adjunct of the Truman Doctrine, and by so doing, bifurcated Europe. Moreover, among three top-level U.S. committees examining ways of bringing U.S. resources to bear on European recovery, the Committee on Foreign Aid (Harriman Committee) found that:
- "The interest of the United States in Europe...cannot be measured simply in economic terms. It is also strategic and political. We all know that we are faced in the world today with two conflicting ideologies...Our position in the world has been based for at least a century on the existence in Europe of a number of strong states committed by tradition and inclination to the democratic concept..."5
The bipolar world had begun to emerge. In January, 1948, the British Foreign Secretary, following talks with the U.S. Secretary of State, proposed an alliance among the U.K., France, and the Benelux nations, referring to "the conception of the unity of Europe and the preservation of Europe as the heart of western civilization."6 At the end of February, 1948, western Europe was shocked by the fall of the Czechoslovakian government to a communist coup d'etat. In March, the British-proposed alliance was contracted as the Brussels Pact, a fifty-year treaty of collective defense and economic collaboration. U.S. approval was immediate; the President told Congress that:
- "Its significance goes far beyond the actual terms of the agreement itself. It is a notable step in the direction of
