Is a commitment to advancing democracy consistent with an “America First” approach to foreign policy? History would suggest so.
Over the years 1948-1952, the US devoted $130 billion in current dollars to the reconstruction of Western Europe. As a share of total US output over the period, this would be equivalent to $800 billion today, notes Benn Steil, director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War, to be published by Simon & Schuster in February 2018. But whereas the Marshall Plan is widely regarded as the largest and most effective foreign-aid program in history, it is less widely appreciated as the most successful example of an “America First” foreign policy, he writes for Project Syndicate:
Of course, the humanitarian impulse underpinning the Marshall Plan remains at the heart of its enduring legacy worldwide. But the plan was, in fact, the first major component of the new Truman Doctrine, which pledged US support for “free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” and of George F. Kennan’s strategy to “contain” the Soviet Union. (Kennan’s famous “X” article in Foreign Affairs, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” also recently marked its 70th anniversary.)
Marshall’s State Department believed that unless war-torn Western Europe could be quickly rebuilt, and confidence in liberal-democratic government restored, the European public would seek salvation in populism and authoritarianism. Such a shift among America’s most important trading partners would in turn undermine America’s own physical and economic security, necessitating a massive increase in defense expenditure and government economic control. Only by ensuring that the US had strong, independent allies and stable trade and security relationships, Truman and Marshall believed, could it hope to maintain its own freedoms and way of life. RTWT
