European Institute

Europe celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Marshall Plan last year. It was a celebration worth having. The Marshall Plan represented a stunning departure of foreign policy in all modern history. Never before had a conquering nation reached out its hand in such beneficence to its vanquished foe. For that matter, never before had foreign assistance been attempted or even contemplated on such a scale. And one would be hard pressed to find any other aid program before or since that so thoroughly met the overarching strategic goals of a nation – which in this case was jump-starting European economies and shoring-up western Europe as a bulwark against the growing expansionist threat of the Soviet Union.