David Stockman
February 1, 2025
The case for getting out of NATO now encompasses four fundamental propositions:
As to the impending fiscal calamity, just recall this sequence. When Ronald Reagan campaigned against the soaring Federal deficits in 1980 the public debt was $930 billion and about 30% of GDP. But it had erupted to $20 trillion by Donald Trump’s first election, now stands at $36 trillion and 125% of GDP and will be hitting $62 trillion by the mid-2030s.
Yet even that figure embodies CBO’s most recent Rosy Scenario fairy tale under which Congress never again adopts a single new spending increase or tax cut, including the impending $5 trillion extension of the expiring 2017 Trump tax cuts. And CBO is also pleased to forecast no recessions, no inflation recurrence, nor any other economic crises for the remainder of this decade and forever thereafter, world without end.
This dream also assumes that 7% of GDP deficits and annual interest expense of $1.7 trillion by 2034 will bring an average yield on the public debt at just 3.4%.
Yes, and if dogs could whistle the world would be a chorus! Give the average yield a minimally realistic 250 basis points boost, however, and now you have $3 trillion of annual debt service expense and a $4.5 trillion annual deficit by 2034.
In short, there is a doom-loop building inside the Federal fiscal equation under which soaring interest expense will ignite a veritable fiscal wildfire, powering the public debt upward to $150 trillion or 166% of GDP by mid-century under CBO’s baseline. Of course, long before the debt actually hits this staggering figure, the whole system would implode. Every remnant of America as we now know it would go down the tubes.
In truth, there isn’t a snowball’s chance in the hot place of containing America’s impending public debt disaster unless the Empire is brought home and the national security budget is slashed by the aforementioned $500 billion per year. That’s especially urgent because – the merits aside – there is no chance whatsoever of getting big slices like this out of the other two fiscal biggies, Social Security and Medicare, surrounded as they are by a wall of political terrorists on the left.
Fortunately, slashing the Pentagon by $500 billion is not only doable but fully warranted on the merits. Today’s bloated Empire-serving Warfare State is not remotely necessary for homeland security and the proper foreign policy of a peaceful Republic.
In this context, let’s start with the big, nasty national security budget numbers. Under a comprehensive reckoning for FY 2025 the total comes to just under $1.4 trillion, including:
When this stupendous total is looked at in historic perspective, three things standout. First, the end of the Cold War in 1991 and the subsequent disappearance of the heavily armed Soviet Empire into the dustbin of history left no visible trace on the national security budget.
In fact, at the peak of the Cold War in 1962 when the Soviet’s were at their industrial prime and JFK faced down Khrushchev in Cuba the comprehensive national security budget in today’s dollars stood at just $640 billion. That was barely 46% of the current level, and was still only $810 billion in 1990 on the eve of the Soviet collapse.
So what transpired thereafter is truly astounding. An adversary armed to the teeth with upwards of 37,000 nukes and nearly a 4 million man conventional armed force vanished entirely from the face of the earth, and yet and yet: The US national security budget kept rising skyward to the present $1.4 trillion without missing a beat.
The second key point is that the big budget increase during the Cold War occurred not in the heat of confrontation during the 1950s and 1960s but during the Reagan era of the 1980s when the Soviet Union was already on its last leg economically and politically. Yet between 1980 and 1990 the constant dollar national security budget soared by +42%, from $570 billion to the aforementioned $810 billion.
The explanation for this is straight-forward. During the Reagan Era the neocons hijacked the Republican party and cast its historic fiscal prudence to the winds. So doing, they claimed that massive defense increases were needed because the Soviet Union was on the verge of a nuclear first strike capacity.
That latter was an abject lie as proven by the fact that less than 10% of the Reagan defense build-up actually went to the strategic nuclear arsenal. By contrast, the overwhelming share of the 140% increase was allocated to conventional forces including the 600-ship Navy, massive increases in air power, new generations of battle tanks and armed personnel carriers, expanded air and sealift capacities and extensive new cruise missiles and electronics warfare capabilities.
All of these latter forces had but one purpose – overseas power projection and the conduct of wars of invasion and occupation in a world in which the US was not threatened in the slightest by any industrial power with expansive land-based and other conventional warfare capabilities.
The real effect of the Reagan defense build-up, therefore, was to supply future administrations with the military wherewithal to launch serial adventures in Regime Change. Thus, the Forever Wars from the First Gulf War onward were enabled by the Reagan build-up of unneeded conventional military capacity.
So when real defense spending should have been cut in half by $400 billion (FY 2025 $) after 1990 it was actually expanded by $600 billion to fund recurrent adventures in regime change and global intervention.
Thirdly, the Forever Wars have been a physical, medical and fiscal disaster. Currently 5 million wounded veterans receive disability compensation and 9 million receive health care benefits. That’s one out of every 30 adult Americans, and the overwhelming share of these VA beneficiaries are vets who served in the Vietnam War and the Forever Wars which followed.
Accordingly, what needs be described as the “deferred cost” of Empire has literally shot the moon. In today’s dollars, veterans benefits have risen from $57 billion in 1962, mainly representing WWII veterans, to $370 billion. This 6.5X rise represents the frightful human and fiscal tab for Vietnam and the Forever Wars.
So the question recurs. How did a peaceful Republic secure behind the great Atlantic and Pacific Ocean moats, which until 1949 eschewed permanent “entangling alliances” abroad consistent with the wisdom of Washington, Jefferson and the Founders, end up with an global Empire and massive Warfare State budget that it doesn’t need and can’t any longer afford?
The answer, we believe, lies in three strategic mistakes made on the banks of the Potomac in 1917, 1949 and 1991, respectively, that have enabled the rise of a destructive Empire and its self-fueling Warfare State fiscal monster. Of course, the latter can only be eliminated by returning to Jefferson’s admonition that America should pursue –
Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.
For most of its history, of course, America had adhered to this advice yet had been invasion-free owing to the great Atlantic and Pacific ocean moats. These blessings of Providence, in turn, enabled America to remain a peaceful Republic because its favorable geography precluded the need for a large standing military, heavy taxes, a powerful central government and, most especially, the need for entangling alliances with foreign nations.
In fact, an early treaty with France was canceled by Congress in 1797, meaning that the nation was free of permanent alliances for the next 152 years. Even as late as 1919 Congress prudently rejected the entanglements of the League of Nations Treaty after Woodrow Wilson’s foolish crusade not only failed to make the world safe for democracy but paved the way to the vast carnage of WWII.
It was only thereafter that an inexorable slide toward Empire incepted in 1949 when the Senate ratified the NATO Treaty. But, as we will argue, that was based on utterly false lessons from the world wars and a misguided theory of collective international security.
To be sure, prior to the giant historical error of NATO in 1949, Jefferson’s admonition had been the default position of American governance. This was demonstrated by the radical demobilization of military forces even after America had elected to go to war in both 1917 and 1941. In both cases, the drastic rise and fall of military budgets left an unmistakable marker which reflected an underlying commitment to non-intervention abroad as a peacetime policy norm.
Thus, the US military budget on the eve of World War I was just $11 billion when expressed in present day dollars (2025 $) and amounted to a slim 0.9% of GDP. That’s because America had no foreign allies to support and it was the great ocean moats not a diminutive $11 billion military budget on which the nation’s homeland security safely rested.
After Wilson plunged American forces into the stalemated trenches on the Western Front, constant dollar military spending in today’s dollars soared 18-fold to $194 billion by war’s end in 1919. That amounted to nearly 15% of GDP at the wartime peak, but shortly after the armistice a sweeping demobilization began.
Soon, 100% of the troops were home – along with the bloated phalanx of wartime diplomats and civilian support operatives. Accordingly, defense spending bottomed out at just $12 billion in 1924, amounting to a 93% reduction from the wartime peak and just 0.8% of GDP. The pre-war status quo ante had thus been fully restored, implying that the lurch into a foreign war and entanglements had amounted to a one-off venture, and a bad one at that.
Indeed, Woodrow Wilson’s intervention in the Great War was by then widely understood by the public to have been a calamitous mistake. The liberty and security of the American homeland had not been remotely threatened because by 1917 the German Fleet was quarantined in its Jutland home–port by the Royal Navy and all sides to the conflict were running out of draftable men, materiale, morale and fiscal resources.
Accordingly, on the date Congress declared war (April 6, 1917) there was not even the slightest chance of a German attack on America. Yet Wilson had plunged the US into the stalemated carnage of the old world for the vainglorious purpose of acquiring a powerful seat at the post–war peace conference, and so doing tipped the balance on the Western Front to a victory by the Entente powers led by England and France.
That is, the natural end to this pointless “world war” would have left all the sides exhausted, bankrupt and demoralized, and their respective domestic “war parties” subject to massive repudiation at the post-war polls. But the arrival of two million fresh American doughboys and massive flows of armaments and loans from Washington literally rechanneled the course of history, enabling a vindictive peace of the victors at Versailles – a travesty that sowed the seeds for the even more destructive and calamitous second world war.
Specifically, Wilson’s foolish intervention encouraged a last futile offensive by Russia in the summer of 1917, the failure of which gave birth to the bloody Revolution of Lenin and Stalin later that fall. Likewise, Wilson’s machinations with the victors at Versailles and their parceling out of the parts and pieces of Germany to France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium and others fostered the stab-in-the-back myth and revanchist campaigns on which Hitler rode to power.
More importantly still, the alleged “lessons” of the interwar period and WWII were falsely played and replayed in the years after 1945. To wit, the Wilson–enabled and wholly aberrational rise of Hitler and Stalin did not happen, as claimed, because the good people of England, France and America slept through the 1920s and 1930s. These monsters of the 20th century were not resident in the DNA of nations nor do they continuously lurk among the lesser tinpots who rise from time to time to authoritarian tyranny among the far flung nations of the earth.
To the contrary, they were aberrations – freaks of historical happenstance. That means that even after the two catastrophic world wars there was no baseline case for Empire as a requisite of America’s homeland security. Washington and Jefferson were still correct even in 1946 and beyond.
The permanent Washington-based Empire of bases, alliances, collective security and relentless CIA meddling in the internal affairs of foreign countries that arose after 1946 was therefore the second unforced error – one that flowed from Wilson’s original mistake.
For a brief moment after WWII ended, of course, Jefferson’s admonition had prevailed when another massive post-war demobilization occurred, laying the ground for a return to the pre–1914 status quo ante. Accordingly, the war-weary Washington policy makers were absolutely correct when they brought America’s 12 million-man expeditionary force home from Asia, Europe and the Seven Seas after August 1945, reducing it to just 1.47 million by 1948.
So doing, they also abruptly closed the fiscal sluice-gates to what had become America’s Brobdingnagian war budget, which had peaked at $83 billion in 1945 before plunging to just $9 billion by 1948.
Moreover, when translated into present day dollars, the magnitude of this second demobilization becomes crystal clear: Constant dollar spending (FY 2025 $) dropped form $1.7 trillion in 1945 to just $125 billion by 1948, marking another stunning 93% reduction in post-war military spending.
And well it should have. Among the burned out and exhausted lands abroad after V-E Day and V-J Day there was absolutely no military threat anywhere on the planet to the homeland security and liberty of America.
Japan’s leading cities had been fried alive by horrendous nuclear and conventional bombing assaults; Germany’s industrial and urban areas had been laid waste by bomber storms night after night for months on end; Italy had long since hung its wartime leader in a convulsion of political upheaval; France was barely functioning economically and politically after four years of brutal Nazi occupation; England was utterly bankrupt and so demoralized that its electorate had thrown its wartime leader, Winston Churchill, to the political wolves; and that is to say nothing of the prostate corpus of Stalinist Russia.
And we do mean prostrate. During WWII Soviet Russia had suffered 27 million military and civilian deaths due to bombs, bullets, starvation, disease, pestilence, atrocities and other barely imaginable inhuman afflictions. And that was atop 32,000 industrial enterprises that had been pulverized along with upwards of 70,000 towns and villages destroyed, leaving tens of millions of Soviet citizens destitute owing to the brutality of both their communist rulers at home and the German invaders who had descended upon them from the west for the second time in 25 years.
In some kind of ghoulish absolution, therefore, the slate had been wiped clean. There was not even a scant reason for American expeditionary forces to remain outside the homeland after 1945. Nor was there any need whatsoever to maintain bases, alliances and commitments to intervene anywhere abroad that would put American servicemen in harms’ way and involve Washington in the “entangling alliances” against which Jefferson and Washington himself had forewarned.
And yet and yet. Washington’s incipient “War Party” of military contractors and globe-trotting operatives and officialdom gestated in the heat of World War II and jazzed-up on $1.7 trillion of war spending was not about to go quietly into the good night. Instead, the Cold War was midwifed on the banks of the Potomac when President Truman fell under the spell of war-hawks like Secretary James Byrnes, Dean Acheson, James Forrestal and the Dulles brothers, who were loath to go back to their mundane lives as civilian bankers, politicians or peacetime diplomats.
So exactly 11 months after Hitlers’ demise at his own hand in his bunker and eight months after Armageddon had been visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the out-of-power but inveterate war-mongering Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton Missouri.
That was the opening call to the Cold War, which was powerfully seconded barely 10 months latter when the then accidental US president from the same state delivered his “Truman Doctrine” speech to the Congress. That latter was a belligerent oration which ignited the Cold War and the costly, suffocating post-1947 web of entangling alliances and the budget-crushing American Empire it fostered.
In light of all that was known then and which has transpired since, however, it can be well and truly said that the ruckus in Greece and Turkey caused by local communist parties, which was the basis for Truman’s declaration, didn’t amount to a hill-of-beans with respect to the homeland security of America. These long ago political skirmishes should get but a scant mention in world history books, and none at all in America’s.
That is to say, with respect to Turkey Stalin wanted a port on the Dardanelles, as had all the Russian Czars for generations before him. But so what? The only thing he could have choked off was his own minuscule export shipments from the Black Sea regions.
Likewise, after a decade of brutal political and economic oppression by a homegrown dictatorship during 1936 to 1941 and then by the Nazi, Italian Fascist and Bulgarian occupiers during WWII, the Greek people were seeking more relief than could be delivered by the sickly exiled King George II. The British in their purported wisdom had put the latter back on the Greek throne in 1946.
As it happened, the population of Greece at the time was 7.3 million and even in today’s dollars its GDP was just $50 billion and $7,000 per capita. In short, Greece was a museum piece of western history that had seen its better days but by then was an economic cipher. Had the local communist party come to power absent Truman’s intervention – with the aid of Stalin or not – that misfortune for the Greek people would have had no bearing on America’s homeland security 5,000 miles away on the far side of the Atlantic moat.
As it happened, of course, the Truman Doctrine was the handiwork of Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson. The latter was a pompous Yale-trained international lawyer from Washington’s elite Covington & Burling, who had been a New Dealer during the early 1930s and then came back as an assistant secretary of state for economic policy in February 1941.
From that perch he had designed the American/British/Dutch embargo that cut off 95% of Japan’s oil supply and paved the way to Pearl Harbor. Indeed, he was actually the “trigger man” for America’s entry into World War II when he unilaterally acted to shut-off 100% of Japan’s oil while FDR was away meeting with Churchill at the famous “Atlantic Charter” confab in Newfoundland in August 1941.
Acheson was also an inveterate anglophile who apparently suffered from empire-envy. He thus imagined that America should step into Great Britain’s imperial shoes when it emerged economically crippled and politically fractured from WWII and could no longer provide financial aid to the governments of Greece and Turkey.
So upon this advice from the Brits in February 1947, Acheson had sprung into action. In a pivotal meeting shortly thereafter between Congressmen and State Department officials, Acheson articulated what would later become known as the “domino theory.”
He stated that more was at stake than Greece and Turkey, for if those two key states should fall, communism would likely spread south to Iran and as far east as India. Acheson reportedly concluded that “not since the days of Rome and Carthage” had such a polarization of power existed.
That was utter poppycock, but even then neither Iran nor India had any meaningful bearing on America’s homeland security. Should their people have made the stupid mistake of voting in the small but noisy communist parties that had taken root in both countries after 1919 it would have been of little note nor material threat to the liberty and security of Americans from Bangor Maine to San Diego California.
The Greek-Turkey aid gambit of March 1947, of course, was just the opening salvo. Soon the baleful idea that communist political gains anywhere in democratic Europe were to be viewed as cause for national security alarms gathered momentum on the banks of the Potomac. That unwarranted leap took root especially among the wartime dandies and policy potentates who had fashioned and led America’s global mobilization during WWII.
Accordingly, the modest $400 million aid to Greece and Turkey quickly ballooned into the Marshall plan announced in June 1947. Now the economic dislocations in France, Italy and elsewhere in western Europe and the resulting political gains of the communists and other leftist parties became the basis for drastically expanded US intervention.
Again, in today’s dollars the Marshall plan provided upwards of $175 billion to Western European countries between 1948 and 1951. Needless to say, by virtue of doling out such tremendous sums of money – which in present day dollars exceeded current Ukraine spending so far – Washington was soon knee-deep in the domestic politics, economics and inter-country relationships and intrigues of post-war Europe.
But why? There was not a snowballs’ chance in the hot place that a communist Italy or communist France or red Luxembourg would have been a military threat to the US. Or even that in league with Soviet Russia they would have posed a conventional military challenge on the New Jersey shores 4,000 miles to the further side of the Atlantic moat—most especially when the United States still had a monopoly on the A-bomb.
Indeed, the US had left WWII with the greatest assemblage of naval power in human history. This included 28 aircraft carriers, 23 battleships, 72 cruisers, 377 destroyers, and numerous other vessels. Altogether this amounted to 10 million tons of naval vessel capacity or more than six times the 1.5 million tons of the Soviet Navy, whose fleets consisted of far fewer and far less lethal warships.
Needless to say, therefore, neither the Truman Doctrine nor the Marshall plan advanced America’s homeland security in any material manner. The requisite military muscle had already been bought and paid for during WWII.
But these interventions did grease the slippery slope to NATO and entangling alliances and interventions stretching to all four corners of the planet in the years ahead. And they did most definitely set off alarm bells in the Kremlin, where the hyper-paranoid Joseph Stalin everywhere and always expected treachery from friend and foe alike.
That was a given – considering the slippery, blood-soaked path by which he had climbed to absolute power in the Soviet Union itself and the treachery of Hitler’s double-cross after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 and the subsequent devastating invasion of Russia by the Nazi. So it is not surprising that Stalin soon suspected that his wartime allies – especially with FDR and Churchill gone – were laying the groundwork for the isolation and encirclement of Soviet Russia, exactly as the US, England and France had attempted after WWI.
To be sure, Stalin was among the most wretched, evil rulers ever to oppress a decent-sized chunk of mankind, and would have remained a blight on his own countrymen and ogre before the world during the remaining six years of his despicable life. But he was no threat to the American homeland as the now open archives of the old Soviet Union prove in spades.
These documents, in fact, amount to the national security dog which didn’t bark. Dig, scour, search and forage thru them as you might. Yet they will fail to reveal any Soviet plan or capability to militarily conquer western Europe.
They show, therefore, that Washington’s standing up of NATO was a giant historical mistake. It was not needed to contain Soviet military aggression, but it did foster a half-century of hegemonic folly in Washington and a fiscally crushing Warfare State – the fiscal girth of which became orders of magnitude larger than required for defense of the homeland in North America.
It is in the nature of human history, it seems, that a wrong path taken like Wilson’s error in plunging America into the Great War in 1917, frequently begets another baleful turn. In this case, the slippery slope had further materialized when Britain and America had needed to align with the vile red tyrants of Moscow to rid the world of the Hitlerian nightmare after 1941.
Indeed, the need for this wartime alliance with the devil seemed so urgent at the time to both Churchill and FDR that they more or less ceded the nations of eastern Europe to the then advancing Red Army at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. That historic meet-up, by the way, was in Russian Crimea, not the Ukraine.
In return for Stalin’s continued march toward Berlin and promise of help in vanquishing Japan in the Far East as well, the Big Three principals reached an understanding that the Soviet Union would exert significant influence over Eastern Europe, including Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and parts of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.
Of course, free elections and democratic governments were to arise in areas occupied by the Red Army, but neither Churchill nor FDR went to any length to provide the enforcement mechanisms to ensure this would happen. It was a case of saying Eastern Europe is in your sphere of influence, Uncle Joe – by wink from the cynical Churchill and by nod from the doddering Roosevelt.
For his part, of course, Stalin was then in the business of rescuing his bloody regime from the near extinction event that had accompanied the Nazi invasion. His aim, therefore, was not about the ideological project of extending communism westward. Instead, it was focused on driving the remnants of the Wehrmacht from his own country and establishing an invincible “cordon sanitaire” from the Baltic to the Adriatic, as Churchill himself later charged, so as to never again allow marauding armies from western Europe to invade and plunder the Russian motherland.
Needless to say, the arrival of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO – within 25 months between March 1947 and April 1949 when the NATO Treaty was signed in Washington – sent Stalin’s wartime understandings into a tailspin. Slowly at first and then aggressively in the end his initial fear that the wartime alliance was being abandoned by his capitalist allies gave way to a paranoid certainty that they were once again in the business of attempting to encircle and destroy the Soviet Union.
But even the resulting Soviet departure from the cooperative modus operandi of the wartime alliance arose from what might well be described as an unforced error in Washington.
We are referring to the latter’s badly misplaced fears that deteriorating economic conditions in Western Europe could lead to the aforementioned communist parties coming to political power in France, Italy and elsewhere. But as we have seen, that wasn’t a serious military threat to America’s homeland security in any event because the post-war Soviet economy was a shambles and its military had been bled and exhausted by its death struggle with the Wehrmacht.
To be sure, communist governments in Western Europe would have been a misfortune for any electorate who stupidly put them in power. But that would have been their domestic governance problem over there, not a threat to the American homeland over here.
Nevertheless, Washington’s gratuitous antidote for what was essentially an internal political problem in western Europe was a sweeping course of economic and military interventions in European affairs. These initiatives were clinically described as “containment” measures designed only to keep the Soviet Union in its lane, not a prelude to an attack on eastern Europe or Moscow itself.
But if you examine a thousand random documents from the archives of the Soviet foreign ministry, top communist party echelons and correspondence to and from Stalin himself it is readily apparent that these initiatives were viewed in Moscow as anything but a polite message to stay in lane. To the contrary, they were seen on the Soviet side as a definitely unfriendly scheme of encirclement and an incipient assault on the Soviet sphere of influence in eastern Europe, or the cordon sanitaire, that Stalin believed he had won at Yalta.
To be sure, writing off this string of what came to be called “captive nations” would have amounted to an embrace of realpolitik that would have made moralists and anti-communist ideologues uneasy in the extreme. But as it happened, abandonment of Eastern Europe per the Yalta zones of influence scheme was exactly what became Washington’s de facto policy until the very end of the Cold War in 1991, anyway.
That is to say, the uprisings against the Soviet hegemon in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1981 generated no response from the West beyond empty speeches and hortatory resolutions from western parliaments. The whole policy of “containment”, therefore, was actually just a large-scale and sustained effort by Washington to steer European politics away from the communist Left.
But why in the hell was thwarting the foolishness of communism in Europe America’s business at all? That is, NATO was essentially an instrument of political control on the European side of the Atlantic, not a military shield that added any incremental security for the citizens domiciled on the North American side of the pond.
So the question recurs as to exactly why was America’s fully warranted post-war demobilization reversed for no good reason of homeland military security?
Part of the answer is embedded in the prevalent Keynesian theorem popular in Washington at the time which held that post-war demobilization would result in a devastating collapse of so-called “aggregate demand” and a resulting spiral into depression. Unless treated with aggressive counter-cyclical fiscal stabilization measures, therefore, it would be the 1930s all over again.
However, most of Europe was fiscally incapacitated owing to the impacts of the war. The economic aid proffered by Washington through the Marshall plan, therefore, amounted to a surrogate form of Keynesian stabilization against a depressionary relapse.
Needless to say, the hive mind on the Potomac had it all wrong, and the evidence was right in its own backyard. During the very first year of demobilization, in fact, the US private sector economy came bounding out of the starting gates after being freed from wartime controls. Real private GDP grew by nearly 27% in 1946 over prior year and never looked back, and it did so with no fiscal stabilization help from Washington, which was blocked by a Republican Congress.
What in 1945 had been a private sector GDP of $1.55 trillion in today’s dollars had jumped to nearly $2.0 trillion by 1947 and to more than $2.3 trillion by 1950. Thus, even as the US was making the turn from a war economy to the booming prosperity of the 1950s, private sector GDP expanded by nearly 50% with the growth rate clocking in at 7.6% per annum over the five-year period. So the American economy never came close to tumbling into the feared Keynesian abyss.
That the prevailing Keynesian theorem was just plain wrong, however, was well illustrated by the contemporaneous economic rebound in the western zone of Germany. The latter’s economy took off well before the Marshall Plan aid made any substantial impact owing to Ludwig Erhard’s famous turn to currency reform and free market policies.
In short, Washington’s Soviet “containment” policies were unnecessary as a matter of America’s homeland military security – the only valid basis for the foreign policy of peaceful Republic. Yet based on fuzzy thinking about economics and the taste for international power politics that had been acquired by Washington’s ruling class and military contractors during WWII the US stumbled into the very entangling alliances that Washington and Jefferson had forsworn. These European entanglements, in turn, surely and inexorably formed the gateway to Empire and the fiscally crushing Warfare State that now plagues the nation.
The irony, of course, is that there was actually nothing to “contain’. The documents show the Soviet leadership’s prime concern was consolidating the territory and security gains in Eastern Europe which the USSR had won with blood and treasure in the war against Hitler.
Thus, for several weeks after Secretary Marshall’s June 5, 1947 speech at Harvard, the archives show that Soviet leaders hoped it might prove to be a source of capital for the reconstruction of the war-damaged USSR and provide an opening for it to extract the war reparations from Germany about which Moscow was totally obsessed.
As the details of the American plan unfolded, however, the Soviet leadership slowly came to view it as an attempt to use economic aid not only to consolidate a potentially hostile Western European bloc, but also to undermine recently-won, and still somewhat tenuous, Soviet gains in Eastern Europe.
At length, therefore, Stalin ordered Poland and Czechoslovakia to withdraw from the intra-Europe consultation meetings in July 1947 that involved discussions with the west about joining the Marshall Plan – discussions he had initially blessed. Thereafter, all Soviet bloc participation in the Marshall Plan ceased and Stalin’s calculus shifted sharply from accommodation and towards a strategy of confrontational unilateral action to secure Soviet interests.
Nor were the Kremlin’s fears entirely an exercise in Stalin-style paranoia. As Scott D. Parrish, a leading scholar of the Soviet archives, concluded,
…What the new documentation helps us see more clearly, then, is that the real difficulty and source of conflict in 1947 was neither Soviet nor American “aggression.” Rather, it lay in the unstable international economic and political conditions in key European countries which led both sides to believe that the current status quo was unstable… And it was this same environment that compelled Stalin to respond to the plan with a series of tactically offensive maneuvers which fanned the flames of confrontation even higher. This decisive moment in the emergence of the Cold War was thus more a story of tragedy than evil.
The Soviet Union’s acquisition of the A-bomb in 1949 did not change the equation or gainsay the case that the entanglements of the Marshall Plan and NATO were a mistake. Crucially, neither did it create a military requirement for US air bases in Europe or alliances with European countries.
Instead, home territories and the open oceans and skies turned out to be more than adequate for basing the nuclear arsenals of both sides, as the Cuban Missile Crisis fully clarified.
Indeed, once both sides had the A-bomb the age of nuclear deterrence or MAD (mutual assured destruction) commenced. Notwithstanding the fringe views of Dr. Strangelove types like Herman Khan, nuclear war was soon deemed to be unwinnable and the focus shifted to the ability to reliably deliver a devastating second strike in response to a potential nuclear provocation.
This “assured” destruction was itself the defense against nuclear attack. But to be an effective deterrent the opposing side had to believe that its opponent’s ability to deliver was operationally full-proof and highly certain to happen.
In this respect during the strategic bomber age of the 1950s the US had such deterrence capacity early on – with long-range strategic bombers capable of reaching the Soviet Union and returning with mid-air refueling. These strategic bombers including the B-50 Superfortress and the B-36 Peacemaker had impressive range capabilities, with the latter reaching 10,000 miles.
However, it was the introduction of the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress in 1955 that removed any doubt. The B-52 had a range of nearly 9,000 miles without aerial refueling, even as it carried a payload of A-bombs far heavier than any previous aircraft, was powered by far more reliable engines and could attain altitudes beyond the reach of interdiction.
As it happened, the Soviets were late to the strategic bomber game, even after they detonated a serviceable nuke in August 1949. At the time and for several years to follow the Soviets relied upon the Tupolev Tu-4 to deliver their A-bombs, which was a reverse-engineered copy of America’s earlier, far less capable B-29. Accordingly, the Soviet bombers faced significant challenges, including limited range and payload capacity, which made it difficult to deliver a meaningful number of nukes to the U.S. without risking detection and interception.
February 1, 2025
The case for getting out of NATO now encompasses four fundamental propositions:
- First, the Federal budget has become a self-fueling fiscal doomsday machine, even as the Fed has run out of capacity to monetize the skyrocketing public debt.
- Second, the only viable starting point for fiscal salvation is slashing the nation’s elephantine Warfare State by at least $500 billion per year.
- Third, the route to that end is a return to the “no entangling alliance” wisdom of the Founders, which means bringing the Empire Home, closing the 750 US bases abroad, scuttling much of the US Navy and Army and withdrawing from NATO and similar lesser treaties and commitments in Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere.
- Fourthly, canceling NATO and its clones requires debunking its Origins Story and the false claim that it brought peace and security to post-war America when what it actually did was transform Washington into a planetary War Capital dominated by a panoptic complex of arms merchants, paladins of foreign intervention, neocon warmongers and a vast Warfare State nomenklatura.
As to the impending fiscal calamity, just recall this sequence. When Ronald Reagan campaigned against the soaring Federal deficits in 1980 the public debt was $930 billion and about 30% of GDP. But it had erupted to $20 trillion by Donald Trump’s first election, now stands at $36 trillion and 125% of GDP and will be hitting $62 trillion by the mid-2030s.
Yet even that figure embodies CBO’s most recent Rosy Scenario fairy tale under which Congress never again adopts a single new spending increase or tax cut, including the impending $5 trillion extension of the expiring 2017 Trump tax cuts. And CBO is also pleased to forecast no recessions, no inflation recurrence, nor any other economic crises for the remainder of this decade and forever thereafter, world without end.
This dream also assumes that 7% of GDP deficits and annual interest expense of $1.7 trillion by 2034 will bring an average yield on the public debt at just 3.4%.
Yes, and if dogs could whistle the world would be a chorus! Give the average yield a minimally realistic 250 basis points boost, however, and now you have $3 trillion of annual debt service expense and a $4.5 trillion annual deficit by 2034.
In short, there is a doom-loop building inside the Federal fiscal equation under which soaring interest expense will ignite a veritable fiscal wildfire, powering the public debt upward to $150 trillion or 166% of GDP by mid-century under CBO’s baseline. Of course, long before the debt actually hits this staggering figure, the whole system would implode. Every remnant of America as we now know it would go down the tubes.
In truth, there isn’t a snowball’s chance in the hot place of containing America’s impending public debt disaster unless the Empire is brought home and the national security budget is slashed by the aforementioned $500 billion per year. That’s especially urgent because – the merits aside – there is no chance whatsoever of getting big slices like this out of the other two fiscal biggies, Social Security and Medicare, surrounded as they are by a wall of political terrorists on the left.
Fortunately, slashing the Pentagon by $500 billion is not only doable but fully warranted on the merits. Today’s bloated Empire-serving Warfare State is not remotely necessary for homeland security and the proper foreign policy of a peaceful Republic.
In this context, let’s start with the big, nasty national security budget numbers. Under a comprehensive reckoning for FY 2025 the total comes to just under $1.4 trillion, including:
- $927 billion for the national defense function.
- $66 billion for international operations and aid.
- $370 billion for veterans disability and health care.
When this stupendous total is looked at in historic perspective, three things standout. First, the end of the Cold War in 1991 and the subsequent disappearance of the heavily armed Soviet Empire into the dustbin of history left no visible trace on the national security budget.
In fact, at the peak of the Cold War in 1962 when the Soviet’s were at their industrial prime and JFK faced down Khrushchev in Cuba the comprehensive national security budget in today’s dollars stood at just $640 billion. That was barely 46% of the current level, and was still only $810 billion in 1990 on the eve of the Soviet collapse.
So what transpired thereafter is truly astounding. An adversary armed to the teeth with upwards of 37,000 nukes and nearly a 4 million man conventional armed force vanished entirely from the face of the earth, and yet and yet: The US national security budget kept rising skyward to the present $1.4 trillion without missing a beat.
The second key point is that the big budget increase during the Cold War occurred not in the heat of confrontation during the 1950s and 1960s but during the Reagan era of the 1980s when the Soviet Union was already on its last leg economically and politically. Yet between 1980 and 1990 the constant dollar national security budget soared by +42%, from $570 billion to the aforementioned $810 billion.
The explanation for this is straight-forward. During the Reagan Era the neocons hijacked the Republican party and cast its historic fiscal prudence to the winds. So doing, they claimed that massive defense increases were needed because the Soviet Union was on the verge of a nuclear first strike capacity.
That latter was an abject lie as proven by the fact that less than 10% of the Reagan defense build-up actually went to the strategic nuclear arsenal. By contrast, the overwhelming share of the 140% increase was allocated to conventional forces including the 600-ship Navy, massive increases in air power, new generations of battle tanks and armed personnel carriers, expanded air and sealift capacities and extensive new cruise missiles and electronics warfare capabilities.
All of these latter forces had but one purpose – overseas power projection and the conduct of wars of invasion and occupation in a world in which the US was not threatened in the slightest by any industrial power with expansive land-based and other conventional warfare capabilities.
The real effect of the Reagan defense build-up, therefore, was to supply future administrations with the military wherewithal to launch serial adventures in Regime Change. Thus, the Forever Wars from the First Gulf War onward were enabled by the Reagan build-up of unneeded conventional military capacity.
So when real defense spending should have been cut in half by $400 billion (FY 2025 $) after 1990 it was actually expanded by $600 billion to fund recurrent adventures in regime change and global intervention.
Thirdly, the Forever Wars have been a physical, medical and fiscal disaster. Currently 5 million wounded veterans receive disability compensation and 9 million receive health care benefits. That’s one out of every 30 adult Americans, and the overwhelming share of these VA beneficiaries are vets who served in the Vietnam War and the Forever Wars which followed.
Accordingly, what needs be described as the “deferred cost” of Empire has literally shot the moon. In today’s dollars, veterans benefits have risen from $57 billion in 1962, mainly representing WWII veterans, to $370 billion. This 6.5X rise represents the frightful human and fiscal tab for Vietnam and the Forever Wars.
So the question recurs. How did a peaceful Republic secure behind the great Atlantic and Pacific Ocean moats, which until 1949 eschewed permanent “entangling alliances” abroad consistent with the wisdom of Washington, Jefferson and the Founders, end up with an global Empire and massive Warfare State budget that it doesn’t need and can’t any longer afford?
The answer, we believe, lies in three strategic mistakes made on the banks of the Potomac in 1917, 1949 and 1991, respectively, that have enabled the rise of a destructive Empire and its self-fueling Warfare State fiscal monster. Of course, the latter can only be eliminated by returning to Jefferson’s admonition that America should pursue –
Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.
For most of its history, of course, America had adhered to this advice yet had been invasion-free owing to the great Atlantic and Pacific ocean moats. These blessings of Providence, in turn, enabled America to remain a peaceful Republic because its favorable geography precluded the need for a large standing military, heavy taxes, a powerful central government and, most especially, the need for entangling alliances with foreign nations.
In fact, an early treaty with France was canceled by Congress in 1797, meaning that the nation was free of permanent alliances for the next 152 years. Even as late as 1919 Congress prudently rejected the entanglements of the League of Nations Treaty after Woodrow Wilson’s foolish crusade not only failed to make the world safe for democracy but paved the way to the vast carnage of WWII.
It was only thereafter that an inexorable slide toward Empire incepted in 1949 when the Senate ratified the NATO Treaty. But, as we will argue, that was based on utterly false lessons from the world wars and a misguided theory of collective international security.
To be sure, prior to the giant historical error of NATO in 1949, Jefferson’s admonition had been the default position of American governance. This was demonstrated by the radical demobilization of military forces even after America had elected to go to war in both 1917 and 1941. In both cases, the drastic rise and fall of military budgets left an unmistakable marker which reflected an underlying commitment to non-intervention abroad as a peacetime policy norm.
Thus, the US military budget on the eve of World War I was just $11 billion when expressed in present day dollars (2025 $) and amounted to a slim 0.9% of GDP. That’s because America had no foreign allies to support and it was the great ocean moats not a diminutive $11 billion military budget on which the nation’s homeland security safely rested.
After Wilson plunged American forces into the stalemated trenches on the Western Front, constant dollar military spending in today’s dollars soared 18-fold to $194 billion by war’s end in 1919. That amounted to nearly 15% of GDP at the wartime peak, but shortly after the armistice a sweeping demobilization began.
Soon, 100% of the troops were home – along with the bloated phalanx of wartime diplomats and civilian support operatives. Accordingly, defense spending bottomed out at just $12 billion in 1924, amounting to a 93% reduction from the wartime peak and just 0.8% of GDP. The pre-war status quo ante had thus been fully restored, implying that the lurch into a foreign war and entanglements had amounted to a one-off venture, and a bad one at that.
Indeed, Woodrow Wilson’s intervention in the Great War was by then widely understood by the public to have been a calamitous mistake. The liberty and security of the American homeland had not been remotely threatened because by 1917 the German Fleet was quarantined in its Jutland home–port by the Royal Navy and all sides to the conflict were running out of draftable men, materiale, morale and fiscal resources.
Accordingly, on the date Congress declared war (April 6, 1917) there was not even the slightest chance of a German attack on America. Yet Wilson had plunged the US into the stalemated carnage of the old world for the vainglorious purpose of acquiring a powerful seat at the post–war peace conference, and so doing tipped the balance on the Western Front to a victory by the Entente powers led by England and France.
That is, the natural end to this pointless “world war” would have left all the sides exhausted, bankrupt and demoralized, and their respective domestic “war parties” subject to massive repudiation at the post-war polls. But the arrival of two million fresh American doughboys and massive flows of armaments and loans from Washington literally rechanneled the course of history, enabling a vindictive peace of the victors at Versailles – a travesty that sowed the seeds for the even more destructive and calamitous second world war.
Specifically, Wilson’s foolish intervention encouraged a last futile offensive by Russia in the summer of 1917, the failure of which gave birth to the bloody Revolution of Lenin and Stalin later that fall. Likewise, Wilson’s machinations with the victors at Versailles and their parceling out of the parts and pieces of Germany to France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium and others fostered the stab-in-the-back myth and revanchist campaigns on which Hitler rode to power.
More importantly still, the alleged “lessons” of the interwar period and WWII were falsely played and replayed in the years after 1945. To wit, the Wilson–enabled and wholly aberrational rise of Hitler and Stalin did not happen, as claimed, because the good people of England, France and America slept through the 1920s and 1930s. These monsters of the 20th century were not resident in the DNA of nations nor do they continuously lurk among the lesser tinpots who rise from time to time to authoritarian tyranny among the far flung nations of the earth.
To the contrary, they were aberrations – freaks of historical happenstance. That means that even after the two catastrophic world wars there was no baseline case for Empire as a requisite of America’s homeland security. Washington and Jefferson were still correct even in 1946 and beyond.
The permanent Washington-based Empire of bases, alliances, collective security and relentless CIA meddling in the internal affairs of foreign countries that arose after 1946 was therefore the second unforced error – one that flowed from Wilson’s original mistake.
For a brief moment after WWII ended, of course, Jefferson’s admonition had prevailed when another massive post-war demobilization occurred, laying the ground for a return to the pre–1914 status quo ante. Accordingly, the war-weary Washington policy makers were absolutely correct when they brought America’s 12 million-man expeditionary force home from Asia, Europe and the Seven Seas after August 1945, reducing it to just 1.47 million by 1948.
So doing, they also abruptly closed the fiscal sluice-gates to what had become America’s Brobdingnagian war budget, which had peaked at $83 billion in 1945 before plunging to just $9 billion by 1948.
Moreover, when translated into present day dollars, the magnitude of this second demobilization becomes crystal clear: Constant dollar spending (FY 2025 $) dropped form $1.7 trillion in 1945 to just $125 billion by 1948, marking another stunning 93% reduction in post-war military spending.
And well it should have. Among the burned out and exhausted lands abroad after V-E Day and V-J Day there was absolutely no military threat anywhere on the planet to the homeland security and liberty of America.
Japan’s leading cities had been fried alive by horrendous nuclear and conventional bombing assaults; Germany’s industrial and urban areas had been laid waste by bomber storms night after night for months on end; Italy had long since hung its wartime leader in a convulsion of political upheaval; France was barely functioning economically and politically after four years of brutal Nazi occupation; England was utterly bankrupt and so demoralized that its electorate had thrown its wartime leader, Winston Churchill, to the political wolves; and that is to say nothing of the prostate corpus of Stalinist Russia.
And we do mean prostrate. During WWII Soviet Russia had suffered 27 million military and civilian deaths due to bombs, bullets, starvation, disease, pestilence, atrocities and other barely imaginable inhuman afflictions. And that was atop 32,000 industrial enterprises that had been pulverized along with upwards of 70,000 towns and villages destroyed, leaving tens of millions of Soviet citizens destitute owing to the brutality of both their communist rulers at home and the German invaders who had descended upon them from the west for the second time in 25 years.
In some kind of ghoulish absolution, therefore, the slate had been wiped clean. There was not even a scant reason for American expeditionary forces to remain outside the homeland after 1945. Nor was there any need whatsoever to maintain bases, alliances and commitments to intervene anywhere abroad that would put American servicemen in harms’ way and involve Washington in the “entangling alliances” against which Jefferson and Washington himself had forewarned.
And yet and yet. Washington’s incipient “War Party” of military contractors and globe-trotting operatives and officialdom gestated in the heat of World War II and jazzed-up on $1.7 trillion of war spending was not about to go quietly into the good night. Instead, the Cold War was midwifed on the banks of the Potomac when President Truman fell under the spell of war-hawks like Secretary James Byrnes, Dean Acheson, James Forrestal and the Dulles brothers, who were loath to go back to their mundane lives as civilian bankers, politicians or peacetime diplomats.
So exactly 11 months after Hitlers’ demise at his own hand in his bunker and eight months after Armageddon had been visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the out-of-power but inveterate war-mongering Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton Missouri.
That was the opening call to the Cold War, which was powerfully seconded barely 10 months latter when the then accidental US president from the same state delivered his “Truman Doctrine” speech to the Congress. That latter was a belligerent oration which ignited the Cold War and the costly, suffocating post-1947 web of entangling alliances and the budget-crushing American Empire it fostered.
In light of all that was known then and which has transpired since, however, it can be well and truly said that the ruckus in Greece and Turkey caused by local communist parties, which was the basis for Truman’s declaration, didn’t amount to a hill-of-beans with respect to the homeland security of America. These long ago political skirmishes should get but a scant mention in world history books, and none at all in America’s.
That is to say, with respect to Turkey Stalin wanted a port on the Dardanelles, as had all the Russian Czars for generations before him. But so what? The only thing he could have choked off was his own minuscule export shipments from the Black Sea regions.
Likewise, after a decade of brutal political and economic oppression by a homegrown dictatorship during 1936 to 1941 and then by the Nazi, Italian Fascist and Bulgarian occupiers during WWII, the Greek people were seeking more relief than could be delivered by the sickly exiled King George II. The British in their purported wisdom had put the latter back on the Greek throne in 1946.
As it happened, the population of Greece at the time was 7.3 million and even in today’s dollars its GDP was just $50 billion and $7,000 per capita. In short, Greece was a museum piece of western history that had seen its better days but by then was an economic cipher. Had the local communist party come to power absent Truman’s intervention – with the aid of Stalin or not – that misfortune for the Greek people would have had no bearing on America’s homeland security 5,000 miles away on the far side of the Atlantic moat.
As it happened, of course, the Truman Doctrine was the handiwork of Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson. The latter was a pompous Yale-trained international lawyer from Washington’s elite Covington & Burling, who had been a New Dealer during the early 1930s and then came back as an assistant secretary of state for economic policy in February 1941.
From that perch he had designed the American/British/Dutch embargo that cut off 95% of Japan’s oil supply and paved the way to Pearl Harbor. Indeed, he was actually the “trigger man” for America’s entry into World War II when he unilaterally acted to shut-off 100% of Japan’s oil while FDR was away meeting with Churchill at the famous “Atlantic Charter” confab in Newfoundland in August 1941.
Acheson was also an inveterate anglophile who apparently suffered from empire-envy. He thus imagined that America should step into Great Britain’s imperial shoes when it emerged economically crippled and politically fractured from WWII and could no longer provide financial aid to the governments of Greece and Turkey.
So upon this advice from the Brits in February 1947, Acheson had sprung into action. In a pivotal meeting shortly thereafter between Congressmen and State Department officials, Acheson articulated what would later become known as the “domino theory.”
He stated that more was at stake than Greece and Turkey, for if those two key states should fall, communism would likely spread south to Iran and as far east as India. Acheson reportedly concluded that “not since the days of Rome and Carthage” had such a polarization of power existed.
That was utter poppycock, but even then neither Iran nor India had any meaningful bearing on America’s homeland security. Should their people have made the stupid mistake of voting in the small but noisy communist parties that had taken root in both countries after 1919 it would have been of little note nor material threat to the liberty and security of Americans from Bangor Maine to San Diego California.
The Greek-Turkey aid gambit of March 1947, of course, was just the opening salvo. Soon the baleful idea that communist political gains anywhere in democratic Europe were to be viewed as cause for national security alarms gathered momentum on the banks of the Potomac. That unwarranted leap took root especially among the wartime dandies and policy potentates who had fashioned and led America’s global mobilization during WWII.
Accordingly, the modest $400 million aid to Greece and Turkey quickly ballooned into the Marshall plan announced in June 1947. Now the economic dislocations in France, Italy and elsewhere in western Europe and the resulting political gains of the communists and other leftist parties became the basis for drastically expanded US intervention.
Again, in today’s dollars the Marshall plan provided upwards of $175 billion to Western European countries between 1948 and 1951. Needless to say, by virtue of doling out such tremendous sums of money – which in present day dollars exceeded current Ukraine spending so far – Washington was soon knee-deep in the domestic politics, economics and inter-country relationships and intrigues of post-war Europe.
But why? There was not a snowballs’ chance in the hot place that a communist Italy or communist France or red Luxembourg would have been a military threat to the US. Or even that in league with Soviet Russia they would have posed a conventional military challenge on the New Jersey shores 4,000 miles to the further side of the Atlantic moat—most especially when the United States still had a monopoly on the A-bomb.
Indeed, the US had left WWII with the greatest assemblage of naval power in human history. This included 28 aircraft carriers, 23 battleships, 72 cruisers, 377 destroyers, and numerous other vessels. Altogether this amounted to 10 million tons of naval vessel capacity or more than six times the 1.5 million tons of the Soviet Navy, whose fleets consisted of far fewer and far less lethal warships.
Needless to say, therefore, neither the Truman Doctrine nor the Marshall plan advanced America’s homeland security in any material manner. The requisite military muscle had already been bought and paid for during WWII.
But these interventions did grease the slippery slope to NATO and entangling alliances and interventions stretching to all four corners of the planet in the years ahead. And they did most definitely set off alarm bells in the Kremlin, where the hyper-paranoid Joseph Stalin everywhere and always expected treachery from friend and foe alike.
That was a given – considering the slippery, blood-soaked path by which he had climbed to absolute power in the Soviet Union itself and the treachery of Hitler’s double-cross after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 and the subsequent devastating invasion of Russia by the Nazi. So it is not surprising that Stalin soon suspected that his wartime allies – especially with FDR and Churchill gone – were laying the groundwork for the isolation and encirclement of Soviet Russia, exactly as the US, England and France had attempted after WWI.
To be sure, Stalin was among the most wretched, evil rulers ever to oppress a decent-sized chunk of mankind, and would have remained a blight on his own countrymen and ogre before the world during the remaining six years of his despicable life. But he was no threat to the American homeland as the now open archives of the old Soviet Union prove in spades.
These documents, in fact, amount to the national security dog which didn’t bark. Dig, scour, search and forage thru them as you might. Yet they will fail to reveal any Soviet plan or capability to militarily conquer western Europe.
They show, therefore, that Washington’s standing up of NATO was a giant historical mistake. It was not needed to contain Soviet military aggression, but it did foster a half-century of hegemonic folly in Washington and a fiscally crushing Warfare State – the fiscal girth of which became orders of magnitude larger than required for defense of the homeland in North America.
It is in the nature of human history, it seems, that a wrong path taken like Wilson’s error in plunging America into the Great War in 1917, frequently begets another baleful turn. In this case, the slippery slope had further materialized when Britain and America had needed to align with the vile red tyrants of Moscow to rid the world of the Hitlerian nightmare after 1941.
Indeed, the need for this wartime alliance with the devil seemed so urgent at the time to both Churchill and FDR that they more or less ceded the nations of eastern Europe to the then advancing Red Army at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. That historic meet-up, by the way, was in Russian Crimea, not the Ukraine.
In return for Stalin’s continued march toward Berlin and promise of help in vanquishing Japan in the Far East as well, the Big Three principals reached an understanding that the Soviet Union would exert significant influence over Eastern Europe, including Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and parts of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.
Of course, free elections and democratic governments were to arise in areas occupied by the Red Army, but neither Churchill nor FDR went to any length to provide the enforcement mechanisms to ensure this would happen. It was a case of saying Eastern Europe is in your sphere of influence, Uncle Joe – by wink from the cynical Churchill and by nod from the doddering Roosevelt.
For his part, of course, Stalin was then in the business of rescuing his bloody regime from the near extinction event that had accompanied the Nazi invasion. His aim, therefore, was not about the ideological project of extending communism westward. Instead, it was focused on driving the remnants of the Wehrmacht from his own country and establishing an invincible “cordon sanitaire” from the Baltic to the Adriatic, as Churchill himself later charged, so as to never again allow marauding armies from western Europe to invade and plunder the Russian motherland.
Needless to say, the arrival of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO – within 25 months between March 1947 and April 1949 when the NATO Treaty was signed in Washington – sent Stalin’s wartime understandings into a tailspin. Slowly at first and then aggressively in the end his initial fear that the wartime alliance was being abandoned by his capitalist allies gave way to a paranoid certainty that they were once again in the business of attempting to encircle and destroy the Soviet Union.
But even the resulting Soviet departure from the cooperative modus operandi of the wartime alliance arose from what might well be described as an unforced error in Washington.
We are referring to the latter’s badly misplaced fears that deteriorating economic conditions in Western Europe could lead to the aforementioned communist parties coming to political power in France, Italy and elsewhere. But as we have seen, that wasn’t a serious military threat to America’s homeland security in any event because the post-war Soviet economy was a shambles and its military had been bled and exhausted by its death struggle with the Wehrmacht.
To be sure, communist governments in Western Europe would have been a misfortune for any electorate who stupidly put them in power. But that would have been their domestic governance problem over there, not a threat to the American homeland over here.
Nevertheless, Washington’s gratuitous antidote for what was essentially an internal political problem in western Europe was a sweeping course of economic and military interventions in European affairs. These initiatives were clinically described as “containment” measures designed only to keep the Soviet Union in its lane, not a prelude to an attack on eastern Europe or Moscow itself.
But if you examine a thousand random documents from the archives of the Soviet foreign ministry, top communist party echelons and correspondence to and from Stalin himself it is readily apparent that these initiatives were viewed in Moscow as anything but a polite message to stay in lane. To the contrary, they were seen on the Soviet side as a definitely unfriendly scheme of encirclement and an incipient assault on the Soviet sphere of influence in eastern Europe, or the cordon sanitaire, that Stalin believed he had won at Yalta.
To be sure, writing off this string of what came to be called “captive nations” would have amounted to an embrace of realpolitik that would have made moralists and anti-communist ideologues uneasy in the extreme. But as it happened, abandonment of Eastern Europe per the Yalta zones of influence scheme was exactly what became Washington’s de facto policy until the very end of the Cold War in 1991, anyway.
That is to say, the uprisings against the Soviet hegemon in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1981 generated no response from the West beyond empty speeches and hortatory resolutions from western parliaments. The whole policy of “containment”, therefore, was actually just a large-scale and sustained effort by Washington to steer European politics away from the communist Left.
But why in the hell was thwarting the foolishness of communism in Europe America’s business at all? That is, NATO was essentially an instrument of political control on the European side of the Atlantic, not a military shield that added any incremental security for the citizens domiciled on the North American side of the pond.
So the question recurs as to exactly why was America’s fully warranted post-war demobilization reversed for no good reason of homeland military security?
Part of the answer is embedded in the prevalent Keynesian theorem popular in Washington at the time which held that post-war demobilization would result in a devastating collapse of so-called “aggregate demand” and a resulting spiral into depression. Unless treated with aggressive counter-cyclical fiscal stabilization measures, therefore, it would be the 1930s all over again.
However, most of Europe was fiscally incapacitated owing to the impacts of the war. The economic aid proffered by Washington through the Marshall plan, therefore, amounted to a surrogate form of Keynesian stabilization against a depressionary relapse.
Needless to say, the hive mind on the Potomac had it all wrong, and the evidence was right in its own backyard. During the very first year of demobilization, in fact, the US private sector economy came bounding out of the starting gates after being freed from wartime controls. Real private GDP grew by nearly 27% in 1946 over prior year and never looked back, and it did so with no fiscal stabilization help from Washington, which was blocked by a Republican Congress.
What in 1945 had been a private sector GDP of $1.55 trillion in today’s dollars had jumped to nearly $2.0 trillion by 1947 and to more than $2.3 trillion by 1950. Thus, even as the US was making the turn from a war economy to the booming prosperity of the 1950s, private sector GDP expanded by nearly 50% with the growth rate clocking in at 7.6% per annum over the five-year period. So the American economy never came close to tumbling into the feared Keynesian abyss.
That the prevailing Keynesian theorem was just plain wrong, however, was well illustrated by the contemporaneous economic rebound in the western zone of Germany. The latter’s economy took off well before the Marshall Plan aid made any substantial impact owing to Ludwig Erhard’s famous turn to currency reform and free market policies.
In short, Washington’s Soviet “containment” policies were unnecessary as a matter of America’s homeland military security – the only valid basis for the foreign policy of peaceful Republic. Yet based on fuzzy thinking about economics and the taste for international power politics that had been acquired by Washington’s ruling class and military contractors during WWII the US stumbled into the very entangling alliances that Washington and Jefferson had forsworn. These European entanglements, in turn, surely and inexorably formed the gateway to Empire and the fiscally crushing Warfare State that now plagues the nation.
The irony, of course, is that there was actually nothing to “contain’. The documents show the Soviet leadership’s prime concern was consolidating the territory and security gains in Eastern Europe which the USSR had won with blood and treasure in the war against Hitler.
Thus, for several weeks after Secretary Marshall’s June 5, 1947 speech at Harvard, the archives show that Soviet leaders hoped it might prove to be a source of capital for the reconstruction of the war-damaged USSR and provide an opening for it to extract the war reparations from Germany about which Moscow was totally obsessed.
As the details of the American plan unfolded, however, the Soviet leadership slowly came to view it as an attempt to use economic aid not only to consolidate a potentially hostile Western European bloc, but also to undermine recently-won, and still somewhat tenuous, Soviet gains in Eastern Europe.
At length, therefore, Stalin ordered Poland and Czechoslovakia to withdraw from the intra-Europe consultation meetings in July 1947 that involved discussions with the west about joining the Marshall Plan – discussions he had initially blessed. Thereafter, all Soviet bloc participation in the Marshall Plan ceased and Stalin’s calculus shifted sharply from accommodation and towards a strategy of confrontational unilateral action to secure Soviet interests.
Nor were the Kremlin’s fears entirely an exercise in Stalin-style paranoia. As Scott D. Parrish, a leading scholar of the Soviet archives, concluded,
…What the new documentation helps us see more clearly, then, is that the real difficulty and source of conflict in 1947 was neither Soviet nor American “aggression.” Rather, it lay in the unstable international economic and political conditions in key European countries which led both sides to believe that the current status quo was unstable… And it was this same environment that compelled Stalin to respond to the plan with a series of tactically offensive maneuvers which fanned the flames of confrontation even higher. This decisive moment in the emergence of the Cold War was thus more a story of tragedy than evil.
The Soviet Union’s acquisition of the A-bomb in 1949 did not change the equation or gainsay the case that the entanglements of the Marshall Plan and NATO were a mistake. Crucially, neither did it create a military requirement for US air bases in Europe or alliances with European countries.
Instead, home territories and the open oceans and skies turned out to be more than adequate for basing the nuclear arsenals of both sides, as the Cuban Missile Crisis fully clarified.
Indeed, once both sides had the A-bomb the age of nuclear deterrence or MAD (mutual assured destruction) commenced. Notwithstanding the fringe views of Dr. Strangelove types like Herman Khan, nuclear war was soon deemed to be unwinnable and the focus shifted to the ability to reliably deliver a devastating second strike in response to a potential nuclear provocation.
This “assured” destruction was itself the defense against nuclear attack. But to be an effective deterrent the opposing side had to believe that its opponent’s ability to deliver was operationally full-proof and highly certain to happen.
In this respect during the strategic bomber age of the 1950s the US had such deterrence capacity early on – with long-range strategic bombers capable of reaching the Soviet Union and returning with mid-air refueling. These strategic bombers including the B-50 Superfortress and the B-36 Peacemaker had impressive range capabilities, with the latter reaching 10,000 miles.
However, it was the introduction of the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress in 1955 that removed any doubt. The B-52 had a range of nearly 9,000 miles without aerial refueling, even as it carried a payload of A-bombs far heavier than any previous aircraft, was powered by far more reliable engines and could attain altitudes beyond the reach of interdiction.
As it happened, the Soviets were late to the strategic bomber game, even after they detonated a serviceable nuke in August 1949. At the time and for several years to follow the Soviets relied upon the Tupolev Tu-4 to deliver their A-bombs, which was a reverse-engineered copy of America’s earlier, far less capable B-29. Accordingly, the Soviet bombers faced significant challenges, including limited range and payload capacity, which made it difficult to deliver a meaningful number of nukes to the U.S. without risking detection and interception.
Last edited:
