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“The Marshall Plan. Few U.S. diplomatic efforts evoke such a nostalgic sense of pride and accomplishment. Proposed in June 1947 by President Harry Truman’s secretary of state, George C. Marshall, the plan has been credited with helping Europeans recover after the devastation of World War II, preventing communism from gaining support among populations filled with despair, ensuring that Western Europe could become prosperous and strong enough to deter Soviet aggression, and creating a liberal postwar order that planted the seeds for U.S. economic and political dominance as well as for the creation of today’s European Union. Although critics of the plan have argued that the financial assistance only marginally fostered the economic growth already taking place on the continent or that it was a tool for enriching U.S. capitalists by expanding markets, the Marshall Plan belonged to an era when it seemed that people all over the world loved the United States. Nearly six decades later, dramatic change is again unfolding on the world stage, marked by the emergence of new threats and the establishment of new rules and institutions. Faced with today’s challenges in the Middle East and Africa, U.S. policymakers from across the political spectrum are championing the Marshall Plan as a model of successful foreign policy, an illustration of U.S. strategic foresight and economic as well as political benevolence that can be transplanted from post–World War II Europe to the Middle East and Africa today.”
