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  • NSC 68 and the Political Economy of the Early Cold War
  • Melvyn P. Leffler
Curt Cardwell , NSC 68 and the Political Economy of the Early Cold War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 298 pp.

The Cold War was about the dollar gap, argues Curt Cardwell in this provocative yet exaggerated account of the early post-World War II years. U.S. officials, Cardwell claims, were not really preoccupied with a threat from the Soviet Union; they were obsessed with the balance of payments problems of their prospective allies in Asia and Europe. They feared that Britain, France, West Germany, and Japan would not have sufficient dollars to buy U.S. goods and that an open world economy would be endangered. Other scholars (like William Borden) have argued this case with regard to Japan and East Asia, says Cardwell, but few have underscored the importance of the dollar gap in relation to West European recovery, to U.S. rearmament efforts, and to the writing of NSC 68.

Many scholars of the Cold War will find it difficult to accept the basic framework of this book. Relying primarily on Geoffrey Roberts's work on Soviet foreign policy, Cardwell insists that Iosif Stalin wanted postwar cooperation. Stalin's security concerns "were authentic" (p. 41). He "felt betrayed and disrespected" (p. 267). He did not want to Communize Eastern Europe, yet U.S. multilateralists refused to acknowledge his legitimate security anxieties and "would stop at nothing to see their goal fulfilled, even when the measures called for posed a direct threat to the Soviet Union, real or perceived" (p. 268). Although these claims merit serious consideration, Cardwell's benign view of Stalin's actions and intentions does not mesh well with less forgiving portraits of Stalin's personality and policies.

But readers should not dismiss this volume out of hand. Cardwell has much to say that is valuable about postwar U.S. foreign policy. He shows how the dollar gap catalyzed U.S. policymakers' anxieties in the initial postwar years and shaped the passage of the British loan in 1946, the aid to Greece and Turkey in March 1947, and the European Recovery Program (ERP) in 1947-1948. Although Western Europe started to recover, he argues, the dollar gap was not solved. Cardwell's major contribution is to show the extent to which U.S. officials feared that the Marshall Plan would end in 1952 without having fixed the dollar gap, thereby impelling America's allies to revert to autarkic trade practices and state planning. Given these apprehensions, U.S. officials worked hard to think of new ways to sustain the outflow of dollars. Knowing that Congress would resist the prolongation of assistance, policymakers decided they [End Page 192] had once again to magnify the Soviet threat. They therefore embraced the hyperbolic language of NSC 68 and focused on rearmament. Although the evidence for all of this, Cardwell admits, "is largely circumstantial," in his view it is nonetheless "compelling" (p. 161). In short, "the Soviet Union was containable, the dollar gap was not" (p. 180).

Let me acknowledge here that Cardwell is seeking, among other things, to rebut my arguments in A Preponderance of Power. U.S. officials, he insists, were not concerned with national security. They simply packaged their economic anxieties about the future of an open world in the wrapping of national security. They exaggerated the specter of a Soviet threat in order to scare the U.S. Congress and the American people. Again and again, Cardwell makes the point that "the dollar gap had no intrinsic relationship to the Soviet Union and, therefore, to the Cold War" (p. 71).

To support his view, Cardwell emphasizes that Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze did not expect a Soviet attack in early 1950. They were, he claims, not alarmed by Stalin's detonation of a nuclear bomb in August 1949 or by the Communist takeover of China or by the overall specter of growing Soviet power. Because U.S. officials believed that Stalin did not want war, the only possible explanation for NSC 68 is that Acheson and Nitze wanted to use the bogeyman of a Soviet/Communist threat to sustain...

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