October 21, 2004
ARCHITECT OF ERROR:
Paul Nitze, 97; Key Player in U.S. Foreign Policy During Cold War (Claudia Luther, October 21, 2004, LA Times)
Paul Nitze, who played a pivotal role in shaping U.S. foreign and arms control strategy from the 1940s through the end of the Cold War, has died. He was 97.Nitze died of pneumonia Tuesday night at his home in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., according to his son, William.
Nitze, a dashing East Coast aristocrat sometimes referred to as "the silver fox," first entered public service in Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency and retired six decades later at the start of the first Bush administration. He was among a small group of patricians that included Dean Acheson, W. Averill Harriman, John McCloy, Robert A. Lovett, George F. Kennan and Charles E. (Chip) Bohlen who influenced nearly every major national security decision from World War II through the Korean and Vietnam wars.
It was Nitze who drafted a document that first laid out the military framework for containing the Soviets, which put in place the Cold War strategy in effect until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the arms race subsided.
He held a number of official titles in the State and Defense departments and was secretary of the Navy from 1963 to 1967. But even when not an official part of any administration, he was at the center of power, cajoling, criticizing, shaping and commenting.
"Wise men come and wise men go, but decade after decade there is Paul Nitze," President Reagan's Secretary of State George P. Shultz said on the occasion of Nitze's 80th birthday, two years before Nitze stepped out of the public spotlight.
Mr, Nitze was a patriot who served his country to the best of his ability, but Containment, the Marshall Plan, and arms control negotiations were all mistakes that we're still paying for. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 21, 2004 9:05 AM
How would you have structured the Marshall Plan differently ?
Posted by: Michael Herdegen at October 21, 2004 10:10 AMMichael:
Only two things mattered after WWII, getting rid of the USSR and dismantling the social welfare state. The Marshall Plan made both those things harder by restoring the status quo.
Posted by: oj at October 21, 2004 10:21 AMPatton was right. And he knew it.
Posted by: Sandy P at October 21, 2004 10:57 AMI'm trying to remember who wrote recently that modern wars have increasingly required "buying off" the common folk out of whose ranks most in the military are recruited.
According to the writer, the expansion of the modern welfare state is a direct consequence of the toll that WW I, especially, took.
Posted by: Eugene S. at October 21, 2004 11:14 AMEugene:
http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/864
Posted by: oj at October 21, 2004 11:30 AMThe Marshall plan kept Western Europe from going Communist in the 40s. Just look at the contemporary election results. Like it or not, the social welfare state was what the voters wanted.
Containment was a rational strategy, although we should have been more active in physically supporting insurgencies in Eastern Europe, if only through simple means like a 'burp gun' strategy.
Of course, our greatest post WWII error was managing to replace the evil empires of Europe as the automatic bogeyman in the Third World. But our own freedom, where Fabian socialists dominated academia in the Anglosphere perhaps made that inevitable.
Posted by: Bart at October 21, 2004 1:34 PMOrrin,
Thanks for the link but I was thinking of someone else, who focused specifically on the First World War to illustrate how the mass slaughter in the trenches forced the ruling elites to buy off the working class to prevent mutiny.
Someone who wrote at length about how there was not only the 1918 Sailors' Mutiny in Kiel (Germany) but similar mutinies in all the belligerents' armed forces toward the end of WWI, and that extraordinary concessions were offered just to keep the troops from deserting.
Your link leads to a discussion of the period from the Great Depression onwards.
Posted by: Eugene S. at October 21, 2004 2:02 PMBart, we did try a 'burp gun' strategy. Read William Sloane Coffin Jr.'s autobiography.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at October 21, 2004 2:30 PMHarry, Thank you but no. I generally avoid writings by anti-semites who coddle America's enemies.
OJ, paying for the Marshall plan saved us hundreds of billions in the long run. Or would you have preferred a Western Europe completely supine before the Soviets, because the Europeans would have elected men like Thorez, Togliatti and Schumacher to power rather than Schuman, deGasperi and Adenauer. Do you really think it would have been a better outcome if they had?
Bart:
Yes, the even more overextended USSR would have fallen much quicker. We would have saved trillions of dollars. The 60s and 70s would never have happened.
Posted by: oj at October 21, 2004 4:50 PMNitze was not really a fan of arms control agreements. Are you confusing him with Paul Warnke, who most certainly was?
Posted by: jim hamlen at October 22, 2004 12:16 AMWarnke was certainly worse.
Posted by: oj at October 22, 2004 8:18 AMTraitors and spies are seldom as costly as idiots. Ineptitude is certainly a significant factor.
Posted by: LarryH at October 22, 2004 8:22 AMWell, Bart, I despise him, too, though for different reasons.
But if you read only to validate what you know today, you'll never know any more in the future.
Coffin ran a big part of the burp gun program into Ukraine
Posted by: Harry Eagar at October 22, 2004 5:04 PM