Steil’s fresh perspective on a well-tilled subject will be appreciated by specialists for its wide-ranging analysis and welcomed by general readers for its engrossing style and accessibility. The Marshall Plan achieved the goals of its creators, he concludes, and while it played a role in drawing the lines of the Cold War, the conflict itself was inevitable.

political scene and the “legislative drama” behind the plan’s political passage. statesmen driving the effort to enact the Marshall Plan and devotes considerable space to describing the domestic U.S. Steil emphasizes the roles and personalities of leading U.S. The plan inevitably drew the ire of the U.S.S.R., which attempted to undermine the project. Focusing on the critical years 1947 to 1949, Benn Steils gripping narrative takes us through the seminal episodes marking the collapse of postwar US-Soviet. The book makes clear that the Marshall Plan was more than simply an aid program it effectively constituted the creation of a new Western-oriented political, economic, and military architecture in Western Europe. Steil places the massive and unprecedented European reconstruction program at the center of the emerging Cold War, delineating how it intertwined with many of the early crises of the conflict. As Benn Steil makes clear in his trenchant and timely new book, The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War, the architects of America’s global engagement after World War II would have been. A lucid and engaging writer, Steil has a rare gift for blending economic and political history, showing how the Marshall Plan dashed Soviet hopes. In this accessible work of political and economic history, Steil ( The Battle of Bretton Woods), director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, comprehensively details the conception, planning, implementation, impact, and contemporary reverberations of the Marshall Plan. In this fascinating book, Benn Steil returns to one of the enduring achievements of American diplomacy: the Marshall Plan to rebuild European allies that were close to collapse after World War II.

The marshall plan benn steil