Don't expect a US Marshall Plan to rebuild Ukraine

Asia Times

27-03-2025

President Donald Trump wants Ukraine to repay the United States for helping to defend the country against Russia's invasion.
Since 2022, Congress has provided about US$174 billion to Ukraine and neighboring countries to assist in its war effort. Trump inflated this figure to US$350 billion in a March 2025 White House meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron. Separately, he has suggested Ukraine could reimburse the US by giving America access to its minerals.
Ukraine is rich in titanium, graphite, manganese and other rare earth metals used to produce electric vehicle batteries and other tech devices.
Mining and refining these critical mineral resources would require major investment in infrastructure and economic development, including in parts of Ukraine severely damaged by fighting. Some analysts are calling for a return to the European Recovery Program, commonly known as the Marshall Plan.
The Marshall Plan used $13.3 billion in US funds – roughly $171 billion in today's dollars – to rebuild war-torn Western Europe from 1948 to late 1951. It is often evoked as a solution for reconstruction following global crises. Yet, as a military historian and curator, I find that the Marshall Plan is not well understood.
For the US, the economic gains of the Marshall Plan did not come from European countries' repaying loans or allowing the US to extract their raw materials. Rather, the US has benefited enormously from a half-century of goodwill, democratic stability and economic success in Europe.
After World War II ended in 1945, Western Europe faced a staggering burden of destruction and upheaval.
Allied bombardment of major industrial areas and German cities such as Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne had created massive housing shortages. Meanwhile, fighting through agricultural areas and a critical manpower shortage had curtailed food production. What harvest there was could not get to hungry civilians because so many of Europe's roads, bridges and ports had been destroyed.
The United Kingdom, Italy, France, Germany and other European governments were buried in debt after so many years of war. They could not afford to rebuild on their own. Yet, rather than cooperating on their mutual economic reconstruction, European nations looked inward, focusing primarily on their own political challenges.
The continent was politically and militarily divided, too. Europe's western half was influenced by the democratic, capitalistic forces led by the US Eastern Europe was beholden to the communist, command-economy forces of the Soviet Union.
In a 1946 speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill articulated Europe's growing postwar divide. Over the ruins of proud nations, he said, 'an iron curtain' had 'descended across the continent.'
Unlike Europe, the US emerged from World War II as the wealthiest nation in the world, with its territory intact and unharmed. Its steel and oil industries were booming. By 1947, the US was the clear successor to Great Britain as the world's superpower.
But President Harry Truman feared the ambitions of the war's other great victor – the Soviet Union. In March 1947, he announced a new doctrine to contain communist expansion southward across Europe by giving $400 million in military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey.
Around the same time, US Secretary of State George Marshall met with Soviet officials to plan Germany's future. Following the Nazis' surrender in May 1945, Germany had been divided into four occupied zones administered by US, British, French and Soviet forces.
Each nation had its own goals for its section of Germany. The US wanted to revitalize Germany politically and economically, believing that a moribund Germany would thwart the economic reconstruction of all of Europe.
Marshall hoped that the Soviets would cooperate, but Soviet ruler Josef Stalin preferred extracting reparations from a prostrate Germany to investing in its recovery. A vibrant German economic engine, the Soviets felt, could just as easily rearm to attack the Russian countryside for the third time that century.
The Truman administration chose to unilaterally rebuild the three Western Allied sectors of Germany – and Western Europe.
Marshall outlined his plan at a commencement address at Harvard University in June 1947. American action to restore global economic health, he said, would provide the foundation for political stability and peace in Europe.
And an economically healthy Western Europe, in turn, would inhibit the spread of communism by plainly demonstrating the benefits of capitalism.
'Our policy is not directed against any country,' Marshall said, 'but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.'
Marshall invited all European nations to participate in drafting a plan to first address the immediate humanitarian aid of Europe's people, then rebuild its infrastructure. The US would pay for it all.
For nearly bankrupt European nations, it was a lifeline. In September 1947, the new Committee for European Economic Co-operation, composed of 16 Western – but not Eastern – European nations, delivered its proposal to Washington.
It would take a masterful legislative strategy for the Democratic Truman administration to persuade the Republican-led Congress to pass this $13 billion bill. It succeeded thanks to the dedicated effort of Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg, who convinced his isolationist colleagues that the Marshall Plan would halt the expansion of communism and benefit American economic growth.
In April 1948, Truman signed the Economic Cooperation Act. By year's end, over $2 billion had reached Europe, and its industrial production had finally surpassed prewar levels seen in 1939.
Along with economic stability, the Truman administration recognized that Europe needed military security to defend against communist encroachment by the Soviet Union.
In July 1949, 12 European countries, the US and Canada established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO committed each member country to the mutual defense of fellow NATO members.
Since 1947, NATO has steadily expanded eastward to include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and other former Soviet satellite states directly bordering Russia.
Ukraine, which declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, is not yet a NATO member. But it desperately wants to be.
Ukraine applied for NATO membership in 2022 after Russia's invasion. Its application is pending. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said any peace deal with Ukraine must bar NATO membership.
Modern-day Ukraine mirrors the Western European countries of the Marshall Plan era in meaningful ways.
It suffers from the physical devastation of war, with its major cities heavily damaged. The threat of military attack from hostile neighbors remains urgent. And it has a functional, democratic government that would – in peacetime – be capable of receiving and distributing aid to develop the nation's economic growth and stability.
US global leadership, however, has changed dramatically since 1948.
Outright American taxpayer financing of Ukraine's reconstruction seems impossible. Any plan to reconstruct the country after war will likely require public funding from multiple nations and substantial private investment. That private investment could well include mineral extraction and refinement ventures.
Ultimately, Ukraine's recovery will most likely involve Ukraine and neighboring nations reaching agreement to restore its economic and military security.
The European Union, which Ukraine also seeks to join, has the bureaucratic and economic resources necessary to reconstruct Ukraine, restore peace and ease tensions on the continent.
Any future Marshall Plan for Ukraine will probably be European.
Frank A Blazich Jr is curator of military history, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.