The Wages of Containment
State-Building, American Grand Strategy, and the Cold War in Europe and East Asia
In my research for the book project, I am working on situating the United States’ support for the creation of the developmental state in a broader strategic context. The book examines the United States’ involvement in state-building in Europe and East Asia after the Second World War, showing how variation in U.S. strategic assessments of the severity of Communist security threats led to variation in U.S. support for the centralization of economic and political power among its allies and security partners. Although American aid programs to Europe and East Asia in this period were informed by similar principles, they differed in administration as the United States sought to address the different vulnerabilities of U.S. allies (as they were perceived by U.S. officials). In Western Europe, the initial postwar crisis ended relatively quickly: the massive buildup of NATO in response to the Korean War and the admission of West Germany in the alliance created an effective deterrent against Communist military aggression; and after the crisis of the late 1940s, the subversive potential of the French and Italian Communists diminished significantly. As a result, the United States supported a liberal and democratic model of planned capitalism, in which comparatively weak planning ministries existed alongside vibrant labor unions and a stable coalition of the center-left and the center-right. In East Asia, on the other hand, the establishment of the alliance system did not dispel American fears about the spread of Communism, because the Communist threat in that region was understood in non-military terms as the threat of subversion and economic coercion. As a result, the United States supported the creation of a centralized and authoritarian model of planned capitalism, in which powerful planning ministries existed alongside weak labor unions and a monopoly of political power by conservative regimes. Over time, there came to be a marked contrast between the welfare states of Western Europe and the developmental states of East Asia, and my book explains and theorizes the United States’ strategy in the events that produced that contrast.