Abstract
In March 1948 the Truman administration implemented domestic restrictions on exports to the Soviet Union. This marked a change in policy from economic cooperation with Moscow through the Lend-Lease Programme in the Second World War to a strategy of economic containment, which was ultimately transformed into an economic cold war against the Kremlin. There are several reasons why American government officials initiated this policy reversal.
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Notes and References
Philip J. Funigiello, American-Soviet Trade in the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 17–23.
Wilson D. Miscamble, ‘The Foreign Policy of the Truman Administration: A Post-Cold War Appraisal’, Presidential Studies Quarterly, vol. xxiv, No. 3 (Summer 1994), pp. 481–3.
Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 94–140.
See, in particular, Anne Deighton, The Impossible Peace: Britain, the Division of Germany and the Origins of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
The best account of Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech is Fraser Harbutt’s The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and the Origins of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
George F. Kennan [‘X’], ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 25 (July 1947), pp. 566–82.
John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 48–103.
Justus D. Doenecke, Not to the Swift: The Old Isolationists in the Cold War Era (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1979), pp. 19–72.
Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 46–54;
Vojtech Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 11–30.
The Policy Planning Staff’s role in the making of policy in the State Department is discussed in Wilson D. Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947–50 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 3–40
David Mayers, George F. Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy (Oxford University Press: New York, 1988), pp. 105–60.
For two excellent interpretations see Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain and the reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–52 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
Melvyn P. Leffler, ‘The United States and the Strategic Dimensions of the Marshall Plan’, Diplomatic History, vol. 12 (Summer 1988), pp. 277–306.
Robert Mark Spaulding, Osthandel and Ostpolitik: German Trade Policies in Eastern Europe from Bismarck to Adenauer (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1997), pp. 349–53.
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© 2001 Ian Jackson
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Jackson, I. (2001). The Origins of Economic Containment, 1947–48. In: The Economic Cold War. Cold War History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510920_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510920_2
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