Union Busting
In one of this morning's Daily Presidential Rants, Donald Trump insisted – as he has many times before – that the European Union was "formed for the primary purpose of 'screwing' the United States of America."
Leaving aside for the moment the fact that the president seems to be baffled by the basic use of quotation marks and capitalizations, we should note that this characterization is 100% backwards. At every stage of its creation and evolution, the European Union was designed to facilitate American foreign policy goals and to protect American interests from the pressures of the Soviet Union. Its origins and evolution were, in fact, closely tied to the greatest foreign policy initiative of the post-World War II era – the Marshall Plan.
The idea that Western Europe should be encouraged and enabled to work together along economic, cultural and, yes, political lines was firmly part of the American foreign policy consensus in the postwar era.
George Marshall, one of the great generals of the American war effort and Harry Truman's Secretary of State, insisted that helping Europe in this way amounted to helping the United States. "It is logical," he told Congress, "that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of ordinary economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace."
The European Recovery Program – commonly known as the Marshall Plan – was a massive effort to restore prosperity and therefore peace to war-torn Europe. It funneled a staggering sum of $13.3 billion ($176 billion today) to the continent.
In order to handle the funds, two organizations were created – the Economic Cooperation Administration here in the U.S., and the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) in Europe. The OEEC, a precursor of the OECD, is widely recognized as the first real step to a unified Europe. And, as you can see below, the USA played an active part in the conference that led to its creation.
From the start of this process, Americans understood that economic cooperation would lead to political cooperation, a goal which they openly and actively sought.
Indeed, it was common to see in the late 1940s Americans promoting the end goal of a "United States of Europe" that would prevent internal fighting on the continent and build up a bulwark against the expansionism of the Soviet Union.
Here, for instance, is a 1947 piece by Harold Ickes, a progressive Republican who had served in FDR's Cabinet, talking about a congressional resolution backing a "United States of Europe within the framework of the United Nations." As he notes, congressmen in both parties had provided "widespread support" for an idea that promised "a hope for world peace and a higher civilization."
And over the next decades, the movement towards this "United States of Europe" steadily progressed, with the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1952 – again, backed by Marshall Plan funds – and the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957.
And just as Democratic President Harry Truman saw the strengthening of European economic and political ties as in America's best interest, so too did Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower ... and every president who followed them in the twentieth century, as the European community became stronger and more united, just as American policymakers had long hoped.
When the European Union was formally established in 1993 with the Maastricht Treaty, another American president – Bill Clinton – celebrated it as another "milestone in the progress of the European Community toward political and economic union, a goal which the United States strongly supports and encourages."
At every step of the way, the European Union was understood – by Americans and by everyone else – as a measure that was promoted and perfected with the full support of the United States of America.
The idea that its purpose was to "screw" America over instead of helping it out is so deeply stupid that, of course, Donald Trump believes it.
