By
Harry C. Blaney III
George C. Marshall was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953 for his economic recovery plan for Western Europe. The Marshall Plan’s legacy lives on today in programs of cooperation and dialogue across the Atlantic. The irony is that after seven decades of essential peace in Europe and effective deterrence from Soviet aggression, Donald Trump is trying to dismantle the fabric of Atlantic cooperation which threatens a disaster for America and out allies. Let’s hope the Europeans are smarter than our administration.
When we have a president and many in the powerful Republican far right that rejects a seven decades old set of policies that provide for the entire globe a more secure, more prosperous and lasting framework for international cooperation and comity but now sadly we are threatened by our own administration with a radical dismantling of that durable and beneficial structure by a group of misguided and malicious leaders bent to destruction of all that has held the fabric of our often risky world together.
People forget also that it was not just the Marshall Plant that our post World War II leaders under President Harry Truman created but also many elements we have today that keep the international order to the benefit of all nations. These include importantly the United Nations and many of it associated agencies like UNHCR and World Health Organization, UNICEF, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, NATO, the OECD, the later creation of UNEP to protect our environment, and not least European unity now embodied in the European Union today.
We need to not just remember these acts we need in this generation to support these structures, provide adequate funding, and give them the capacity to help keep our fragile world at peace and with justice and support for humanitarian goald and care for those most vulnerable.
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Rethinking National Security 