George Marshall as Secretary of State – what we can learn
I’ve just finished a book on George Marshall’s attempt to broker peace at the start of the second phase of the Chinese Civil War: The China Mission: George C. Marshall’s Unfinished War, 1945-1947, by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan – who since its 2018 publication has become Editor of Foreign Affairs.
Starting with the dessert first, I’m going to share learnings from Marshall’s time as Secretary of State (immediately following this mission), and potential lessons from the Chinese Civil War to Ukraine.
In a part two, I’ll share some Great Man of History stuff, strategic insights from Mao, and Marshall’s thoughts on marriage. Enjoy.
First, for anyone unfamiliar with Marshall and his stature, here is Churchill speaking about Marshall and his time as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army during WWII:
I greatly admired the manner in which the American Army was formed. I think it was a prodigy of organisation, of improvisation. There have been many occasions when a powerful state has wished to raise great armies, and with money and time and discipline and loyalty that can be accomplished. Nevertheless the rate at which the small American Army of only a few hundred thousand men, not long before the war, created the mighty force of millions of soldiers, is a wonder of military history.
I was here two or three years ago and visited with General Marshall... and we saw the spectacle of what you might call the mass production of divisions. In great and rapid rotation they were formed, and moved on to further stages of their perfection. I saw the creation of this mighty force – this mighty Army, victorious in every theatre against the enemy in so short a time and from such a very small parent stock. This is an achievement which the soldiers of every country will always study with admiration and with envy.
But that is not the whole story, nor even the greatest part of the story. To create great Armies is one thing; to lead them and to handle them is another. It remains to me a mystery as yet unexplained how the very small staffs which the United States kept during the years of peace were able not only to build up the Armies and Air Force units, but also to find the leaders and vast staffs capable of handling enormous masses and of moving them faster and farther than masses have ever been moved in war before.
That you should have been able to preserve the art not only of creating mighty armies almost at the stroke of a wand – but of leading and guiding those armies upon a scale incomparably greater than anything that was prepared for or even dreamed of, constitutes a gift made by the Officer Corps of the United States to their nation in time of trouble, which I earnestly hope will never be forgotten here, and it certainly will never be forgotten in the island from which I come.
Lessons from Marshall as Secretary of State (1947–49)
How somebody of Marshall’s calibre thought about the role, and how he prioritised global issues…
Truman decided to call the aid effort the Marshall Plan, since only naming it after Marshall gave it any hope of clearing Congress.
a spur to European recovery, a check on Soviet expansion, a shining example of American leadership
Marshall took care of one persistent rumor before taking up his new task. He reiterated to reporters that he would not run for president in 1948, or ever.
Truman called for assistance to Greece and Turkey in their fights against Communist insurgency and Soviet infiltration. “It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures,” he pronounced—what soon became known as the Truman Doctrine.
Marshall supported Truman’s call to assist Greece and Turkey, but found its language too sweeping, too resistant to prioritization, too uniform in approach. For aid to work, there would have to be a shared commitment. “No amount of assistance can prove effective or of lasting benefit unless the Greek people themselves are prepared to work together resolutely for their own salvation,” he said.
> On this, Ukrainians surely are. But are there other parts of the world where potential invasion is often spoken of, but whose residents do not seem resolute about preparing for?
…he summoned George Kennan, the diplomat whose telegrams from Moscow he had read over the prior year. Marshall wanted Kennan to head up a new State Department strategy outfit, the Policy Planning Staff, and make European assistance its first task. When Kennan received the charge and requested instructions, Marshall offered just one: “avoid trivia.”
Almost as soon as the Marshall Plan was announced, the appeals began. There should be a Marshall Plan for China, said Chiang’s ambassador in Washington. There should be a Marshall Plan for Latin America, said South American governments. There should be a Marshall Plan for the entire Far East, said intelligence reports. So began a venerable tradition in American statecraft: for every problem, a Marshall Plan was the solution.
> Europe should be eternally grateful to America for this. Europe today is not.
To Marshall, in the new global struggle, the battle for Europe was not just most vital but also the one he could be most confident of winning.
> Priorities.
American power was vast, vaster than any other nation’s and at any other time, but not limitless. He had to weigh proliferating needs, to distinguish the vital from the secondary, vital and achievable from vital but futile. Otherwise, the Communists’ aptitude for chaos could disperse American effort across so many fronts that all might be lost.
While he had pledged never to campaign for the presidency, he was soon flying around the United States campaigning for his aid plan with all the fervor of a candidate.
For American security, the stakes in China were high, but not as high as in Europe. “China does not itself possess the raw material and industrial resources which would enable it to become a first-class military power within the foreseeable future,” Marshall argued.
> Is this now reversed today?
Western Europe had industrial capacity that, if harnessed by a Soviet military machine, would constitute a mortal threat; China did not.
> Ditto.
Yet for Marshall, as ever, preliminary to the question of should was the question of could. If the answer to the latter was no, the former was academic.
A few days later, Truman appeared in person at Marshall’s door in Leesburg. He needed to drag Marshall out of retirement again, this time to oversee America’s nascent war effort as secretary of defense. Whatever his personal feelings, Marshall’s sense of duty kicked in once again. (“When the President motors down and sits under our oaks and tells me of his difficulties, he has me at a disadvantage.”)
MacArthur wrote in the letter that brought his downfall, “There is no substitute for victory.”
It was the kind of rousing slogan Marshall considered alluring but treacherous, calls to win a single battle at any price undercutting the “cold-blooded calculation and wisdom and foresight” needed to win the bigger war.
Four decades in the army, spanning two global conflicts, had taught Marshall that there was no such thing as an easy war.
The next great war, he warned, would bring only the “empty triumph of inheriting the responsibility for a shattered world.”
At the height of the McCarthyist fury, one of the most renowned anti-Communist voices in America rose to Marshall’s defense. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr cautioned against “desperation on our side which would tempt us to confront Communism in Asia primarily in military terms and thus play into the hands of the Communist political propaganda by which it would expand still further into Asia.” It was “difficult to sit by with folded hands,” he wrote. “Yet we may have to learn to fold our hands.”
Niebuhr was best known for his Serenity Prayer: grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. In a sense, Marshall’s core strategic principle echoed Niebuhr’s invocation.
Yet both Niebuhr and Marshall knew that the fact that something could not be changed did not make it any less terrible: that was the tragic implication of both the principle and the prayer.
Relevance to Ukraine today
Daniel begins the postscript to the book: ‘Foreign policy is made by analogy.’
The Chinese Civil War isn’t exactly analogous to the conflict in Ukraine, but there are some similarities. The following passages offered some illumination to me as to what’s going on, and what might yet unfold.
Marshall grasped the dynamic at work. Each side overplayed its hand when momentum seemed to be in its favor and then came back to negotiate when the momentum had shifted, at which point the other side was no longer interested.
> This is the approach Richard Haass (president of the Council on Foreign Relations – which I think technically makes him Daniel’s boss) argued for recently in Foreign Affairs. To me it was mildly encouraging that panjandrums are coming around to desiring peace talks, but to think we will be able to force them with Russia at the height of a pendulum swing in our own direction is likely false.
as he contemplated the consequences of failure, Marshall was troubled. The Nationalists could not destroy the Communists, he thought, nor could the Communists destroy the Nationalists. But between them, they could destroy China.
Each side seemed convinced that the military balance would ultimately tip in its favor, meaning neither felt the need to give up any ground.
The embassy’s analysis argued that the United States had minimal leverage over the CCP, but that there was more it could do to pressure Chiang. If his fundamental outlook would not change, at least his calculations could be shaped: “He must be convinced that there are certain limits beyond which he cannot go and still continue to receive American assistance.”
> (Swap Chiang with Zelensky.)
The Nationalist offensive had been more successful than he had anticipated—at least in the short term. To his mind, however, an opening burst of success did not change the Nationalists’ basic strategic problem. Claiming cities was not the same as establishing control. Even driven into the hinterlands, the Communists retained “almost unlimited room in which to maneuver,” judged an American military attaché. They were escaping Nationalist assaults with their armies largely intact. And as Mao had long envisioned, and Marshall could see, Nationalist lines were stretching to the point of peril.
Other American officials, in trying to assign responsibility for outbreaks in a widening swath of the country, threw up their hands. “It is impossible to decide, with any degree of certainty, just who started what,” a military report conceded.
The fight would be long and grueling, Mao acknowledged. Victory might take three to five years without the involvement of American troops, fifteen to twenty if the Americans fought. But he was confident he would win either way.
> Fair to say Putin probably thinks the same today? Do we really think we can out-endure Russia on something existential to them?
Time [magazine] called for ending Marshall’s efforts and letting Chiang finish off the Communists once and for all. Nationalist victories, it brightly proclaimed, made negotiation unnecessary. (Undercutting its own assurance, the magazine also warned: “If the U.S. does not openly and quickly give full material and economic support to the Nationalist Government, China must pass into the Russian orbit. This could only mean a U.S. strategic retreat to the line of the Mariana Islands.”)
Even as Luce [Time magazine editor] and his allies called for all-out support of Chiang, other voices, equally strident, called for Washington to wash its hands of China altogether. “Chiang Kai-shek’s brand of democracy is not ours, any more than is Mao Tse-tung’s,” wrote the Harvard scholar John Fairbank, who had done wartime intelligence work in China. “We have let our fears of Russia and of communism, on which the right-Kuomintang plays so skillfully, drive the Chinese revolution further into dependence on Russia and upon communism.”
Acheson wrote Marshall to update him on the growing stateside contentiousness, with “extremists on one side calling for all-out support of Chiang and those on the other side advocating complete withdrawal of support.”
> This feels plausible for the U.S. in 2024. Surely there is a sane middle-ground to use leverage and negotiate peace.
“While avoiding involvement in their civil strife we will persevere with our policy of helping the Chinese people to bring about peace and economic recovery in their country,” it proclaimed. In stressing an American commitment to a “united and democratic China,” Truman omitted the third word in the old mantra—strong. By now, that mantra—a strong, united, and democratic China—had taken on an ironic edge.
The extent of the Nationalists’ advantage in weaponry, with hundreds of millions of dollars in modern arms sent by Washington, was also deceptive. In pursuit of fast-moving Communist troops, heavy American vehicles bogged down in the mud. Antitank guns got marooned miles from the front. American snow boots were too big for Chinese feet. And troubling numbers of the Nationalists’ weapons were ending up in Communist hands, some captured, some bought from corrupt officers. “We do not know how much the Government is losing,” Marshall admitted, but his sources suggested that the number was considerable. Communist troops sang: “We have no rifles, we have no cannon; the enemy makes them for us!”
> I have no idea whether this is going on in Ukraine. But notable this happened in China, Vietnam, and ultimately Afghanistan.
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Jake Sullivan (now U.S. National Security Advisor) is noted in the acknowledgements section of the book. I wish he heeded a few more lessons from it.