West Berlin children perched on the fence of Tempelhof Airport watch U.S. planes bring in supplies to circumvent the Soviet blockade of land and waterways. The airlift began June 25, 1948, and continued for 11 months. (AP Photo)
A Brief History of U.S.-Euro Relations
Since World War II, Americans' fortunes and fate increasingly have become intertwined with people and nations on the other side of the Atlantic. While the United States and Europe have shared numerous common interests, from thwarting communism to fostering transatlantic trade, they also have quarreled and competed for power. Here's a short history of that complex, sometimes problematic relationship.
1940s-1950s:
The United States felt threatened by the rising power of the Soviet Union, and Europe became the front line of the Cold War between the two superpowers. After Soviet-controlled communist regimes took hold of most of Eastern Europe, U.S. President Harry Truman countered by joining with Great Britain, France, Italy and eight other nations to form a military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
The U.S. also pumped tens of billions of dollars into European economies via the Marshall Plan, and airlifted supplies to the Western-controlled half of the divided German city of Berlin to crack a Soviet embargo. But Europeans also chafed at what they saw as heavy-handed pressure to follow the U.S. government's bidding. In the mid-1950s, for example, the Eisenhower administration hinted that it might pull its troops out of Europe, leaving the continent at the mercy of the Red Army to the east, unless France agreed to allow the noncommunist western half of Germany, its former enemy, to rearm. In the late 1950s, the French elected President Charles de Gaulle, a hero in the Resistance during World War II, who bluntly told U.S. leaders that the Europeans wanted more say in strategic decisions.
Europeans also became worried that the United States, which had amassed great wealth from foreign trade and private investment in Europe after the war, had too much control over their economic fortunes. In 1957, France, West Germany, Italy and other nations formed the European Economic Community and enacted tariffs to protect their industries. By the end of the 1950s, cheap West German products — such as the Volkswagen Beetle — were flowing into the United States, and European economies surged as the U.S. slipped into recession.
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