• knfrmity
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    11 months ago

    This also glosses over the point that lend -lease was primarily meant to create conditions of extreme and unpayable debt. The British empire was gutted and effectively taken over by the US after the war in exchange for not calling the debt due, a debt which is still on the books today. The Bretton Woods institutions were built off of these unequal bargaining positions as well.

    The Soviets saw the broad strokes of thus coming, especially when the US came to them with a post-war rebuilding lend-lease proposal. If they hadn’t, the USSR would have been dead before Kennedy.