The Marshall Plan did not end in 2026. The post-Marshall illusion did.
The European Recovery Program of 1948 has been told too long as morality when its deeper grammar was mastery. American capital in the foundations of the continent, Atlantic security in the walls, European integration as the wiring. The European Coal and Steel Community, and the European Union (EU) it later became, were not spiritual awakenings. They were instruments of containment: bind France and Germany, stabilise the West, keep the periphery manageable beneath a strategic ceiling drawn in Washington. The arrangement worked. It produced, however, a managed order rather than a civilisation governing itself.
The wiring is now exposed. The United States is withdrawing roughly five thousand troops from Germany, with further reductions signalled. A 25% tariff hangs over EU cars and lorries. The Strait of Hormuz absorbs Pentagon attention. And in Brussels, the institutional reflex is to summon Article 42(7) of the Treaty on European Union (TEU), the mutual assistance clause, as if a provision could substitute for a sovereign.
Europe has handbooks. It has simulations. It has the vocabulary of solidarity. The organ it lacks is command.
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