To travel from Morgenthau Plan to Schuman Plan is to move from an American wartime proposal to destroy Ruhr industry to the actual organization of Europe around it little more than five years later. It is also to cross from the threshold of one short and unhappy era into a far longer and better one, passing from the material devastation, political chaos, intellectual confusion, and moral doubt left in the wake of the war to the recovery, reorganization, and renewal of confidence that would lead the way to more than a generation of unbroken peace, increasing prosperity, and improved social welfare. Between 1945 and 1950 changes normally requiring decades to develop and unfold took place within the space of only a few years, too rapidly to be fully recognized at the time or completely understood even now. The Germans had to give up their national ambitions, accept the military and moral verdict of the war, and somehow draw the appropriate lessons from it. The French had to force themselves out of a national mood of fatalism and complacency – a habitual shoulder shrugging – and endure the discomforts, pains, and occasional agonies of modernization. The United States had to play successfully the new historical role that World War II had thrust upon it as the only remaining great power in Europe west of the Elbe.

The United States laid out the route that led to a German return to Europe and set the pace for the voyage along it. Aware also that any attempt to extend its power west of the Elbe would encounter the united opposition of the three western Allies.