The Marshall Plan was one of the most influential foreign policy programs of the postwar era. It signaled the end of American attempts to forge a joint policy with the Soviet Union on Europe and Germany. By spring 1947, it had become clear that the United States and the Soviet Union held conflicting views about how best to deal with their former enemy economically and in terms of security issues. Western Europe and Germany were central to the American planning that led to a politically motivated economic aid program. The Marshall Plan was to become the cornerstone of the United States' dual containment policy toward the USSR and Germany.

The Soviet Union wanted to support its own economic recovery through reparations paid out of Germany's current industrial production. At the same time, it sought to secure political and military control of Germany by taking part in the monitoring of the Ruhr region, Germany's industrial heartland. American foreign policy experts recognized that the result of such a policy would be a German economy geared almost exclusively to the needs of the USSR. Germany's neighbors, it was thought, would inevitably suffer heavily, making rapid economic recovery in Western Europe extremely difficult to achieve. This view, held by many expert observers and by members of the American military government in Germany, was also shared by prominent Republicans, including former president Herbert Hoover. Hoover led a commission on economic conditions in Germany and Europe that had been created by President Harry S. Truman, and he confirmed this assessment in a report of March 1947: