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Comment by fosk | Hacker News Reader

Maybe someone can clarify this to me: wasn’t US help essentially given as a loan that would carry interest and repayments? Or was it given for free with the agreement that they would follow a US-inspired democratic system and be allies (and in exchange of trade agreements)? Were military bases in those countries given as a repayment, perhaps in addition to repaying the loans? But even then, isn’t the US paying rent for those bases?

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The repayment is that we took over the defense of Europe and basically eliminated the pre-war European powers as global competitors. This gives us tremendous leverage to do whatever the fuck we want either unilaterally or by coercing our European client-states to act on our behalf.

Europe deciding to light itself on fire twice in the last century is the best thing that ever happened to America.

There were reparations payed to the USA and then there were repayment of the loans provided as aid within Marshall plan.

Loans to a bombed out country in the aftermath of losing a major war can be hard to come by, for the same reasons as they are for a third world country with an unstable government.

It's not uncommon for a country to get stuck in a situation where they have no infrastructure that could attract investment so they have no industry so they have no economic base to build infrastructure. "Get the US to loan us money" is nominally a way out of this.

The US noticed this too and makes loans to such countries de facto through the World Bank, providing them with an opening through which they can crawl up inside those countries and lay eggs.

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