To travel from the Morgenthau Plan to the Schuman Plan is to move from an American proposal to destroy Ruhr industry to the actual organization of Europe around it only five years later and to cross from the threshold of the short, unhappy period of postwar reconstruction into the far longer and better era of sustained growth and improved public welfare that continues uninterrupted into the present. This transformation required the maturation of American foreign policy. The United States wanted to withdraw from Europe after the defeat of Hitler. Roosevelt's Grand Design for the postwar world did not break cleanly with traditional isolationism. Based on the supposition that a framework of peace could be built upon the two principles of self-determination and free trade, it limited U.S. interventions to policing actions conducted jointly with the other Allied nations, especially the Soviet Union. As a reconstruction strategy, the Grand Design was worthless and as a guide to action meaningless; it would indeed remain only a big sketch.

United States policy-making after World War II developed in response to successive international crises, cropping up as a result of economic and political dislocation, shifts in the strategic balance, mutual hostility, miscalculation, and incompetence. Unguided by overall strategy, America's reconstruction policy in Europe, particularly as it affected the occupied former Reich, became the plaything of domestic factions.