The marshall plan rested squarely on an American conviction that European economic recovery was essential to the long-term interests of the United States. These interests were interdependent and mutually reinforcing, so much so that public officials saw little need to rank them in the order that subsequent historians have tried to establish. They included economic interests. Policymakers in the Truman administration were convinced that a “dynamic economy” at home required American trade and investment abroad, which in turn required the reconstruction of major trading partners in Europe and their reintegration into a multilateral system of world trade. These requirements summed up a world view rooted in political conviction as well as in economic interests. American leaders envisioned an open international economy founded on the principles of liberal capitalism, such as free trade and equal opportunity. But they also equated these principles with democratic forms of government, associated autarkic economic policies with totalitarian political regimes, and assumed that “enemies in the market place” could not be “friends at the council table.” “The political line up followed the economic line up,” as Cordell Hull once put it.

Strategic interests paralleled those of an economic and political nature. American policymakers viewed European markets, sources of supply, manpower resources, and industrial capacity as strategic assets that must not be controlled by a hostile power or coalition. The recent war had demonstrated the threat to American security inherent in such a development and the concomitant need to preserve American access to Europe's resources while denying them to potential rivals.