#453
Benn Steil, author of The World That Wasn't: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century and Senior Fellow and Director of International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, joins The Realignment. Benn and Marshall discuss the origins of the Cold War and postwar U.S. foreign policy through the career of Henry Wallace, FDR's VP before Harry Truman. They discuss despite claims from critics of U.S. foreign policy like the director Oliver Stone, a Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was inevitable.
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0:00 - Introduction
1:37 - Henry Wallace
6:05 - What was the Cold War?
8:52 - Alternative vision for Cold War
16:02 - Great man theory
19:59 - Critical moments during Cold War
24:00 - Stalin
27:11 - Decolonization
33:07 - Henry Wallace in 1930’s
44:23 - What did the US do wrong in the early Cold War?
48:32 - Implications for the 2020’s
54:21 - Idealism