Sailing in the Shadow of the Vietnam War: The GDR Government and the "Vietnam Bonus" of the Early 1970s

Loại tài liệu:

Article

Tác giả:

Horten, Gerd

Đề mục:

Politics

Nhà xuất bản:

Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, United states

Ngày xuất bản:

2013

Định dạng:

pdf

Nguồn gốc:

German Studies Review, Volume 36, Issue 3, 2013, pages 557-578

Ngôn ngữ:

eng

Lượt xem:

Lượt tải:

Nội dung

The question of "Who paid for Vietnam?" indeed became an explosive issue both in East and West Germany in the final years of the war. The increasing cost of the war significantly contributed to the United States' worsening financial position, especially its balance-of-payments deficit. Western European countries-West Germany in particular-were securing the value of the US dollar through buying large amounts of American reserves and refused to sell them even as the value of the dollar began to decline, thus indirectly helping to finance the war. This was done with an implicit understanding of the "Atlantic bargain," by which the United States provided military protection in exchange for international monetary support from its allies. As Hubert Zimmermann highlights, in this way America's allies helped finance the Vietnam War through what he refers to as "an indirect 'Vietnam tax.'" This indirect support became especially apparent after consecutive devaluations of the dollar in the early 1970s, when the currency lost about forty percent of its value. Any country holding US dollar reserves, with West Germany leading the pack, lost an equivalent share of their dollar reserves. In a 1971 interview, the president of the German Central Bank remarked with regret: "We should have been more firm with the Americans." That same year, the left-leaning West German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau put the matter more bluntly and more in line with that of the East German government: "Our economists and our banks know it, even though our politicians don't want to acknowledge it, but our country feels that we have paid a large portion of the sense- less, murderous war in Vietnam and continue to do so.

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Sailing in the Shadow of the Vietnam War: The GDR Government and the "Vietnam Bonus" of the Early 1970s

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