War & Peace Quote by James Forrestal

Peace, Forrestal suggests, is a machine that needs fuel, not a prayer that needs repeating. The line is coldly pragmatic: if you want a "durable peace" after a catastrophic war, you don t just punish the defeated state; you reengineer it. Germany must be "militarily impotent" so it cannot reprise the role that burned Europe down. But it must be "industrially active" so it has something else to do besides brood, radicalize, and become a political vacuum waiting to be filled by extremists or rival empires.

The phrase "revolving fund" is doing ideological work. It dresses a hard power project in the language of accounting: money circulates, repayments replenish the pool, order sustains itself. That technocratic calm is the subtext. Forrestal is arguing that peace is not a moral settlement but a managed system with incentives. You keep Germany inside the economic circuit so it buys, sells, pays, and stabilizes, instead of turning scarcity into grievance and grievance into militarism.

Context matters: this is the early Cold War moment when the United States is shifting from the punitive impulses of postwar revenge to the strategic logic that will become the Marshall Plan. The real fear is not merely German resurgence but Soviet expansion into a weakened Europe. "Industrial" is a proxy for alignment: a productive Germany anchors Western recovery, binds Europe to American capital, and makes democracy materially credible. It s containment, expressed as balance sheet.