War & Peace Quote by W. Averell Harriman

Harriman is doing something that diplomats do better than anyone: turning a moral alliance into an accounting problem. On paper, Lend-Lease was wartime solidarity, a logistical lifeline against a common enemy. In his telling, it becomes a story about “plants” - not just factories, but industrial capacity itself - slipping across the ledger from emergency aid to strategic subsidy. The phrase “authorized by Washington” spreads responsibility upward, a subtle reminder that the machinery of policy can outrun the judgment of the people tasked with executing it. He’s not confessing; he’s prosecuting, with receipts.

The key move is in “not justified for their war effort.” That’s bureaucratic language with a hard edge: it implies the Soviets were gaming the system, requesting assets that couldn’t plausibly help win the current fight. Harriman’s “I thought” reads modest, but it’s a power claim. As the U.S. ambassador to the USSR during the war, his suspicion carries the weight of on-the-ground assessment, and it seeds a narrative that would soon harden into Cold War common sense: the ally as future rival, cooperation as a down payment on confrontation.

“They wanted them for postwar use” is the quiet indictment. It reframes Soviet requests as foresight bordering on opportunism, and it reveals Harriman’s real concern: not that the USSR would survive, but that it would emerge from the war stronger, more self-sufficient, and less controllable. The context is the moment when WWII necessity began dissolving into postwar anxiety - when aid stopped being charity and started looking like arming the next competitor.