ABSTRACT
The difficulty of integrating economics and national security is a hard fact of practical politics. The day-to-day separation of these issues is grounded in basic structures of policymaking and implementation. In order to manage complex political issues and vast public expenditures, modern states must rely on large specialized bureaucracies. The United States (US) understood the potential threat to North Atlantic Treaty Organization's southern flank and stepped in with short-term bridging loans until longer-term financing was available. The history of international debt shows how institutional specialization and particular bureaucratic concerns make it difficult to integrate economic and security issues. Larger diplomatic and security concerns get short shrift, and so do related economic issues such as trade policy. If US policies in early postwar Europe treated economics and security issues as interrelated, the success of those policies led to routinization and bureaucratic specialization. US policy sometimes did encourage coordination among private creditors, but it stopped well short of underwriting their credit risks.
