This prospect acted as a brake on U.S. policy in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The United States never tried to roll back the Soviet bloc in Europe militarily: The likelihood of starting a major war was just too great. When it came to rearming the free world, American planners envisioned a carefully constrained West German military that could only operate within NATO, rather than a fully rearmed, autonomous West Germany that could pose “a grave threat to the security of the USSR.”
