Jamie Dimon’s Marshall Plan Stops at the Frontier

A pact that writes the tariff rules and leaves the frontier to licensing would make Europe an unlicensed ally.

“The initiative, I think, must come from Europe.” George Marshall said it about halfway through a short speech at Harvard in June 1947, and it was the sentence that turned a speech into a program. It would be neither fitting nor effective, he told his audience, for Washington to draw up a recovery plan for Europe on its own. The Europeans would write it, and the United States would help draft it and back it as far as it practically could. [1]

On September 28, Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, proposed a new transatlantic bargain in a different grammar. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, he argued that the United States should offer Europe a major inducement: if Europe carries out economic and military reforms, “including everything that we consider crucial for security and resiliency,” Washington would negotiate a single comprehensive economic and free-trade agreement with it, one that could later take in Canada, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Australia and the Philippines. [2]

Dimon has been warning for more than a year that Europe is falling behind, and on the facts he is mostly right. [3] He is also arguing against the current of his own government, which is pursuing tariffs against several of the allies he wants to bring into the pact. [4] The proposal has the shape of a Marshall Plan: an American inducement offered in exchange for European reform. Set beside Marshall’s speech, it differs in two ways. The first is who holds the pen. Marshall asked Europe to write the program, while Dimon’s version starts from a list of what Washington considers crucial. The second difference is larger, and it decides whether Europe would come out of such a pact as a partner or as a customer. It concerns which layer of power the bargain reaches.

Everything Except the Frontier

The reforms Dimon names are real, and most of them are European in origin. He wants the European Union to complete its capital markets union and its banking union, to carry out the competitiveness programs Mario Draghi and Enrico Letta drafted in 2024, of which he says under 16 percent has been adopted, and to consolidate defense production while cutting its strategic dependencies in manufacturing and energy. [5] Every item on that list works on capital, banks, weapons, energy or goods. A free-trade agreement is the right instrument for those layers, and a transatlantic one would be worth a great deal.

Dimon is not blind to technology either. In April his own bank extended its Security and Resiliency Initiative, a ten-year, $1.5 trillion program to finance industries tied to economic security, across Europe, and one of its five target sectors is frontier and strategic technologies. [6] American capital is plainly ready to help finance European capacity at the frontier. Capital can build a data center, a lab or a company. It cannot settle whether what gets built may keep running on the systems it was designed around.

The layer that will do most to decide Europe’s growth over the next decade sits where a trade agreement barely reaches. Access to advanced AI chips and to the most capable AI systems is now governed as a question of national security. Chips, the tools that make them, model weights and hosted access to models sit under different statutes and agencies, but they do the same work: each turns access into permission. Trade agreements, for their part, reserve wide room for security measures. The security exception in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade has been part of the multilateral trading system since 1947, and the agreement the United States signed with Canada and Mexico carries one of its own. [7] Neither makes every restriction lawful. Both leave access to technology that a government controls on security grounds outside what a tariff schedule can settle. Under any pact of the kind on offer, whether a European ministry, laboratory or company may use the most capable American systems would remain what it is today: a licensing decision taken in Washington.

Europe has already seen what that looks like. In January 2025 the outgoing administration published a chip-export framework that sorted the world into tiers, and it split the European Union. Ten member states were placed among the closest allies with unrestricted access, and the other seventeen faced caps. [8] The Commission answered in the vocabulary of commerce, protesting that Europe was “an economic opportunity for the US, not a security risk.” [9] In May 2025, two days before companies would have had to comply, the Commerce Department announced that it would rescind the framework and not enforce it. [10] What it showed stayed on the record: a single market, a customs union and a common trade policy did not make Europe one unit in the eyes of the licensing authority.

This June the same structure moved from chips to models. A Commerce Department directive barred foreign nationals, inside the United States or outside it, from using an American lab’s two newest models. With no way to check nationality in real time, the lab switched both off for every customer it had, European customers included. When the government approved a partial restoration on June 26, it covered a set of US organizations, and the controls were lifted on June 30. [11] It was the moment the frontier acquired a guest list. A price lets you in if you can pay; a license lets you in if you are allowed.

Canada supplies the rest of the picture. It already has the comprehensive free-trade agreement Dimon wants to offer Europe, and on September 29 an American ban on some Canadian goods took effect, on top of 50 percent duties that apply regardless of a product’s status under that agreement. [12] Washington describes the measures as a response to Canadian treatment of American exports. [13] Whatever one makes of the dispute, a trade pact binds the tariffs a government agrees to bind and leaves it free to reach for other instruments.

Put the two cases together and the position of a Europe that signs the pact as described is easy to state. It would be an unlicensed ally: tied to the United States by treaty in what it sells, what it borrows and what it builds for defense, and admitted to the systems that will shape its productivity only by a permission that can be narrowed by letter. Its tariffs would be guaranteed. Its access to the frontier would be guaranteed by nothing. An unlicensed ally can be rich, secure and closely integrated, and still depend for its most important input on a decision it has no standing to contest.

What 1948 Actually Paid For

The Marshall Plan is remembered as generosity, roughly $13.3 billion to sixteen countries between 1948 and 1952. [14] It was never unconditional. When sixteen governments met in Paris in July 1947 to draft the European program Marshall had asked for, the State Department made its acceptance depend on six commitments, among them production targets, financial stabilization, lower trade barriers and a standing European organization to run the program. [15] Washington set terms. The terms pointed Europe toward building its own capacity in the industries that decided economic power at the time, and toward owning it.

The program’s administrators went further in practice. In its first year the Economic Cooperation Administration used American dollars to pay for European purchases from other European countries, even when the same goods could be bought in the United States, and it insisted that Europeans buy what was available at home before turning to American suppliers, to the irritation of American business. [16] It financed modern European steel mills and helped rebuild European merchant fleets, both of which would compete with American industry. Congressional oversight staff wrote plainly that the program required economic sacrifice from the United States, including readjustments to make room for foreign competition. [17]

Then came the institutions. In 1949 Congress wrote the encouragement of European unification into the program’s law as explicit American policy, and in 1950 the United States put $350 million of working capital, and later $100 million more, into a European Payments Union that cleared trade among Europeans without running every transaction through the dollar. [18] For more than a decade Washington also accepted that European governments discriminated against American imports, on the reasoning that currencies not yet convertible into dollars justified it. A 1959 memorandum from the American executive director at the International Monetary Fund recorded that the United States had tolerated the practice for twelve years while pressing to relax it where feasible. [19] When convertibility arrived and Washington pushed to end it, French officials complained that America seemed to be abandoning its support for European integration, which rested in part on exactly that discrimination. [20]

The plan served American interests too. About 83 percent of the purchases made with program dollars were spent in the United States, and the program’s first purpose was to keep communist parties out of power in Western Europe. [21] It differed from ordinary aid in how it defined that interest. A Europe strong enough to stand on its own, including in industries where it would beat American firms, was judged worth more to the United States than a Europe that stayed a good customer.

Europe is rich now, the inducement on offer is market access, and the offer is a banker’s, made as his government moves the other way on trade. Steel and shipping could be rebuilt almost anywhere with capital and time, while the decisive capability now sits in a handful of firms behind licenses, which makes the plan’s design principle more pressing: pay for European capacity in the layer that decides economic power, and let Europe own it.

A Deeper Pipe, Pointed West

Draghi’s own case for reform runs through exactly the layer the pact leaves out. His argument is that Europe’s productivity gap with the United States is at bottom a technology gap. Addressing the European Parliament in February 2025, he noted that eight of the ten leading large language models had been developed in the United States and the other two in China, and warned: “Every day we delay, the technology frontier is moving away from us.” [22] The capital markets union Dimon wants is the financing half of that problem. Its purpose is to move Europe’s large pool of savings into European companies at scale.

Complete it without stable access to the frontier, and one plausible result is a Europe whose savings flow more efficiently to wherever the frontier sits, which today means across the Atlantic. A deeper capital market is a pipe. A pact that deepens the pipe while leaving the frontier under license settles very little about where the pipe leads.

The same holds for the defense reforms. Consolidating Europe’s defense production is meant to make Europe a more capable security partner, and to the extent that modern weapons programs run on the systems at issue here, in design, logistics and targeting analysis, consolidation on licensed foundations would produce a larger and more integrated industry with the same exposure at its base. In a crisis where the license holder read the situation differently, a bigger European defense sector would stay exposed to the same veto. The pact could end up financing a larger version of the dependence it was meant to reduce.

Europe is not empty-handed at this layer. The only company in the world that makes the extreme-ultraviolet lithography machines every leading-edge chip depends on is Dutch. The Dutch government had already restricted sales of those machines, and since September 2023 it has also required its own export licenses for ASML’s most advanced immersion systems. [23] Europe already runs a license over one input the whole frontier needs, and of everything in the hand Dimon describes, that is the one card played at the same table as the frontier. The card is not wholly European. The machine’s extreme-ultraviolet light source comes from Cymer, a San Diego company ASML acquired in 2013 and runs as a division based in the United States, and a component built in the United States ships under American export rules. [24] Each side already has a hand on the other’s supply, and neither has written down when it may use it.

Four Terms for Washington

If an administration takes up the idea and wants what the planners of 1948 wanted, a Europe able to stand beside it, four terms would do the work.

The first is to write eligibility into the treaty. The pact should cover all four channels to the frontier, since any one left outside becomes the new switch. Governments, firms and research institutions in member states that meet agreed security conditions should hold standing access, with the sensitive categories that remain excluded named in advance instead of left to open-ended discretion. The obligation would bind governments, not companies: nothing in it would require a private lab to sell a product, release its weights or ignore evidence of misuse.

A genuine emergency would still permit immediate action. The suspending government would then have to identify the capability at issue, give its reasons through a confidential channel, keep unrelated services running and submit any continuing restriction to a joint review on a fixed clock. A restriction the review does not renew would lapse, and one kept in place outside the procedure would entitle the other side to suspend proportionate benefits of its own, access to European lithography included. A review without a remedy is advisory. With one, a broad and open-ended suspension becomes costly to sustain without explanation.

The method already exists for the closest allies. Since September 1, 2024, most defense trade among the United States, Britain and Australia has moved without individual export licenses under an exemption that took effect once Washington certified that both partners ran comparable export controls and granted reciprocal exemptions. Officials estimated that about 80 percent of existing commercial defense trade became eligible, while an excluded-technology list kept the most sensitive items under license. [25] That exemption covers defense articles under a different statute from the one that governs chips and models, so it proves the method can be written and leaves open how it would carry over. It also shows that an administration can give an ally a standing claim without handing it a veto over national security.

The second is to treat the Union as one eligibility unit. The 2025 framework’s split between ten members and seventeen asked Europe to finish its single market in capital while fragmenting it in compute. An agreement premised on European integration cannot license Europe country by country. Union-wide eligibility would have to rest on Union-wide rules: common enforcement standards, end-use monitoring and penalties for diversion, with a way to suspend a single violating entity without cutting off the member state it sits in, let alone the Union.

The third is to accept a European preference at the frontier, the way 1948 accepted discrimination against dollar goods. Public purchases of European compute and European models, and public money for European labs, should sit outside the pact’s disciplines on subsidies and procurement. Dimon’s stated aim is a Europe that can serve as a stronger counterweight to Beijing’s economic power. [26] A Europe that owns part of the frontier serves that aim better than one that rents all of it.

The fourth is to let Europe write the reform list. The reforms Dimon wants already have European authors; what they lack is a European majority willing to pass them. A list presented as Washington’s conditions hands every government that opposes a reform a ready argument that it is an American demand. Marshall understood that the conditions a recipient writes are the ones it defends at home.

These terms ask something real of Washington: limits on discretionary pressure against allies, and tolerance for European firms that will sometimes take business from American ones. They also return something an administration can defend on American grounds: joint controls against diversion to adversaries, predictable access to European equipment the United States does not make, and a Europe with less reason to cut itself off from American technology wholesale.

Four Terms for Brussels

The first is to price the pact in eligibility. Tariff concessions can be withdrawn by the next administration, as Canada has found, and they reach only the layers where Europe’s position is already strongest. Brussels should treat any agreement that leaves the license layer outside the treaty as a trade deal, valuable on its own terms, and stop describing it as a strategic partnership.

The second is to play the lithography card as reciprocity. The American exemption for Britain and Australia was granted in exchange for comparable controls and a matching exemption flowing back. Europe can offer the same: bring European controls on lithography and other critical tools into one treaty procedure with American controls on chips and models, so that each side’s standing access to the other’s chokepoint is written down and neither can narrow it by letter. Because the machine already carries American parts, the reciprocity has to be procedural: neither side gives up its switch, and both agree on when and how it may be used against the other. License for license is a bargain between parties that each hold something, and it is the only version of this pact in which Europe arrives with more than its market.

The third is to keep the exit executable whatever the treaty says. Treaty guarantees can be broken, and an exit that has been rehearsed is much harder to take away. European supervisors have already named the risk in finance: in October 2025 the Dutch central bank and markets regulator warned that states could use the sector’s dependence on a small number of non-European IT providers as leverage in a trade dispute, and that lock-in makes switching costly. [27] Keeping the exit open means procurement rules that keep data and workloads portable in practice, switching between providers that has actually been tested, fallback models for essential public functions, which may be slower than the best available system but must work, and a domestic floor of inference capacity that does not depend on any single foreign supplier. These rules would apply to every supplier, American or otherwise, and they are what make the ally worth bargaining with. A partner that cannot leave brings nothing to the table except compliance.

The fourth is to do the Draghi reforms for Europe’s own reasons and on its own schedule. Marshall’s sentence applies in both directions. That the case for a European capital market reached the front pages in late September through an American banker’s op-ed is a measure of how far the initiative has drifted from Europe.

The Rules That Will Matter

Dimon wants a pact that would let the United States and its allies set the rules of global trade, and he writes of securing the West’s strength for the next 250 years. [28] Over that horizon the rules that matter most will be the ones about who may use the systems that do the work, and on what terms. A pact that writes the tariff rules and leaves those to a licensing office would bind Europe closely to the United States in everything except the thing most likely to decide its future.

The Marshall Plan paid Europe to build. A pact that stops below the frontier pays Europe to rent.

Notes

[1] George C. Marshall, address at Harvard University, June 5, 1947, https://www.nato.int/docu/speech/1947/s470605a_e.htm. The sentence quoted is Marshall’s; the surrounding lines are paraphrased.

[2] Jamie Dimon, “A Plan for the Western World’s Revival,” Wall Street Journal, September 28, 2026, https://www.wsj.com/opinion/jamie-dimon-a-plan-for-the-western-worlds-revival-5fb12cc2. Quoted as reported in Jenni Reid, “Jamie Dimon has a plan to revive the West: A ‘big, beautiful’ deal with Europe,” CNBC, September 29, 2026, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/29/jamie-dimon-europe-trade.html.

[3] Fortune, “Jamie Dimon gets real with Europe about shrinking to just 65% of American GDP over 10-15 years,” July 10, 2025, reporting his remarks in Dublin, https://fortune.com/2025/07/10/jamie-dimon-tells-europe-youre-losing-not-good-tariffs-jpmorgan/.

[4] Reid, note [2] (the op-ed’s contrast with the administration’s tariff policy and the souring of relations with the EU and Canada).

[5] Cris Tolomia, “Jamie Dimon is calling for a ‘big, beautiful’ U.S.-Europe free trade deal,” Quartz, September 29, 2026, https://qz.com/jamie-dimon-us-europe-free-trade-deal-092926 (the Draghi and Letta programs and the under-16-percent figure, which is Dimon’s estimate); Reid, note [2] (capital markets union, banking union, defense, manufacturing and energy independence).

[6] JPMorganChase, “JPMorganChase Expands Security and Resiliency Initiative Across Europe,” press release, April 21, 2026, https://www.jpmorganchase.com/newsroom/press-releases/2026/jpmc-expands-sri-across-europe. The $1.5 trillion figure is the initiative’s global ten-year total, not a European allocation.

[7] General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (1947), art. XXI (Security Exceptions); Agreement between the United States of America, the United Mexican States, and Canada (2020), art. 32.2 (Essential Security).

[8] U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security, “Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion,” interim final rule (RIN 0694-AJ90), issued January 13, 2025, published January 15, 2025; Amanda Liang, “EU urges Trump to reverse Biden’s AI export ban affecting 17 member states,” DigiTimes, January 15, 2025, https://apps.digitimes.com/news/a20250115PD218/eu-european-commission-ban-security.html.

[9] Joint Statement by Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen and Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič, European Commission, January 13, 2025, as reported in “Europe hopes Trump trumps Biden’s plan for US to play AI gatekeeper,” The Register, January 14, 2025, https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/14/ec_biden_ai_order_concerns/.

[10] U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security, announcement of May 13, 2025 that it would rescind the AI Diffusion Rule and not enforce it; the compliance date had been May 15, 2025.

[11] Anthropic, “Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5,” June 12, 2026, https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access; Anthropic, “Redeploying Fable 5,” June 30, 2026, updated July 1, 2026, https://www.anthropic.com/news/redeploying-fable-5. These are the affected company’s accounts.

[12] “America’s Canadian import restrictions come into force. Here are the products barred from entry,” CNBC, September 29, 2026, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/29/canada-import-ban-trade-war.html; RV Industry Association, “White House Announces Import Ban on Canadian Products and Modifications to Section 338 Tariff Scope” (the 50 percent Section 338 duty applies regardless of USMCA qualification), https://www.rvia.org/news-insights/white-house-announces-import-ban-canadian-products-and-modifications-section-338-tariff-scope.

[13] “U.S. reveals import ban on slew of Canadian goods as trade war escalates,” CNBC, September 9, 2026, quoting U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/09/us-canada-trade-war-import-ban.html.

[14] Congressional Research Service, The Marshall Plan: Design, Accomplishments, and Relevance to the Present, Report 97-62 (January 6, 1997), summary and Table 2 (Agency for International Development figures, April 3, 1948 to June 30, 1952), https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/97-62.html.

[15] CRS, note [14], pp. 3-4 (the Paris conference of July 12, 1947, and the six conditions of U.S. acceptance).

[16] CRS, note [14], pp. 18 and 23 (dollar financing of intra-European purchases in the program’s first year; the requirement to buy in Europe before turning to U.S. suppliers).

[17] CRS, note [14], p. 21 (steel mill and merchant marine projects; the congressional watchdog committee staff on economic sacrifice and readjustment for foreign competition).

[18] CRS, note [14], p. 18 (the 1949 amendment making European unification explicit U.S. policy; the $350 million and $100 million contributions to the European Payments Union, established 1950).

[19] Memorandum from the U.S. Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund (Southard) to Secretary of the Treasury Anderson and Acting Secretary of State Dillon, “The Issue of Dollar Discrimination,” May 18, 1959, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, vol. IV, doc. 46, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v04/d46.

[20] Southard memorandum, note [19] (the French reaction at the 1959 GATT meeting and the link to integration in the OEEC and the Common Market).

[21] CRS, note [14], pp. 16 and 19 (containment as the program’s rationale; an estimated 83 percent of ECA-dollar purchases spent in the United States).

[22] Mario Draghi, remarks to the European Parliament, February 2025, European Parliament audiovisual service transcript, https://api.multimedia.europarl.europa.eu/documents/20125/81296251/1739781678112_I267271%5BSD-EN%5D.pdf; Mario Draghi, The Future of European Competitiveness (European Commission, September 2024).

[23] ASML, “Statement regarding Dutch government’s export control regulations announcement,” June 30, 2023 (national licenses for TWINSCAN NXT:2000i and later immersion systems from September 1, 2023; EUV sales already restricted), https://www.asml.com/news/press-releases/2023/statement-regarding-export-control-regulations-dutch-government; Associated Press, “Dutch semiconductor machine export restrictions to come into force in September,” June 30, 2023 (ASML as the world’s only producer of EUV lithography machines).

[24] ASML, “ASML to acquire Cymer to accelerate development of EUV technology,” press release, October 17, 2012 (Cymer to be run as an independent division based in the United States, delivering DUV and EUV light sources), https://www.asml.com/news/press-releases/2012/asml-to-acquire-cymer-to-accelerate-development-of-euv-technology; ASML, “ASML completes acquisition of Cymer,” 2013, https://asml.com/news/press-releases/2013/asml-completes-acquisition-of-cymer. On jurisdiction: items in the United States are subject to the Export Administration Regulations, 15 C.F.R. 734.3(a)(1).

[25] U.S. Department of State, International Traffic in Arms Regulations, AUKUS exemption, 22 C.F.R. 126.7, interim final rule, 89 Fed. Reg. 67270 (effective September 1, 2024); Bureau of Industry and Security and Directorate of Defense Trade Controls, “Export Control Changes for the AUKUS Partnership” (briefing; about 80 percent of the value of existing commercial defense trade eligible; the Excluded Technology List), https://www.bis.gov/media/documents/aukus.pdf; Perkins Coie, “Export Control Exemptions Facilitate U.S. Defense and Sensitive Technology Trade” (the August 15, 2024 certification of comparable controls and reciprocal exemptions), https://perkinscoie.com/insights/update/export-control-exemptions-facilitate-us-defense-and-sensitive-technology-trade.

[26] Reid, note [2] (Dimon on a Europe that would be a stronger counterweight to Beijing’s economic power).

[27] Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets and De Nederlandsche Bank, “Digital dependence of the financial sector,” October 20, 2025, https://www.afm.nl/~/profmedia/files/rapporten/2025/digital-dependence-of-the-financial-sector.pdf.

[28] Reid, note [2] (setting the global rules on trade; the Western world’s strength for the next 250 years).