Looking back, this orgy of ostentatious giving, the mugging for the camera, the battles over who could donate more or whose sacrifice could be nobler, seemed to have a performative dimension. Was it all just generosity for show, a public relations ploy, or worse—a neoimperialist plot to hook the world on U.S. goods? Or did the Friendship Train stem from a deep-rooted sense of kindness, a virtue hard-wired into the American psyche. Cynics and true-believers can debate about it, but most people harbor multiple motives for their acts. Whatever their intentions, the fact is that Americans chose to give and, in the end, saved lives. Years later, that was how it would be remembered, as Europeans made their gratitude known. And certainly, at the time, the donations were welcomed as a lifeline. Thank you letters arrived from overseas. From Vienna, one man wrote to the Friendship Train Committee Chair of Hartford, Connecticut, “We cannot fully measure what this noble help means.” He said that people like him could hardly have survived without the help that Americans so freely gave. A German man in Luneburg described how much Germans look forward to the many CARE packages Americans sent.

No one realized what all this meant when the Friendship Train first began its journey. The racing of food to Europe, the selfless acts of giving by average Americans, the overcoming of communist sabotage, and the steady, reliable stream of American aid, all created the perfect playbook for another, more dramatic rescue operation. The Friendship Train was, in a sense, a trial run. In the next showdown, however, supplies could no longer go by ship or rail. This time they would have to go by air to rescue the hungry people of West Berlin.

From the vantage point of 2020, it can seem hard to imagine Americans uniting over anything, much less a massive rescue operation for starving strangers. The country has become so inward-looking that it has lost focus on the world beyond its shores. Right now, innocent civilians in Yemen are suffering starvation in an appalling humanitarian disaster. More than one million Chinese Uighurs are trapped in concentration camps. Human-rights abuses have surged in recent years from the Philippines to Hong Kong. Most Americans, if they knew the details of human suffering abroad, would be moved to act. But a country can only act on its conscience when it is conscious of the facts. Politicians, media, and civic leaders could help unite America again by focusing on what America can do for those in greatest need abroad. There are no easy fixes for getting America back on track, but at this holiday season, we could begin a process of renewal by helping strangers overseas, as we have so often done before.

Zachary Shore is a professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, a senior fellow at UC Berkeley’s Institute of European Studies, and a National Security Visiting Fellow of Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

Image: Reuters