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| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Truman Doctrine |
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| US Military History Companion: Truman Doctrine |
In 1947, Soviet‐American tensions developed along the “northern tier” of the Mediterranean and culminated in the Truman Doctrine. The Soviet Union, recently rebuffed in Iran, seemed determined to stage a Communist takeover in Greece and wrest the Dardenelles Straits—connecting the Black Sea with the Mediterranean—from Turkey. Although it is doubtful that the Soviets were either directly involved in the Greek troubles or actually prepared to take military action against Turkey, the perception of danger distorted reality. The Truman administration feared that the Soviets sought access to the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, and ultimately the entire Middle East. Soviet hegemony in this oil‐rich region could promote the collapse of Western Europe.
The immediate concern was Greece. The British supported the restoration of the monarchy after World War II, but opposition came from numerous groups, including the Greek Communist Party. Fighting had broken out in Athens in late 1944, which resulted in an uneasy truce in February 1946; but in August, Greek guerrillas raided a number of villages and towns, and soon received assistance from the Communist regimes in Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria. By the spring of 1947, the U.S. government regarded Greece as the supreme test of the free world.
Turkey was also crucial. Located along the Soviet border, it controlled the Dardanelles and was vital to the Soviets' push for a warm‐water link to the Middle East. By early 1947, Soviet troops had amassed along the common border, causing a war of nerves that forced the Turkish government into military preparations.
The crisis in the Mediterranean became an American problem in February 1947, when the British government declared itself financially incapable of maintaining long‐standing commitments in Greece and Turkey. Secretary of State George C. Marshall had already instructed his undersecretary, Dean Acheson, to prepare an economic and military assistance plan for Greece. Congressional members from both parties received invitations to the White House to join the administration in halting a Communist drive allegedly engineered by the Kremlin. Because of traditional American isolationism, what lay ahead, President Harry S. Truman remarked, was “the greatest selling job ever facing a President.”
The result was the Truman Doctrine. Before a joint session of Congress on 12 March 1947, the president outlined the dangers in Greece and Turkey. “I believe,” he emphasized, “that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” To save Greece and Turkey, he called on Congress to authorize a military and economic aid program of $400 million.
Widespread resistance arose against this policy. Marshall and State Department adviser George F. Kennan thought the anti‐Communist tone of the message too severe. Isolationist Republican senator Robert Taft argued against assuming Britain's responsibilities, and columnist Walter Lippmann warned that the administration had not distinguished which areas were vital to U.S. interests and was heading toward a worldwide ideological crusade. Containment, Lippmann asserted, was a “strategic monstrosity.” Acheson insisted that the Truman Doctrine applied specifically to Greece and Turkey, and that the administration would consider aid to other countries only on their “individual merits.”
The arguments continued for weeks, but in May 1947 Congress approved the Greek‐Turkish aid bills by a wide, bipartisan margin, and American aid was soon en route to both countries.
The Truman Doctrine stabilized Greece and Turkey, thereby appearing to establish the credibility of containment. Nearly 300 U.S. military and civilian personnel provided advisory assistance to the Greek Army in its war against the guerrillas. American weaponry also proved essential to the government's victory, although the growing rift between Yugoslav leader Marshal Tito (Josip Broz) and the Soviet Union played an important role. A year after his defection from the Cominform in July 1948, Tito closed the border and effectively denied the Greek guerrillas further refuge and assistance. In October 1949, the royalist army scattered them into the northern mountains of Greece and into Albania, and the fighting came to an end. The crisis in Turkey likewise passed as America's military assistance and advice bolstered the country against Soviet pressure.
Containment brought mixed results. It yielded a monumental triumph in the Near East, and hence in the Cold War. Yet the administration's rhetoric and emergency tactics encouraged a Red Scare during the 1950s, known as McCarthyism. More far‐reaching, American policymakers later ignored the restraints implanted in the Truman Doctrine to launch the global crusade Lippmann had warned against. Indeed, containment became heavily military in orientation, as exemplified by the establishment of NATO in 1949 and the later U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
[See also Cold War: External Course; Cold War: Domestic Course.]
Bibliography
| US Military Dictionary: Truman Doctrine |
A containment policy presented by President Harry S. Truman to Congress on March 12, 1947, during the Cold War, to protect Greece and Turkey from potential Soviet communist aggression. It proposed a military and economic aid program of $400 million. It was approved by Congress in May 1947, after much resistance and debate, and effectively stabilized Greece and Turkey.
See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.
| Political Dictionary: Truman Doctrine |
The so-called Truman Doctrine was enunciated by President Harry S. Truman in a speech to a joint session of the US Congress on 12 March 1947. In it he denounced the oppressive nature of the communist system of government and warned against the possibility that campaigns of subversion might bring even more countries under that system. He sought, and was given, Congressional authority to provide assistance to threatened regimes—initially those in Greece and Turkey. The ‘Doctrine’ was thus the starting point for the strategy of containment of communism developed by successive US Presidents during the Cold War.
— David Carlton
| US History Encyclopedia: Truman Doctrine |
The 12 March 1947 announcement of the Truman Doctrine marked the beginning of a new, aggressive American posture toward the Soviet Union. The administration of President Harry S. Truman abandoned efforts to accommodate the Soviet Union, which had emerged as America's principal rival after World War II. Now the two superpowers engaged in the Cold War. The doctrine called on Congress to approve $400 million in military assistance for Greece, which was fighting communist insurgents, and neighboring Turkey, also believed to be threatened by Soviet subversion. The doctrine was formulated after Britain indicated it no longer had the wherewithal to support the royalist Greek government. But during the previous year, the Truman administration had grown increasingly suspicious of Soviet intentions as the nations of Eastern Europe disappeared behind what the former British prime minister Winston Churchill had termed the "iron curtain."
Although it was specifically targeted to Greece, the Truman Doctrine was envisioned to have a much broader reach. Truman made this clear when he framed his request as part of a general policy to "support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." The doctrine was to be the first step in a strategy of containment of the Soviet Union, designed to prevent communist influence throughout Western Europe. The United States subsequently agreed to launch the massive recovery plan for Europe known as the Marshall Plan and entered its first peacetime military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The eruption of the Korean War in 1950 prompted a further expansion of the Truman Doctrine and the containment policy. The United States was committed to fighting communism in Asia and around the world.
Bibliography
Gaddis, John Lewis. The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947. New York: Columbia University Press, 1972.
Harbutt, Fraser J. The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and the Origins of the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
| Wikipedia: Truman Doctrine |
The Truman Doctrine is a set of principles of U.S. foreign policy created on March 12, 1947 by President Harry S Truman. In his speech to Congress, Truman declared that the United States, as "leader of the free world", must support democracy worldwide and fight against communism. The approach was conceived with the help of George Marshall and Dean Acheson, two influential associates.[1]
The Truman Doctrine represented the harsh aspect of containment policy, and the Marshall Plan was the soft side. The declaration of the Truman Doctrine served to inhibit the formation of coalition governments that included communist elements.
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In 1946, George F. Kennan was serving as deputy head of the U.S. mission in Moscow. At the end of that term, Kennan sent a 5,450-word telegram (the "Long Telegram")[2] from Moscow to Secretary of State James Byrnes outlining a new strategy on how to handle diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.
This dispatch came to the attention of Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, a leading advocate for a hard-line approach to relations with the Soviets.
In February 1947, President Truman appeared before Congress and used Kennan's warnings in the "Long Telegram" as the basis of for what became known as the Truman Doctrine.
Based on the Long Telegram, Kennan published an article in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym "X," entitled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct,"[3][4]. The publication triggered an intense debate. Walter Lippmann, a leading U.S. journalist and commentator on international affairs, who favored proposals of disengagement in Germany, strongly criticized the "X" article.[5]
President Truman, who was supported by Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg and the Republican-controlled Congress, promulgated this doctrine after "Prime Minister Tsaldaris of Greece visited Washington in December 1946 to plead for additional American assistance."[6] Aid was agreed by the United States government to be given to both Greece and Turkey. It was an early response to a perceived political involvement by the Soviet Union in Europe and Asia, as suggested by the Communist movements in Turkey and Greece.
The United States gave aid to Greece and Turkey for both political and military reasons; this came shortly after Great Britain ceased its economic aid to both countries in 1947.[7] The situation was perceived as very important for American balance of power politics in the context of the cold war: "If Greece was lost, Turkey would become an untenable outpost in a sea of communism. Similarly, if Turkey yielded to Soviet demands, the position of Greece would be extremely endangered."[8] It was a regional domino effect threat that guided the United States' decision. The United States was cautious of a third World War at this time, and needed military advantages over the Soviet Union if they were to win. Greece and Turkey turned out to be very important: "the failure of the West to prevent a communist takeover in Greece would not only put the Russians on a particularly dangerous flank for the Turks, but strengthen the Soviet Union's ability to cut off allied supplies and assistance in the event of war."[9]
The Truman Doctrine was the first in a series of containment moves by the United States, followed by economic restoration of Western Europe through the Marshall Plan and military containment by the creation of NATO in 1949. In Truman's words, it became "the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." Using a framing rhetoric that continues to have resonance today, Truman reasoned that because these "totalitarian regimes" coerced "free peoples," they represented a threat to international peace and the national security of the United States.
President Truman made the proclamation in an address to the U.S. Congress on February 27, 1947, amid the crisis of the Greek Civil War (1946–1949). Truman insisted that if Greece and Turkey did not receive the aid that they needed, they would inevitably fall to Communism with consequences throughout the region.
In 1950, Truman signed the top-secret policy plan NSC-68, which shifted foreign policy from passive to active containment. The document differed from Kennan's original notion of containment outlined in the "X" article, containing much harsher anti-Communist rhetoric. NSC-68 explicitly stated that the Communists planned for world domination.
The act, which Truman signed into law on May 22, 1947, granted Greece $300 million in military and economic aid. In the second stage of the civil war in December 1944 (The Dekimvriana), the British helped prevent the seizure of Athens by the leftist National Liberation Front (EAM), controlled effectively by the Communists. In the third phase (1946–1949), guerrilla forces controlled by the Greek Communist Party (KKE) fought against the internationally recognized Greek government which was formed after 1946 elections boycotted by the KKE. Increased American aid helped defeat the KKE, after interim defeats for government forces from 1946 to 1948. British support was affected by the British economic crisis. In 1967 a Greek military junta overthrew the centre right government of Panagiotis Kanellopoulos and seized power. The military junta of Greece, though criticized worldwide for its human rights record, was supported by the American government during its seven year rule.[10] This caused anti-American sentiment in Greece. Some forty years after the harsh oppressions under military rule, U.S. President Bill Clinton issued an apology, largely unreported by the Western media, for the United States' past support of the totalitarian government.[11][12]
At the conclusion of World War II, Stalin demanded partial control of the Dardanelles, a strategic passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.[13][14] Since British assistance to Turkey had ended in 1947, the U.S. dispatched military aid to ensure that Turkey would retain chief control of the passage. The aircraft carrier Franklin D Roosevelt was sent to join the Missouri,[15] accompanied by $100 million in economic and military aid to the nation.
The postwar period from 1946 started with a "multi-party period" and a Democratic Party government of Adnan Menderes, but in 1960 there was a military coup d'état led by General Cemal Gürsel, followed by the execution of Menderes. In 1971 there was another coup against the rightist government of Süleyman Demirel and the Justice Party, and another coup in 1980.
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