The Truman Doctrine and the Cold War - Essay Example

Your Your The Truman Doctrine and the Cold War To many, the deadly clouds of radiation that brought death so suddenly to so many in Japan signified the end of a long, bloody conflict that had drained the resources of every major power on the planet. The past three decades, especially in Europe, had been ones of immense destruction - not just of buildings and resources, but of people. Germany, which had instigated two attempts to take over the rest of the continent, was at last subdued, and nations the world over welcomed the opportunity for peace. Indeed, as the war was still going on in Europe and Asia, it was thought that the peace afterward would only require that all the world believe in "good faith and getting along with everybody," so horrific had the war been (Leffler p. 346). It was in this time that the United Nations was formed, because the world was even more conflict-weary than it had been after the Great War, when Woodrow Wilson sought to create a League of Nations that would stop major disputes before they ever again became worldwide wars. However, even as workers were still picking up the rubble from the damage in Europe and Asia, the seeds of a new war between the United States and the Soviet Union, two erstwhile allies, were being planted: the Cold War. This was not a war that could ever really begin on a battlefield, because both of the combatants possessed the tactical ability to destroy the planet with nuclear bombs. And so, in many instances, the Cold War became a game to see how much one side would put up with from the other. Perhaps the most volatile moments of the Cold War occurred during the Presidency of John F. Kennedy, when the Soviet Union installed missiles on the island of Cuba, mere miles away from United States soil. The fifteen days of that crisis were as close as the two sides ever came to actual nuclear holocaust. The beginnings of this Cold War, in some ways, may be said to lie at the feet of the United States government. Even during World War II, the United States and Great Britain refused to let the Soviets join the project to create atomic weapons, which led Stalin to mistrust the other two Allies. At the end of the war, the United States stopped sending lend-lease aid far earlier than the Soviets liked, and refused to lend the Soviet government $6 billion for reconstruction, while at the same time lending Great Britain $3.75 billion for similar costs (Pollard, p. 27). The two sides also differed on the postwar fate of Eastern Europe: the Soviet Union, having been invaded twice in thirty years by German armies, wanted to create a buffer zone protecting it from further western invasions, and so it quickly cemented control over most of Eastern Europe, including the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. The Americans, in contrast, supported the Wilsonian idea of an "open world" filled with autonomous, democratic nations. The Soviet grab for Eastern Europe immediately after World War II ended deeply offended American sensibilities (Bailey and Kennedy, p. 822). Stalin was in no way innocent in the beginnings of the Cold War. In 1946, he broke an agreement to remove Soviet troops from northern Iran. In early 1947, when Great Britain told the United States it could no longer assist the Greek government in keeping stability, and when the Turkish government seemed vulnerable to internal agitation, President Truman decided that a containment policy toward the Soviet Union would be best. In a speech to Congress on March 12, 1947, he asked for $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey, to help keep their governments from collapsing, and to keep Communist influence from overtaking those two countries. In this speech, Truman hearkened back to World War II for support: One of the primary objectives of the foreign policy of the United States is the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion. This was a fundamental issue in the war with Germany and Japan. Our victory was won over countries which sought to impose their will, and their way of life, upon other nations (Truman address). This appeal to Congress that was based on the idea of an autonomous life for all countries was one that rang with the sensitivities of the times. The United States had just fought a bloody, four-year war against those who would have taken away the freedom of everyone that they vanquished, and so the Congress responded to this new threat. The open-ended nature of Truman's promises, however, seemed to herald an age when the American military would be called upon to support anti-Communist efforts the world over. This new policy emphasis was a complete reversal of the Monroe Doctrine, which had been a staple of American policy from 1823 even through American refusal to participate in Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations. This doctrine had insisted that the United States stay out of matters dealing with Europe and its affairs. The Truman Doctrine not only suggested involvement in Europe but heavy responsibility on the part of the American government for the future of the free nations around the world (Truman Doctrine). An early criticism of what would become known as the Truman Doctrine was the perception that the United States seemed to be promising support to any country that promised to take on Communism as an enemy. Critics also complained about the doctrine's apparent division of the world between those who favored the United States, and those who favored the Soviet Union (Bailey and Kennedy, p. 826). One of these early critics was Henry Wallace, who found the Truman Doctrine to be patronizing, at best. He argued that No people can be bought. America cannot afford to spend billions and billions of dollars for unproductive purposes. The world is hungry and insecure, and the peoples of all lands demand change. President Truman cannot prevent change in the world any more than he can prevent the tide from coming in or the sun from setting. But once America stands for opposition to change, we are lost. America will become the most-hated nation in the world (Speech on the Truman Doctrine). In other words, Wallace felt that no amount of money would be able to sway the minds of peoples around the globe. In our own time, sixty years after the creation of the Marshall Plan, one might wonder how much the billions and billions and dollars that the United States has sent overseas have bought in terms of global goodwill. While the rest of the world is happy to accept, and even to demand, American aid, other countries are very hesitant, and even hostile, at the thought of accepting conditions on that aid, in terms of internal affairs. Another source of criticism for the President's speech was one of its more obvious aims: to frighten the American public. As Robert Ivie has observed, the containment speech was the first statement of hostilities between the United States and its former ally after the Second World War, and the speech itself was structured to "scare hell out of the country" (As the initial declaration of hostile relations with the Soviet Union after World War II, the president's speech was deliberately designed, in a well-known phrase attributed to Senator Arthur Vandenberg, "to scare hell out of the country"). The Marshall Plan was the primary success of the Truman Doctrine - indeed, this may have been the most positive contribution that the United States has made to international diplomacy in the entire history of the country. The destruction of World War II was followed unmercifully by a harsh winter in Europe in 1946-1947. As a result, many of the Western European countries were suffering from grave economic conditions, which could potentially have led to Communist insurgencies which would have undermined their democratic governments. In a speech at Harvard University's 1947 commencement, Secretary of State George C. Marshall urged the struggling countries in Europe to sit down together and figure out how the United States could best help the region, instead of each individual country. An interesting element of this plan is that the Soviet Union was invited to sit down with the other countries and join in their request to the United States for economic development assistance. However, the Soviet Union left the meetings early on, but the West stayed. In 1948, Congress responded to this unified request for assistance by creating the Economic Cooperation Administration, which sent over $13 billion into the economies of Western Europe over the next five years. After its success, Truman created the Point Four program, which was designed to aid less developed countries in a similar way. However, it proved much easier to rebuild existing infrastructures than to create new ones, and the Point Four Program was ended fairly quickly ("United States"). Military forms of the containment of Communism moved parallel to the economic forms. Truman's advisers urged him to make the western zones of Germany a military center of strength. When the Soviet Union responded by blocking all surface traffic into the western zones of the city of Berlin, Great Britain and the United States airlifted supplies to Berlin for almost a year, until the Russians permitted traffic once again. Another pillar in this containment policy was the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, in 1949, to counter aggression from the Soviet Union or its satellite countries ("United States"). The idea that came from the Truman Doctrine that would lead to the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam was what would later be called the "domino theory" - in other words, if democratic countries had governmental instability and reappeared as Communist regimes, the instability would spread into other countries around them, and one country after another would become Communist, much like a row of dominoes falling. In his containment speech of March 12, 1947, Truman also said that It is necessary only to glance at a map to realize that the survival and integrity of the Greek nation are of grave importance in a much wider situation. If Greece should fall under the control of an armed minority, the effect upon its neighbor, Turkey, would be immediate and serious. Confusion and disorder might well spread throughout the entire Middle East. Moreover, the disappearance of Greece as an independent state would have a profound effect upon those countries in Europe whose peoples are struggling against great difficulties to maintain their freedoms and their independence while they repair the damages of war Should we fail to aid Greece and Turkey in this fateful hour, the effect will be far reaching to the West as well as to the East(Truman Doctrine). In other words, should Greece and Turkey have become Communist countries in the late 1940's, Truman argued, Communism (or at least chaos) might well have spread throughout the Middle East, and into southern Europe. The investment in Greece and Turkey, initially, was ostensibly an investment in democracy everywhere. And how humanitarian was the $400 million that the United States sent to Greece and Turkey $338 million went to Greece, but half of that money went to military ordnance and other assistance, including bombers and napalm bombs. 250 American military advisers instituted a policy of removing thousands of Greek citizens from their homes to isolate the rebels. In Turkey, of the $85 million in total aid, $80 million went in military aid, and $4.5 million went to build roads - almost nothing for humanitarian assistance. Additionally, neither the Greek nor the Turkish government represented anything like the ideal, free, democratic societies that Truman sought to protect from Communist aggression in his speech (Truman Doctrine). In the end, how aggressive did the Soviet Union intend to be Was Stalin all along preparing for a worldwide empire of red Communism Or would the initial buffer zone of Eastern Europe have been enough Could the United States government have averted decades of international tension (not to mention untold expenditures) with a simple loan of $6 billion to the Soviet Union in 1945 Could Secretary Marshall have contributed to a worldwide sense of trust had he insisted more strongly that the Soviet representatives take part in the Marshall Plan If Communism had spread to Greece and Turkey, would those countries too not have fallen under the weight of Communism's own flaws, as the Soviet Union did While the Marshall Plan was instrumental in Western Europe's return to prosperity, was it nothing more than a twentieth-century form of colonialism Scott Parrish, an American historian, has written that In general, theevidence supports the overall thrust of the arguments that Soviet policy in 1947 was largely defensive and reactive U.S. officials felt embattled in the spring of 1947, and feared that the deteriorating economic situation in Western Europe could lead to communists coming to power in such countries as France and Italy. If this were to happen, American security would be threatened. Prior to the summer of 1947, then, available evidence suggests that Stalin still hoped to pursue a variant of detente [co-operation] with the Western Powers The Marshall Plan, however, radically changed Stalin's calculus, and led him to shift away from this more moderate line The new archival documentation shows that in making this shift, the Soviet leadership was moved primarily by fear of its own vulnerability to American economic power (Cold War). In other words, the primary cause of the Cold War may well have lain in nothing more than two leaders' inability to trust each other enough to admit that their own perceptions of weakness were causing them to act aggressively toward the other, and to misconstrue the actions that the other took on the world stage. True enough, the years 1945 through 1948 were tumultuous ones in Europe and Asia, and so it is far easier to design policy with hindsight. After all, even Winston Churchill described Europe in the middle of 1947 as "a rubble-heap, a charnel house, a breeding-ground of pestilence and hate" (Goldman p. 66). It is also true that Stalin was a cold-blooded, ruthless dictator, responsible for the deaths of millions of his own citizens - and a figure that may well have been foolish for the West to even consider trusting (Goode). However, the story of the Cold War, in the final analysis, is a story that is as old as humanity itself; however, based on the way that the United States and North Korea are interacting in our own time, and in the way that the various groups in Iraq are vying for hegemony, it is a story that will not end anytime soon. Works Cited Bailey, Thomas A. and Kennedy, David M. The American Pageant: a History of the Republic. Lexington, Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company, 1987. Cold War: The Truman Doctrine and Marshall Aid. Accessed 12 October 2006 online at http://www.learningcurve.gov.uk/coldwar/G3/cs3/ Goldman, Eric F. The Crucial Decade - and after: America, 1945-1960. New York: Vintage Books, 1960. Goode, Stephen. "Westerns took a while to grasp the Soviet threat." Insight on the News, 10 June 1996. Accessed 12 October 2006 online at http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_n22_v12/ai_18354517 Ivie, Robert L. "Fire, flood and red fever: motivating metaphors of global emergency in the Truman Doctrine speech." Presidential Studies Quarterly, vol. 29. Accessed 12 October 2006 online at http://www.questia.com/PM.qsta=o&se=gglsc&d=5001303753&er=deny Leffler, Melvyn P. "The American conception of national security and the beginnings of the Cold War, 1945-1948. American Historical Review, vol. 89, no. 2, pp. 346-381. Pollard, R.A. Economic security and the origins of the Cold War, 1945-1960. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. President Harry S Truman's address before a joint session of Congress, March 12, 1947. Accessed 12 October 2006 on line at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/trudoc.htm. Speech on the Truman Doctrine by Henry B. Wallace. Accessed 12 October 2006 online at http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.aspdocument=852 The Truman Doctrine. Accessed 12 October 2006 online at http://www.writing.upenn.edu/afilreis/50s/truman-doctrine.html Truman Doctrine. Accessed 12 October 2006 online at http://www.johndclare.net/cold_war8_TrumanDoctrine.htm "United States." Encyclopdia Britannica. 2006. Encyclopdia Britannica Online. 15 Oct. 2006 . Read More