Truman Doctrine

Background

In February 1946 George F. Kennan sent his 'Long Telegram' from Moscow, predicting that the Soviets would respond only to force and recommending a long-term strategy of containment. Four setbacks followed in 1946: the Soviet failure to withdraw troops from northern Iran, Soviet pressure on Iran for oil concessions, Soviet efforts to force base and transit rights through the Turkish Straits, and the Soviet rejection in June 1946 of the Baruch plan for international control of nuclear energy. By late 1946 Britain informed the United States that its declining economy made continued support for the Greek government impossible. After Konstantinos Tsaldaris's visit to Washington in December 1946, the State Department drew up a plan to aid both Greece and Turkey.

The declaration

In an eighteen-minute address to a joint session of Congress on March 12, 1947, Truman declared the doctrine and requested $400 million in military and economic aid for Greece and Turkey (for the 1947-1948 fiscal year, $300 million to Greece and $100 million to Turkey). He also said that "we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way" and that aid "should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes." In May 1947 a large majority of Congress approved the $400 million.

U.S. domestic politics

Truman needed Republican support. Senator Arthur Vandenberg backed him against isolationists such as Robert A. Taft, and Dean Acheson presented the 'domino theory', comparing a communist state to a rotten apple infecting a barrel. Vandenberg advised Truman to appear before Congress and "scare the hell out of the American people." When Marshall, Kennan and others criticised a draft for excess rhetoric, Truman replied that the request would pass only if he played up the threat.

Implementation and examples

The aid was operationalised through agreements signed with Greece on June 20, 1947 and with Turkey on July 12, 1947. The U.S. Navy sent the Midway-class aircraft carrier USS Franklin D. Roosevelt in support of Turkey, which received $100 million in economic and military aid. Increased American aid assisted the Greek government in defeating the KKE after interim government defeats from 1946 to 1948. Truman used disease imagery, echoing Roosevelt's 1937 "quarantine the aggressor" language, and combined it with fire and flood imagery; the doctrine became a metaphor for aid to keep nations from communist influence and was, in the article's phrase, "informally extended to become the basis of American Cold War policy throughout Europe and around the world." Historian James T. Patterson called its sweeping rhetoric a commitment that "set the stage for innumerable later ventures" and "was in these ways a major step."

The Greek civil war context

The Greek government the United States undertook to defend was itself repressive rather than democratic. After the Dekemvriana clashes of December 1944 and the Treaty of Varkiza, which dissolved ELAS and broke EAM's power, the White Terror, a period of persecution against Greek leftists, contributed to the outbreak of the Greek Civil War in 1946. The KKE received no Soviet help: Stalin deliberately refrained from supporting the Greek Communists and forced Tito to do likewise, so Yugoslav support was given against Stalin's wishes. Historian Eric Foner writes that the doctrine "set a precedent for American assistance to anticommunist regimes throughout the world, no matter how undemocratic, and for the creation of a set of global military alliances directed against the Soviet Union."

Later development and distinctions

The doctrine must be distinguished from containment, the strategic concept Kennan proposed in his 1946 Long Telegram, which the doctrine operationalised; from the Marshall Plan, the economic reconstruction programme for Western Europe (proposed in June 1947, signed in April 1948); from the creation of NATO in 1949 as the military instrument; and from the later Eisenhower Doctrine of 1953. The Russian article places it as the first in a rubric of U.S. presidential doctrines, from Monroe onward, and situates it in a chain of events: Churchill's Fulton speech of March 5, 1946 with Truman present, the de facto U.S. embargo of March 1948 on industrial equipment exports to the USSR and socialist countries, the Marshall Plan (April 4, 1948), the Vandenberg Resolution (June 11, 1948), the Berlin blockade (June 24, 1948), the North Atlantic Treaty (April 4, 1949), and the Korean War from June 25, 1950. In that chain the Marshall Plan is dated not to its June 1947 proposal but to April 4, 1948, the signing date of the Economic Recovery Act.

Oil was deliberately omitted from the March 12, 1947 address, yet guarding access to oil was an important part of the doctrine, and one draft of the speech spoke of the "great natural resources" of the Middle East at stake (Kolko & Kolko 1972). In 1946 Britain announced it would no longer support Greece, confirming that the immediate catalyst was the British withdrawal rather than an existing U.S. commitment. The doctrine serves as the period marker for the Cold War era that ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991; no source records a formal termination of the doctrine itself in that year.