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The Mixed Legacy of the Truman Doctrine
03/29/10
As the American military commitment to Afghanistan grows under the Obama administration, violence continues to disrupt the Iraqi electoral process. Americans also fear the nuclear ambitions of Iran and wonder why so many allies are lukewarm in their military support for the war on terror. There is a tendency for Americans to perceive themselves in the words of Mark Twain as “innocents abroad”; the victims of extremists who resent our democratic freedoms and high standard of living. Nevertheless, an examination of American foreign policy during the Cold War reveals a more complicated world. In its post-World War II crusade against communism, the United States supported anticommunist dictatorial regimes in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, including Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The blowback from Cold War foreign policy continues to plague the United States. Grasping how the support for authoritarian governments began with the 1947 Truman Doctrine, providing military assistance to any government that claimed to be fighting communism, will not end the global terror threat. However, an understanding of how global resentment of the United States flows from the Cold War and American support for dictatorial regimes, exposing democratic rhetoric as often hypocritical, should help the United States to formulate policy alternatives that will seek to redress this Cold War legacy.
The Truman Doctrine was proclaimed by President Harry S. Truman in an address before a Joint Session of Congress on March 12, 1947. Truman was responding to a February 21, 1947, statement by the British Embassy that Great Britain would no longer be able to extend aid to the Greek government in its struggle against a communist insurgency. The president summoned congressional leaders to the White House, and Michigan Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, reportedly informed Truman that if he wanted to assure congressional support for military aid to the Greek government, it would be necessary to “scare the hell out of the American people.”
Truman thus drafted his address to Congress, placing the Greek crisis in the gravest political terms as a struggle between democracy and tyranny. Asserting what would later be known as the “domino theory,” Truman maintained, “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.” Thus, Truman concluded, “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support the free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressure.”
However, the extent of Soviet influence in the Greek crisis was considerably exaggerated by the president. In the spring of 1946, Greek communists, who played a leading role in fighting the Nazi occupation, boycotted elections that resulted in the formation of a Rightist government under Prime Minister Constantine Tsaldaris. At this point the National Liberation Front (EAM), in which communists occupied a prominent position, resorted to armed struggle to topple the Greek regime. The neighboring communist nations of Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia offered aid to the insurgency, but Joseph Stalin, adhering to an October 1944 agreement he made with Winston Churchill recognizing a British sphere of influence in Greece while the Soviets would be given the upper hand in Romania, refused to provide support for the EAM. Although Stalin did reverse policy following America intervention, his support for the Greek rebels was limited. In October 1948, Stalin terminated aid to the Greek insurgency, and, fearing Yugoslav dominance in the Balkans, the Soviet leader pressured his Yugoslav counterpart Josip Broz Tito to close the Greek and Yugoslav border, essentially ending foreign support for the Greek insurgency, which collapsed in 1949.
The Greek Civil War was hardly the Soviet-inspired global expansion proclaimed by President Truman, yet the perspective of a monolithic communist movement, directed by Moscow and intent upon global domination, guided American foreign policy through wars in Korea and Vietnam as well as assuring support for authoritarian anticommunist regimes in the Philippines, Indonesia, Iran, and Nicaragua. The United States also rendered military assistance to Islamic freedom fighters in Afghanistan such as Osama Bin Laden. The failure to provide more assistance to Afghan rebuilding after the destructive Soviet war is an example of blowback with which the United States continues to struggle.
The Truman Doctrine, based upon a misreading of the political situation in Greece, committed the United States to an anticommunist global crusade in which many corrupt and authoritarian, yet anticommunist, regimes received American military assistance. The legacy of this foreign policy is a world in which the United States is often perceived as a powerful force blocking political and economic self-determination rather than the innocent champions of democracy whose standard of living is the envy of the world. A more sophisticated appreciation for the ambiguous legacy of the Truman Doctrine will help Americans better comprehend a world in which Americans are viewed as more than innocent abroad.
Ron Briley is a history teacher and assistant headmaster at Sandia Preparatory School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he has taught for over thirty years. His teaching has been recognized by the AHA Beveridge Prize, the Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award from the Society of History Education, and the OAH Tachau Precollegiate Teaching Award. His books include Class at Bat, Gender on Deck, and Race in the Hole (McFarland, 2003), James T. Farrell’s Dreaming Baseball (Kent State, 2007), and All Stars and Movie Stars (Kentucky, 2008).