Immaculate Deception: The Truman Doctrine

This article was published in Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review, Vol. 51, No. 2 (September 2020): 60-62.

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The idea that the United States should lead the world, replacing the British Empire, had been advanced by various U.S. leaders and influential citizens since the late nineteenth century.

This ambition was in keeping with the age-old aspirations of many great states and empires, and also with the trajectory of U.S. history. The United States expanded across North America in the nineteenth century, became an imperial power in Asia in 1899, declared Latin America an exclusive sphere of influence in the early twentieth century, and became the foremost global economic power prior to the First World War. In 1941, publisher Henry Luce wrote that Americans should “accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation of the world . . . to assert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such means as we see fit.”²

The Truman Doctrine was not so forthright. It framed U.S. aspirations to world power in defensive terms, as protecting “free peoples” from aggressive communism. In his speech, Truman artfully connected the civil war in Greece to Soviet control in Eastern Europe, to a mythical struggle between freedom (representing, presumably, the United States) and totalitarianism (the Soviet Union). This framing made it appear that Greece was the immediate target of a grand Soviet-communist plot to take over the world.

In fact, the Soviet Union did not aid the Greek communists. Joseph Stalin held to an agreement made with Winston Churchill in October 1944 to stay out of Greece. Indeed, Churchill later wrote that Stalin had “adhered strictly and faithfully to our agreement of October.”³ In short, where Greece was concerned, “containment” of the Soviet Union had already been achieved through a quiet big-power agreement.

The foreign nation intruding into Greece was not the Soviet Union, but Great Britain, which had sent tanks in December 1944 to crush the Greek left, then supported a despotic rightist government under Admiral Petros Voulgaris. Truman labeled the Greek government “democratic,” despite its repressive features, while painting the communist-led rebels as engaged in “terrorist activities,” though repression had pushed them into a state of rebellion.⁴ His statement that “the United Nations and its related organizations are not in a position to extend help of the kind that is required” belied the fact that the United States was acting against the spirit, if not the letter, of the UN in abetting war rather than seeking a mediated solution.

Truman dealt with Eastern Europe only briefly in his speech, saying that the “peoples of a number of countries of the world” (and he mentioned Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria) “have recently had totalitarian regimes forced upon them against their will.” While it was true that the Soviet Union had imposed pro-Soviet governments on these nations, doing so was technically a right of occupation, and the United States had acted similarly in Japan and South Korea. Truman also failed to note that America’s allies, Great Britain and France, had been imposing their wills on a far greater number of people in their African and Asian colonies. Indeed, at that very time, France was engaged in a colonial war to restore its imperial control over Vietnam.

Truman addressed the situation in Turkey as well. He said the Turks needed U.S. aid “for the purpose of effecting that modernization necessary for the maintenance of its national integrity,” and he intimated that the Soviet Union was pressuring Turkey in some way. What the Soviets had actually done was request base rights in the Dardanelles region, a crucial shipping lane bordering the Black Sea. According to Melvyn Leffler, “the Soviets had not submitted an ultimatum and had not engaged in any threats or intimidation.”⁵

None of these international situations posed a serious threat to U.S. national security – unless they were tied to a grand plan by an expansionist totalitarian power to take over the world. Truman made only one reference to “communist” in his speech, but he used the word “totalitarian” four times, presumably to connect the alleged “communist threat” to the well-grounded Nazi threat of World War II. According to George Herring, “In portraying the war in Greece as a struggle between Communism and freedom, U.S. officials misinterpreted or misrepresented the conflict, ignoring the essentially domestic roots of the insurgency, blurring the authoritarian nature of the Greek government, and greatly exaggerating the Soviet role.”⁶

Truman framed the historical moment as a choice between two “alternative ways of life,” one “based upon the will of the majority,” the other “based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed on the majority.” The latter, of course, was aimed at the Soviet Union, not America’s imperial European allies. The president’s call to action followed. “I believe 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,” he declared. “If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world—and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own nation.”⁷ With this invocation, Truman broadened the idea of “national security” to encompass the world. Henceforth, any loss of U.S. influence anywhere would be viewed in Washington as a security threat. It was the perfect formula for establishing American global predominance—and creating unrelieved empire anxiety.

Though Truman succeeded in persuading a majority in Congress to approve the aid package to Greece and Turkey, his hyperbolic rendition of the “communist threat” came back to haunt him. Since he had raised the specter of communism as a global menace, some members of Congress asked why he had not asked for more aid for Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist forces fighting Mao Tse Tung’s communist army in China. Secretary of State Dean Acheson had no answer except to say, “You must approach each situation as it occurs, in light of the facts of that situation.⁸ Following Mao’s announcement of the founding of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, Republicans had a field day hounding Truman for “losing China.”

The Truman Doctrine set forth a new role for the United States in the world, a new “manifest destiny” for the nation. The Cold War ideological framework it established drew upon a deeper stratum of exceptionalist beliefs in America’s presumed inherent goodness and benefic intentions, beliefs that assumed the United States could be entrusted with world power because it would always use that power in benevolent and protective ways. This presumed moral superiority was also transferable to its allies and client-states, exalted as the “free world” by mere association with the United States.

Though presented in “fairy tale” terms, Cold War anticommunist ideology played an important strategic role in the U.S. quest for global predominance. It did so in five ways.

First, U.S. Cold War ideology greatly magnified the “Soviet threat” and turned a classic geopolitical rivalry into a mythical struggle between good and evil nations. As described in National Security Council Paper 68 of 1950, “the Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.” Since U.S. leaders saw no possibility of compromise or détente with the Soviet Union (at least for the first twenty-five years of the Cold War), their mandate, according to the NSC memorandum, was to frustrate “the Kremlin design” and “foster a fundamental change in the nature of the Soviet system.” To achieve these goals, a level of militarization just short of war would be required. That meant generating “the capability of conducting powerful offensive air operations against vital elements of the Soviet war-making capacity.” Ignoring Soviet security fears and interests, the United States surrounded the Soviet Union with U.S. military bases and allies and conducted covert operations within the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (see section 4 of NSC-68).⁹

Second, U.S. Cold War ideology broadened the “Soviet threat” into a geographically dispersed “communist threat.” Hence, in the name of “containing communism,” the United States suppressed a communist-led rebellion in Greece, undermined democratic socialist and communist parties in Italy and France, aided French efforts to suppress a communist-led national liberation movement in Vietnam, and covertly overthrew democratically elected governments in Iran and Guatemala that were judged to be too open to communists – all in the first decade of the Cold War. Although none of these alleged threats arose from the Soviet Union, U.S. leaders connected them to Moscow by ideological commonality, or what Acheson called “Commie doctrine.”¹⁰

Third, U.S. Cold War ideology set out to make the world safe for capitalism. It extolled the virtues of “free market” capitalism and disparaged socialism and communism (a variant of socialism) as heretical modernizing doctrines. As the latter were leftist philosophies, the U.S. Cold War mission took on the character of a global war against the left. Leftist governments, movements, parties, and individuals were said to be “fellow travelers” of communists by virtue of their common Marxist origins, which in turn made them accessories to the alleged Soviet plot to take over the world. Furthermore, in an effort to maintain the “open market” world order, U.S. leaders took aim at governments, leftist or not, that exerted control over their own natural resources (economic nationalism).

Fourth, U.S. Cold War ideology served as a cover for U.S. hegemonic ambitions. U.S. leaders subtly transformed and distorted the concept of national security to encompass virtually any challenge to U.S. global interests, influence, allies, and credibility as a great power. In truth, U.S. aspirations to power, often described as “leadership,” existed independently of any alleged threats from abroad. This became clearer in the aftermath of the Cold War, as the pursuit and maintenance of U.S. global hegemony continued and new threats were found to justify it.

Finally, U.S. Cold War ideology was immensely useful in rallying Americans to the cause and mobilizing public support for America’s turbo-charged interventionist role in the world. The more ominous the specter of communism, the less likely that Americans would retreat into isolationism, question the wisdom of U.S. missions abroad, or withhold their tax dollars from the burgeoning military-industrial complex. This ideological framework was also beguilingly simple. It allowed Americans to reduce the complexities of the world to a pat formula, easily understood, that verified American righteousness in all cases. Through patriotic inculcation and intimidation – via loyalty oaths, congressional investigations, and blacklists – anti-communist ideology became part of American national identity. Indeed, Americans developed what might be called a national empire-identity complex, in which patriotic pride was joined to global predominance.

To be sure, it was easier for U.S. leaders to convince American citizens of the benevolence of U.S. global designs and intentions than to convince the rest of the world. U.S. leaders promoted capitalism as the road to prosperity, yet for many poor peoples and nations on the periphery of industrial production centers – a majority of the world’s population – capitalism was more likely to be associated with economic dependency, exploitation, inequality, and foreign control. The debilitating results of Western European imperialism in Asia and Africa, and of “Yankee imperialism” in Latin America, which conquered foreign markets to serve home industries, were ultimately more convincing to many in the Third World than the plethora of economic development platitudes and propaganda emanating from Washington.

It is important to clarify here that the “free market” capitalism promoted by the United States abroad was not the same as the reformed capitalism that had developed within the United States over the previous half-century, pushed by populist, progressive, socialist, and New Deal reformers. By the end of the New Deal, the United States had a mixed (capitalist-social welfare) economy that included antitrust laws, business regulations, higher taxes on the rich, and socialist-oriented programs such as Social Security. The difference in the foreign and domestic versions of capitalism is explained by the fact that in the domestic sphere, the federal government challenged and limited corporate power and compensated for its deficiencies to some degree, whereas in foreign affairs, the government worked in tandem with business interests to secure foreign resources and markets to the advantage of home industries.

Had U.S. leaders promoted a New Deal type of social welfare capitalism abroad, it is likely that many poor peoples and nations would have been more receptive to U.S. economic prescriptions. As it was, U.S. officials pushed a hard-edged, austerity-minded capitalism that relegated poor nations to positions as suppliers of industrial nations, sustaining seemingly permanent economic underdevelopment.

American ideals of political freedom and democracy were more welcome the world over, but here the problem was that the United States did not always practice what it preached. The United States, to its credit, fostered democratic institutions in Occupied Japan and West Germany following the Second World War, but elsewhere the Americans supported numerous repressive regimes, in large part to secure their corporate interests and prevent the establishment of successful socialist models. During the first decade of the Cold War, the United States took an active part in fostering reactionary governments in Greece, South Korea, Vietnam, Iran, and Guatemala. It was clear to many people around the world that the United States prioritized its economic and geopolitical interests, and the establishment of pro-American governments, over its ideals of freedom and democracy.

Americans, of course, were inclined to believe that their government and leaders were committed to the promotion of freedom and democracy abroad. Statements to that effect were voiced by the nation’s highest officials, echoed in the mainstream media, and inculcated in the body politic through the educational system, leading to their internalization as part of American identity. It was thus difficult for many citizens to understand the profound contradiction between the nation’s oft-stated ideals and its actual foreign policy practices; and not a few followed U.S. leaders in ignoring or denying the contradiction, reveling in America’s mythic identity as “leader of the free world.”

Americans were not misguided in identifying the Soviet Union as a repressive authoritarian state and the United States as a democratic one. What was not generally understood, however, was that the foreign policies of each nation were not based on its domestic institutions; that repression within the Soviet Union did not automatically translate into aggression without; and that democracy within the United States did not exclude aggression, a point clearly proven by the histories of the United States, Britain, and France.

The Cold War was not fated. The Truman administration had options. It could have met the Russians “halfway,” as advised by Eleanor Roosevelt, continuing the wartime entente established under Franklin Roosevelt.¹¹ It could have placed more reliance on the United Nations and international law. It could have pursued Henry A. Wallace’s idea for a Global New Deal, aiding underdeveloped nations and allowing socialist-oriented experiments to flourish, thereby removing one cause of Cold War animosity.¹² Fredrik Logevall argued as much in his 2004 Bernath Lecture: “The [Cold War] confrontation resulted from decisions by individual human beings who might have chosen otherwise, who might have done more, in particular to maintain the diplomatic dialogue, to seek negotiated solutions to complex international problems. . . . American planners from the start defined their policy choices vis-à-vis the Soviet Union in remarkably narrow terms, and there is little evidence they ever gave close consideration to doing otherwise.”¹³

The choices made in Washington had far-reaching consequences. Had the straitjacket of Cold War ideology not been imposed on U.S. foreign policy, the Truman administration might have responded affirmatively to Ho Chi Minh’s plea for U.S. support, thereby avoiding a later U.S. war in Vietnam. Subsequent administrations might have refused to support right-wing dictatorships and repressive regimes, thereby fostering democratic and human rights principles across the world. Working together with the Soviet Union, U.S. leaders might have called off the nuclear arms race and curbed proliferation, greatly enhancing international security. Had the fervent anti-communist mission not gained traction, the “imperial presidency,” McCarthyism, the “military industrial complex,” and gargantuan military budgets might have been reined in, all to the benefit of the American people. Perhaps, too, Americans would have found better ways to express their unity and patriotism than rallying around America’s superpower status and wars.¹⁴

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Notes:

1. Walter Lippmann, The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy (New York, 1947), 10.

2. Henry R. Luce, “The American Century,” Life, February 17, 1941; reprinted in Diplomatic History 23, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 159–171; online at https://public.websites.umich.edu/~mlassite/discussions261/luce.pdf.

3. Winston Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 6, Triumph and Tragedy (Boston, 1953), 293.

4. John O. Iatrides and Nicholas X. Rizopoulos, “The International Dimension of the Greek Civil War,” World Policy Journal 17, no. 1 (2000): 87–103. In January 1936, the All People Front, a political coalition that included the Greek Communist Party, won fifteen seats in the three- hundred-seat national legislature. In August, General Ioannis Metaxas suspended the Greek constitution and instituted a dictatorship, citing the threat of communism. Despite the trashing of democracy, the U.S. ambassador to Greece, Lincoln MacVeagh, wrote to President Roosevelt in 1938, “Mr. Metaxas is quite the best man in Greek political life today.” Cited in David F. Schmitz, Thank God They’re on Our Side: The United States & Right- Wing Dictatorships, 1921–1965 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999), 115.

5. Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA, 1992), 78.

6. George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 (Oxford, UK, 2008), 616–17.

7. “Truman Doctrine: President Harry S. Truman’s Address before a Joint Session of Congress, March 12, 1947,” http://avalon. law.yale.edu/20th_century/trudoc.asp.

8. Lawrence S. Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 1943– 1949 (New York, 1982), 90.

9. “NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for Nation- al Security (April 14, 1950): A Report to the President Pursuant to the President’s Directive of January 31, 1950,” https://www. citizensource.com/History/20thCen/NSC68.PDF, 3, 5. On covert U.S. interventions in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, see Lindsey A. O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War (Ithaca, NY, 2018). For a review of internal debates over foreign bases within the military departments of the Truman administration, see Elliott V. Converse III, Circling the Earth: United States Plans for a Postwar Overseas Military Base System, 1942–1948 (Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, August 2005), https:// apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a439386.pdf.

10. Secretary of State Dean Acheson used this term in the fall of 1948, judging that Ho Chi Minh and Stalin were de facto allies by virtue of their Marxist ideological orientations. Cited in David A. Welch, Painful Choices: A Theory of Foreign Policy Change (Princeton, NJ, 2005), 123.

11. Mary Welek Atwell, “Eleanor Roosevelt and the Cold War Consensus,” Diplomatic History 3, no. 1 (Winter 1979), 102–103.

12. Henry A. Wallace, “The Century of the Common Man,” delivered May 8 1942, Grand Ballroom, Commodore Hotel, New York, NY, accessed on American Rhetoric Online Speech Bank, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/henrywallacefreeworldassoc.htm.

13. Fredrik Logevall, “Bernath Lecture: A Critique of Containment,” Diplomatic History 48, no. 4 (September 2004), 497–98. The lecture took place at the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in June 2004.

14. A more formal system for inculcating empire identity was developed in Great Britain through the annual celebration of “Empire Day.” See Jim English, “Empire Day in Britain, 1904– 1958,” The Historical Journal 49, no. 1 (March 2006).

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About the author:

Roger Peace is the initiator and coordinator of the open resource educational website, U.S. Foreign Policy History & Resource Guide (http:// peacehistory-usfp.org). A scholar of American foreign relations, he has taught 35 “U.S. in the World” survey courses at the community college level. He is the author of A Call to Conscience: The Anti-Contra Campaign (2012), and “Choosing Values: Toward an Ethical Framework in the Study of History” in The History Teacher (2017).