THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY:

Truman Acts to Save Nations From Red Rule (Felix Belair Jr., March 12, 1947, The New York Times)

President Truman outlined a new foreign policy for the United States today. In a historic message to Congress, he proposed that this country intervene wherever necessary throughout the world to prevent the subjection of free peoples to Communist-inspired totalitarian regimes at the expense of their national integrity and importance.

In a request for $400,000,000 to bolster the hard-pressed Greek and Turkish governments against Communist pressure, the President said the constant coercion and intimidation of free peoples by political infiltration amid poverty and strife undermined the foundations of world peace and threatened the security of the United States.

Although the President refrained from mentioning the Soviet Union by name, there could be no mistaking his identification of the Communist state as the source of much of the unrest throughout the world. He said that, in violation of the Yalta Agreement, the people of Poland, Rumania and Bulgaria had been subjected to totalitarian regimes against their will and that there had been similar developments in other countries.

As the Senate and House of Representatives sat grim-faced but apparently determined on the course recommended by the Chief Executive, Mr. Truman made these cardinal points of departure from traditional American foreign policy:

"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.

"I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes."

However well-intentioned, the Truman doctrine put the US on defense for the next forty years, costing millions of lives and trillions of dollars, tearing apart American society and leaving great swaths of the globe with virtually no conception of society other than as a one to one relation between the individual and his government. In 1947 it would have been rather easy in military terms, if not in political, to destroy the Soviet Union and restore freedom to millions. By essentially agreeing instead to countenance Soviet domination of Eastern Europe we became a partner in the maintenance of the Iron Curtain. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 12, 2003 10:46 AM