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Analysis Of The Truman Doctrine

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In the wake of the Second World War, the United States found itself at a diplomatic turning-point, initiating a global campaign to stave off the spread of Soviet Communism. In 1947, President Harry S. Truman addressed Congress, urging a program of economic aid to Turkey and Greece, both of whom were nominally democratic nations resisting socialist insurrection from groups identified by Truman as “militant minorities” (Foner, 715). This speech, now known as the Truman Doctrine, quickly became a cornerstone of American foreign policy. In the years after the address, the fight between Communism and capitalism spread to Asia. Maoism overtook China, and the Chinese government supported a communist regime in North Korea, separated by the 38th parallel …show more content…

The Truman doctrine established a binary distinction between the first and second worlds: the first governed by the “will of the majority” and the second by “terror and impression” from a violent minority. MacArthur appealed to this dichotomous thinking in encouraging American military action in Korea. He warned that Communist China was “allied with Soviet Russia” and was “aggressively imperialistic, with a lust for expansion and increased power.” In contrast, he noted that the US brought “political morality, freedom of economic enterprise, and social justice” to Japan. MacArthur’s charge to the US was to counter “the Communist threat...a global one... [whose] successful advance in one sector threaten[ed] the destruction of every other sector.” Both Truman and MacArthur alluded to the long-standing American value of self-determination. “We must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies,” said Truman of the residents of Turkey and Greece. Similarly, MacArthur remarked that “the Asian peoples covet[ed] the right to shape their own free destiny.” He identified the United States as a guarantor of this right, deeming “vital” the need for the US to “orient its policies in consonance with this...condition.” The two speeches agree when calling upon the United States to orchestrate an alliance of “freedom loving” peoples across the globe, whose strong democratic principles would ward off the spread of

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