What was the Truman Doctrine?

Britain’s note

On Friday, February 21, 1947, the British embassy in Washington handed the State Department two notes. Britain, nearly bankrupt after the war and in the grip of a brutal winter, would stop its aid to Greece and Turkey at the end of March. Greece’s government was fighting a Communist-led guerrilla army in the mountains of the north. Turkey was under Soviet pressure to share control of the straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean and to give up two eastern provinces; Moscow argued that the straits were the only sea route in and out of its Black Sea ports. Either Washington took over, or it let both go.

The speech

Truman went before a joint session of Congress on March 12. He did not pretend his new client was a model democracy: “The Government of Greece is not perfect,” he admitted, though it had been chosen in an election that foreign observers judged fair. Then he widened the frame from two countries to the whole world.

At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.

One way of life, he said, rested on free institutions and free elections; the other on “terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections.” Then came the sentence that became the doctrine: the policy of the United States must be “to support free peoples” resisting armed minorities or outside pressure. He asked for 400 million dollars through June 1948, plus American civilian and military personnel to supervise how it was spent, and he argued from poverty as much as from arms: “The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want.”

Too broad? Kennan’s objection

Congress approved the aid in May 1947, after senators added a clause letting the United Nations end it. Inside the government, George Kennan, whose cable from Moscow had shaped Washington’s reading of the Soviet Union (the Long Telegram), objected to the wording. He accepted the need to help Greece, but thought the speech turned a decision about two countries into an open promise to the whole world, when what was needed was firmness at a few vital points. Nine days after the speech, on March 21, Truman signed Executive Order 9835, which began loyalty reviews of federal employees and carried the contest home (what McCarthyism was).

Moscow’s view, and what came next

Moscow’s formal answer came that September, when Andrei Zhdanov described “the imperialist and anti-democratic camp” led by America facing “the anti-imperialist and democratic camp” led by the Soviet Union (the Marshall Plan and the two camps). On the ground, the Greek war was less a Soviet operation than the speech implied. Yugoslav witnesses later described a Stalin with little faith in the Greek revolt: Milovan Djilas, one of Tito’s closest aides, wrote that in February 1948 Stalin told the Yugoslavs the uprising should be wound up. Tito’s Yugoslavia was the guerrillas’ main backer, and after Tito broke with Stalin in 1948 and closed his border in July 1949, the rising collapsed. The Greek government won that year, Turkey kept control of its straits, and both countries joined NATO in 1952.