by Benn Steil
American support for UNRRA activities, however, had been steadily eroding, and was dealt a blow by two incidents in August 1946 in which U.S. C-47 transport planes were shot down while inadvertently passing over Yugoslav territory on their way from Austria to Italy. In the first incident, on August 9, there were no fatalities, but officials in Belgrade initially denied U.S. consular access to the seven Americans. In the second, on the 19th, all five crew members were killed.
Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes was enraged. He directed Clayton to take whatever action necessary to stop further UNRRA shipments to Yugoslavia, 73 percent of whose relief assistance from the organization was being funded by the United States. He further demanded that “when UNRRA expired, any new appropriations by Congress for foreign relief should be allocated by the United States and should go to those countries who would not denounce us for granting them the relief they asked for.”91 This reflected not only his personal views, but the reality that UNRRA was now deeply unpopular in Congress. He suggested that it was countries like Greece and Turkey that should get American aid, rather than those “who either from helplessness or otherwise are opposed to our principles.”92 Half a year later, a new secretary of state would have aid to these two states at the center of his department’s agenda.
The president’s speech would therefore mark a radical break from FDR’s vision of a United States acting on the world stage through the new United Nations. It would instead mark the first time a U.S. administration would justify a muscular course of unilateral action outside the U.N., even though it would claim to do so in support of the organization’s ends.93 It would also signal, Acheson said privately, that “we were entering an adversary relationship” with the Soviet Union.94
IRONICALLY, THE MAN WHOSE IDEAS on the importance of containing Russia were most influential in framing the president’s message was also the most critical high-level voice over both its content and tone. But George Kennan would make a career out of repeatedly testing his powers of persuasion and then recoiling from the consequences.
Kennan backed economic aid to Greece, but, believing the Soviet threat remote, wanted to keep military aid to a minimum. He opposed any aid whatsoever to Turkey, which was successfully, he believed, resisting Soviet pressures on its own. (He would temper this view three weeks later; by the summer he would be backing covert operations in both countries.95) Even though the speech would not mention the Soviet Union, Kennan thought it dangerously confrontational. The emphasis on the irreconcilability of two “way[s] of life,” one free and one relying on “terror and repression,” combined with an unbounded American commitment to aid free peoples “resisting attempted subjugation” might, he feared, even provoke the Russians to launch a war.
Others, however, such as Forrestal, a hawk’s hawk, felt that the United States had to make a show of power in Greece and Turkey to deter the Soviets from pressing forward elsewhere. White House counsel and speechwriter Clark Clifford agreed, and wanted the message strengthened; it was time for “the opening gun” in the effort to awaken the American public to the dimensions of the Soviet threat.96 He did the final touch-ups to the president’s address together with his aide George Elsey, who had coauthored a dark and ominous 100,000-word analysis of “American Relations with the Soviet Union” the September prior. The Clifford-Elsey report, as it became known, had featured a call for the United States to “support and assist democratic countries which are in any way menaced or endangered by the U.S.S.R.” Truman had ordered all copies to be locked away at the time. “It would blow the roof off the Kremlin,” he said. But for such elements of the report, the time had come.
The resulting speech, in Marshall’s view, was “too much rhetoric,” or in Bohlen’s reckoning “too much flamboyant anti-Communism.” In Acheson’s view, though, it was sometimes necessary, when dealing with Congress, to make arguments “clearer than the truth.”
The White House insisted the Senate would never approve such a sweeping new policy without a spotlight on the communist threat.97 Truman thought the first State Department draft “too much like an investment prospectus.” He wanted “no hedge in this speech”: It was to be “America’s answer to the surge of Communist tyranny.” The president himself rewrote the words “I believe it should be the policy of the United States” as “I believe it must be the policy . . . ,” making a doctrine out of a statement of belief.98
Kennan’s apparent split with Elsey went much deeper than just concern over the speech’s tone. He never bought into Acheson’s “rotten apple” theory—that one bad apple, Greece, could spoil the barrel. But many of Acheson’s colleagues echoed him. When revolution is successful in one country, Ambassador MacVeagh argued, “it is the doctrine of international communism to breed [it] into the next country. . . . Greece and Turkey are a strategic line. If [the communists] break that down, the whole Near East falls.” What Acheson described as rot spreading from apple to apple would later be captured by the image of falling dominoes, each knocking the next into the subsequent. Dominoes would become the metaphor of choice for Truman’s successor, Eisenhower, in reference to Indochina in 1954.
Why were images of rotting apples and falling dominoes, typically offered with no reference to the politics, culture, topography, or indeed any specifics of the actual countries in question, as compelling as they were to those making the decisions? One answer lies in the rise of the discipline of geopolitics, as practiced through the analysis of maps and the spatial relations between their objects. Briton Halford Mackinder, arguably its founding father, had died only the day before the cabinet meeting approving Truman’s speech proposal, on March 6. Mackinder, a man who “thought in metaphors,”99 had undergone several major political conversions in his career, all driven largely by epiphanies triggered by the study of maps. The focal point of his final one was the supposed strategic centrality of the vast Eurasian “Heartland,” which was dominated by Russia. “Who rules East Europe,” he famously wrote in 1919, “commands the Heartland: Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island: Who rules the World-Island commands the World.”100 The contiguous Heartland surface mass looms threateningly large on a map, particularly when the map is centered on it and distorted by an oval presentation (see Map 1).101
In 1943, Mackinder wrote an influential piece in Foreign Affairs, applying spatial analysis, arguing that “if the Soviet Union emerges from the war as conqueror of Germany, she must rank as the greatest land power on the globe.”102 The phenomenon of “cartohypnosis” was excoriated by some analysts at the time, but its influence would only grow during the Cold War.103
Truman had no difficulty accepting Acheson’s and MacVeagh’s postulates that the Caucasus and eastern Mediterranean were gateways to rapid Soviet world domination. Kennan, however, was deeply disturbed by what he saw as a turn toward naive and simplistic geostrategic thinking in the White House. He thought MacVeagh’s thesis was nonsense; the Middle East, with its “patriarchal” system, was not amenable to Soviet control. Many countries—even China, he stressed—could “fall prey to totalitarian domination without any tragic consequences for world peace.”104 The father, witting or otherwise, of what was to become a doctrine of containing Soviet expansion, Kennan was nonetheless critical of what he saw as a dangerous American impulse “to see universal formulae or doctrines in which to clothe and justify particular actions.”105 But it was too late to try to change the president’s thinking.
Truman would tell his daughter, Margaret, that he had been “worn to a frazzle” by “this terrible decision” to make the speech.106 “I knew that George Washington’s spirit would be invoked against me,” he later reflected. Permanent entanglement in foreign rivalries was not something an American president undertook lightly. “But I was convinced that the policy I was about to proclaim was indeed as much required by the conditions of my day as was Washington’s by the situation in his era.”107
SOMBERLY CLAD IN DARK SUIT and dark tie, Truman strode into the packed House chamber
just after 1 p.m. on March 12, 1947. Acheson sat in the front row, “perfectly tailored . . . stiff and straight as if at a memorial service, hands folded in his lap.”108 The mood was palpably solemn as Truman opened a black folder and began his address. (See Appendix A for the full text.)109
Speaking for nineteen minutes—clearly, slowly, with a measured forcefulness—he laid out a sweeping new doctrine of American global engagement. Each principle was introduced with a biblically inspired “I believe,” a contrivance of Clifford and Elsey’s to connect the president to his upbringing in Missouri.110
“I believe 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,” Truman declared. This support should come, first and foremost, in the form of “economic and financial aid,” this being “essential to economic stability and orderly political processes.” The assertion greatly elevated the role of economic intervention in the American diplomatic arsenal.
Truman juxtaposed the $400 million he was requesting to support Greece and Turkey with the $341 billion ($3.69 trillion in today’s money) the United States had spent fighting World War II, declaring the former to be “an investment in world freedom and world peace.” Though left unsaid, the implication was that a vastly more costly war could result if Congress rejected the assistance. The belief that massive economic assistance could achieve American objectives while obviating a costly military buildup would become the greatest misperception behind the storied aid initiative to come.
The backdrop of domino theory was unmistakable. “It is necessary only to glance at a map,” Truman said, “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. Moreover, the disappearance of Greece as an independent state would have a profound effect upon those countries in Europe whose peoples are struggling against great difficulties to maintain their freedoms and their independence while they repair the damages of war.
Greece and Turkey were not isolated centers of conflict; they were the front lines of a wider struggle to determine the political map of the postwar world.
This was, Truman concluded, “a serious course upon which we embark,” one which he would “not recommend . . . except that the alternative is much more serious.” For “If we falter in our leadership,” he warned, “we may endanger the peace of the world—and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our nation.” For this reason, he was “confident that the Congress [would] face these responsibilities squarely.”
The chamber—members of both parties—rose in applause. Many, however, were visibly discomforted.111
Truman nodded left, nodded right. A sober Acheson knew that much work remained to create an actionable program out of the speech. The reaction in the hall, he concluded dispassionately, had been “a tribute to a brave man rather than unanimous acceptance of his policy.”112 The speech would live on to become “probably the most controversial that has been made by a president in the twentieth century.”113 It would be credited with stirring American intervention in Greece and Turkey, just as it would be blamed for McCarthyism and, later, Vietnam.
“THE EPOCH OF ISOLATION AND occasional intervention is ended,” declared The New York Times. “It is being replaced by an epoch of American responsibility114 . . . . President Truman [has] called for action which will launch the United States on a new and positive foreign policy of world-wide responsibility for the maintenance of peace and order.”115
“President Truman’s latest address to Congress was, beyond question, one of the most momentous [congressional addresses] ever made by an American Chief Executive,” enthused Barnet Nover of The Washington Post.116
“President Truman’s message . . . is a corollary of the Monroe Doctrine,” opined William Philip Simms in the Washington Daily News. “[T]he implications of the ‘Truman Doctrine’ are as grave as any the people of the United States ever were called upon to face.”117
“The decision that Congress, acting for the American people, must [now] make is whether we will join issue with the already undeclared ideological war, by actively assisting those countries menaced by Russian communism,” The Augusta Chronicle concluded, “or whether we shall continue a feeble diplomacy, based on appeasement and half-hearted opposition, while the totalitarian ideology of Russia nibbles away at the freedom of the peoples of the world.”118
Despite the president’s speech containing a single reference to communists (Greek ones),119 and no references to the Soviet Union, the American press had judged the speech consequential, even if oblique as to the precise target of the call to action. “Congress,” The New York Times wrote, “stepped into its new task” after the speech “somewhat bewildered.”120 Senator Vandenberg, however, highlighted the broad message just after leaving the House chamber: “The plain truth is that Soviet-American relationships are at the core of this whole problem. . . . The president’s message faces facts,” he declared, “and so must Congress.”121
Across the ocean, the Soviet journal New Times criticized American aid to the “fascist” Greek and Turkish regimes, as well as Washington’s aspirations to “world hegemony,” but did not treat the speech as new policy. New York Soviet consul Yakov Lomakin reported to Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinsky that “70–80% of the American people are opposed to granting aid to Greece and Turkey” because they feared it “could lead to war between the Soviet Union and the United States.”122
The reaction of the Soviet leadership to the speech was critical, but not alarmist. Ambassador to Washington Nikolai Novikov told Molotov that the speech showed the United States would support “reactionary regimes” in Europe, while trying to undermine the progressive ones that had been established in the East. Molotov responded that “the President is trying to intimidate us, to turn as at a stroke into obedient little boys. But we don’t give a damn.”123 He still believed that the Americans had no choice but to cooperate on the real issue that divided them: Germany. A Communist Party Central Committee analysis was even more confident, proclaiming that Truman’s speech had been directed as much at London as it was Moscow. “[I]t signifies Britain’s expulsion from its sphere of influence in the Mediterranean and the Near East.”124
The Truman Doctrine, as Molotov and Stalin saw it, was a regional policy, directed at an area that was simply not a Soviet priority. There would be a time and a place to challenge it; just not now. In his encounter with Marshall in Moscow the following month, Stalin would not even mention the matter.
For its part, the State Department had misapprehended the position of Greece in the hierarchy of Soviet geopolitical objectives, conflating an ally’s failings (Britain’s) with an opponent’s strategy. It had judged Greece a vacuum in the collapsing British imperium into which Stalin would pour arms, funds, and troops if the United States did not declare its immediate intention to do the same with greater alacrity. Yet the Soviet leader had accepted that Greece was of little strategic importance to Moscow relative to other Balkan states, and had no designs on the country at this point.125
Stalin had in fact remained allegiant to the infamous October 1944 “percentages” agreement scribbled by Churchill, according to which Britain would maintain “90%” influence in postwar Greece in return for predominant Soviet influence in most of the Balkans and eastern Europe. Shortly after the deal, former foreign minister Maxim Litvinov wrote a strategy memorandum assigning all of the Balkans to the Soviet “security sphere,” with the explicit exception of Greece and Turkey.126 When French leader Charles de Gaulle asked Stalin about Greece shortly after, he replied, “Ask Churchill.”127
Despite ample scope for strategic interpretation conducive to his interests, Stalin, in Churchill’s words, “adhered strictly and faithfully to [th
e] agreement. . . . [D]uring all the long weeks of fighting the Communists in the streets of Athens, not one word of reproach came from Pravda or Izvestiia.” Stalin “let his people be beaten up in Greece for the sake of his larger plans”: establishing control in “his” parts of the continent, particularly Poland and Yugoslavia, with a minimum of force and treasure. When Molotov in February 1945 proposed an amendment to the draft Yalta declaration calling for “support [to] be given to the political leaders” of countries who were resisting the Nazis, clearly intended to legitimate Soviet backing for communist fighters in the East and the Balkans, Stalin reassured a worried Churchill: “[T]he prime minister,” he said, “need have no anxiety that Mr. Molotov’s amendment was designed to apply to Greece.” In April, following Roosevelt’s death, Stalin emphasized to Churchill and Truman that he recognized “how important . . . Greece [is] to the security of Great Britain,” and therefore did not “interfere” there. He expected a similar appreciation for Soviet security interests in Poland.128
Stalin might, of course, have considered his part of the Balkan deal moot after the British abdication in Greece. But all evidence says otherwise. Molotov, in a January 1945 note for his staff, drew a distinction between the government of Poland, which was a “big deal” for Moscow and no business of the West, and those of “Belgium, France, Greece” and other states in the Western orbit, where “no one asked” what Moscow thought.129 And in handwritten comments on a Vyshinsky memo the following month, he referred to Greece, where Moscow had “not interfered,” as “the Anglo-American zone of military action,” and not just a British protectorate.130
Picking his points of conflict with care, Stalin had also never been persuaded of the Greek rebels’ capabilities, and had decided early on they were not worth the costs and risks of Soviet support. In January 1945 he had told Yugoslav leaders that the Greek Communists “believed mistakenly that the Red Army would reach to the Aegean Sea. . . . We cannot send our troops to Greece. The [Greek Communists] made a stupid error.”131 He would repeatedly castigate Yugoslav prime minister Josip Broz Tito for aiding them in a lost cause. He did not want his allies doing anything that would attract American air and naval power into the Mediterranean and threaten his interests in eastern and central Europe.