The Truman Doctrine came about after the British urgently informed Washington that they were no longer able to support the Greek government’s efforts in fighting its civil war against communist insurgents. Aid was given to Turkey because of the historic tentions between them and Greece. It was an early response to aggression by the Soviet Union in Europe and the Middle East, illustrated though the communist movements in Iran Turkey and Greece.
The Doctrine was the first in a succession of containment moves by the United States, followed by economic restoration of Western Europe through the Marshall Plan and military containment by the creation of NATO in 1949. In President Truman’s words, it became “the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures.” President Truman believed that because these “totalitarian regimes” coerced “free peoples” they represented a threat to international peace and the national security of the United States. President Truman in the proclamation to congress insisted that if Greece and Turkey did not receive the aid they needed, they would inevitably fall to communism with consequences throughout the region.
The Truman Doctrine granted $400 million, $350 million to Greece and $50 million to Turkey in military and economic aid. The economic aid was to be used in repairing the infrastructure of these countries and military aid came in the form of personnel supervising and helping with the reconstruction of these countries whilst training soldiers. The aid was to help Greece and Turkey get back on their feet so they could both support and defend themselves from coercive forces. It should be noted however that American aid was in many ways a replacement for British aid which the British were no longer financially in a position to give. The policy of containment and opposition to communists in Greece for example was carried out by the British before 1947 in many of the same ways it was carried out afterward by the Americans.
The doctrine also had consequences elsewhere in Europe. Governments in Western Europe with powerful communist movements such as Italy and France were given a variety of assistance and encouraged to keep communists groups out of governments. In 1950 Truman signed NSC-68 which shifted foreign policy from passive to active containment. The document differed from George F. Kennan’ s original notion of containment outlined in his “X” article. NSC-68 contained much harsher anti communist rhetoric it explicitly stated that communists planned for world domination. The Truman Doctrine also contributed to and became the rationale for America’s first involvements in the Korean and Vietnamese Wars.
The Truman Doctrine can be seen as a metaphor for emergency aid to keep a nation independent. Truman used disease imagery not only to communicate a sense of impending disaster in the spread of communism but also to create a rhetorical vision of containing it by extending a protective shield around non-communist countries throughout the world, his own Iron Curtain. It echoed the quarantine the aggressor policy of Franklin Roosevelt proposed in 1937. The medical metaphor extended beyond the immediate aims of the Truman Doctrine in that the imagery combined with fire and flood imagery evocative of disaster (Communism Spreading like wild fire, Waves of Communist Insurgents) provided the United States with an easy transition to direct military confrontation in later years with communist forces in Korea and Vietnam by presenting ideological differences in life or death terms.
