Following the research and subsequent recommendations made by field experts and government officials working for the state department, American foreign policy found itself with a new modus operandi — a geopolitical, ideological, and economic struggle against the face of communism, the Soviet Union. As will be exposed in the discourses that follow, the next forty-five years served as an era in which policy objectives were geared towards containing communism and in its escalation included proxy wars, foreign aid programs, domestic persecution, and the verge of nuclear annihilation.
In March of 1947, President Harry Truman appeared before congress and delivered a speech stating the following:
“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. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political process.”
To that effect, in the midst of the Greek Civil War, the Truman Doctrine was developed. Arguing that because the totalitarian form of government threatened democracy, any regime with such tendencies presented an automatic threat to peace in the international arena and the national security of the United States. To place this idea into context, Truman believed that if Greece and Turkey did not receive relief from their respective crises, they would surely succumb to communism. In light of this, Congress approved $400 million in military and economic aid. The Truman Doctrine was the first measure of containment policy taken by the US government and as political historian Eric Foner expresses, this “set a precedent for American assistance to anticommunist regimes throughout the world, no matter how undemocratic, and for the creation of a set of global military alliances directed against the Soviet Union.”
Not long after the Truman initiative, the European Recovery Program, commonly known as the Marshall Plan, came into play. The new program, similar to the principles established in the Truman Doctrine, provided over $17 billion in aid to assist in rebuilding the economies of several Western European nations. The intended outcome, in addition to curbing communist expansion, was to modernize industry, remove trade barriers, and reconstruct regions impacted by the second world war. Roughly eighteen European countries received the benefits offered my the new initiative, with the largest recipients being the United Kingdom (26%), France (18%), and West Germany (11%).
Containment had now become the status quo in foreign policymaking.
The International Review 