Read this article to learn about the Truman doctrine: a policy statement made by US during the Cold War!
The years 1945-47 are generally taken to mark the beginning of the Cold War. The first ‘shot’ in the Cold War was fired by Winston Churchill.
No longer the Prime Minister of Britain, he made a speech at the University of Fulton, Missourie, in the US, in the presence of the US President, Truman, in which he said,
“From the Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent”.
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The “Iron Curtain” referred to the division of Europe into the Soviet Union and the countries under Soviet control, and the rest of Europe. This division meant that the countries behind the iron curtain—the Soviet Union and communist-ruled states of Eastern Europe—were isolated from the rest of the world and lived under strict censorship and rigid control. Churchill also appealed for British-US political and military alliance to confront the Soviet Union
The US decision to intervene in the Greek civil war may be considered as formally ushering in the Cold War. President Truman, while asking the Congress for $ 400 million as military and economic aid to the Greek government, made a policy statement which has been called the Truman Doctrine.
In his speech, he said, “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure”. The Truman Doctrine proclaimed communism as the threat to the ‘Free World’ which the United States, as the head of the ‘Free World’, would not allow to succeed anywhere in the world.
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Every revolution was seen as being the result of Soviet expansionism which had to be crushed by all the might of the United States. This Doctrine became the basis of the foreign policy of the United States for about four decades and every conflict in the world was seen in terms of a struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union.