move its forces from northern Iran as agreed at the Tehran Conference in 1943 and efforts to foment revolution in the Persian province of Azerbaijan. On this issue, the views of more hawkish advisers to President Truman such as Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal prevailed. After Acheson sent the Soviets a stiff note and the Iranians complained to the United Nations Security Council, the Soviets withdrew their forces. The crisis was over by May 1946.
In February 1946 Josef Stalin delivered what most observers regarded as a truculent and anti-Western speech. George Kennan followed this up with his long telegram to the State Department in which he commented on "the Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs," its moribund fears and suspicions of the West and its need for an external enemy to justify dictatorship at home (Chace, 1998, pp. 149-150, Kennan, 1947, July, pp. 566-582). Kennan called for long term containment by the West of Soviet expansionism. Its arrival in Washington coincided with the gradual emergence of a consensus within the American government in favor of a more forceful reaction by the American government to Soviet threats against Turkey and later Greece.
Stalin had first raised the possibility of revising the Montreux Convention governing the Turkish straits at the Tehran Conference. This had ripened by the time of the Potsdam Conference in July-August 1945 into a Soviet demand for military bases in the Dardanelles and demands for certain territorial concessions in Eastern Turkey. In March 1946 Winston Churchill warned of an iron curtain descending across Central Europe in his speech at Fulton, Missouri. Acheson played a key role in fashioning agreement within the American government in the summer of 1946 to resist Soviet pressure on Turkey. An American naval carrier task force was sent to the area. Chace says "confronted by American resolve and the naval task force in t...