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President Truman & Cold War Policy

President Harry S. Truman's 1949 Inaugural Address and National Security Council Directive 68, taken together, comprise the basic notions of the authors and of the nation with respect to the world economy as the Cold War began to intensify. In the aftermath of World War II, that Cold War was the dark backdrop to the messages of both authors, with the new postwar world emerging as a strategic, economic, ideological and military battleground between the superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union.

Each of the four basic points of Truman's speech focus directly or indirectly on the perceived threat of the Soviet Union. Truman emphasizes the commitment of the U.S. to helping others recover economically from the ravages of World War II, but he ignores the fact that aside from Germany, perhaps the Soviet Union suffered more in every way than any other nation. The Soviets, however, were perceived by American leaders as a threat, not as a nation to be sent aid, as were European nations. Truman mentions the United Nations, but it was largely a symbolic world body with little power of enforcing decisions. Truman mentioned the U.N. in part because it allowed him to suggest that the postwar conflict was between the "good" nations of the U.N. against the "bad" Communist nations.

In reality, the United States throughout the 1950s (Vietnam, Guatemala, Iran) would pursue not U.N.-backed measures for peace and progress, but covert, self-serving, unilateral actions which did everything possible to prevent the peoples of those and other lands from exercising their freedom and democracy to choose their own leaders and develop their own economic plans.

It is true, as Truman notes, that the U.S. did help a number of nations economically, but those nations were primarily allies and developed nations in Europe. As he noted, it was "the European recovery program" (Truman 4) which served as the centerpiece of the American world economic...

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President Truman & Cold War Policy. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 10:58, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1701223.html