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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
President Truman's statesmanship consists in the fact that his administration's foreign policy fused moral principle and national self-interest and that his articulation of foreign policy educated citizens in the principles of the American regime and in the nature of the threat to it. The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan address vital strategic interests, but Truman's conception of the national interest contained a lucid sense of political meaning and purpose in his understanding that the perpetuation of freedom in America required a resolute defense of republicanism elsewhere in the world. Like Lincoln, Truman was committed to the prudent containment of an expansionist power, and for Truman, as for Lincoln, the survival of the Union meant above all the preservation of a regime devoted to the principles of the Founders. NSC-68 crystallized containment policy, uniting power with principle in a strategy that matched military means to political ends.
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15 Ibid., pp. 602–603.
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25 Ibid.
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27 Truman, , Memoirs: Years of Trial and Hope, p. 263Google Scholar. Fellow-travelers then and revisionists later regarded the Truman Doctrine as an example of U.S. imperialism, but few serious men deny that it addressed a legitimate, vital interest. Some reasonable men have, however, faulted Truman's emphasis on the philosophical conflict with communism for fostering a simple, rigid view of the cold war that hindered future accommodation with the Soviets and leading after 1950 to an indiscriminate, global containment that failed to distinguish between vital and peripheral interests. See Donovan, , Conflict and CrisisGoogle Scholar, chap. 30; also, in addition to his other works cited above, Gaddis, John Lewis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982)Google Scholar, chap. 3. This point of view reflects a positivist understanding of the national interest in material terms and assumes the Soviet Union is an ordinary nation-state with limited ambitions and with whom a genuinely peaceful accommodation can be struck. Gaddis says the conflict of “two ways of life” referred to totalitarianism and democracy, not communism and capitalism, suggesting communism is not inherently totalitarian and expansionist, given the power and opportunity.
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41 Truman, , Memoirs: Year of Decisions, p. 364.Google Scholar
42 The texts of Undersecretary of State Acheson's speech before the Delta Council in Cleveland, Mississippi, on 8 May 1947, and Secretary of State Marshall's announcement of the European Recovery Program at Harvard University on 5 June 1947, are contained in Jones, , The Fifteen Weeks, pp. 274–84Google Scholar; see also the bipartisan report of the President's Committee on Foreign Aid endorsing the ERP in Bernstein, and Matusow, , eds., The Truman Administration, pp. 263–75.Google Scholar
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45 Ibid., p. 344.
46 Ibid., p. 342.
47 Truman discusses NATO in Memoirs: Years of Trial and Hope, chap. 17; see also Acheson, , Present at the Creation, chap. 31Google Scholar. Kaplan, Lawrence A., “The United States and the Origins of NATO, 1946–1949,” Review of Politics, 31 (04 1969), 210–22Google Scholar, offers useful background, emphasizing the major departure in foreign policy represented by NATO.
48 See Gardner, Lloyd C., “Truman Era Foreign Policy: Recent Historical Trends,” in Kirkendall The Truman Period as a Research Field: A Reappraisal, 1972, pp. 47–74Google Scholar. Gardner is vexed by the indivisibility of the political and military aspects of containment.
49 McCloy, John J., The Atlantic Alliance: Its Origin and Its Future (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 23.Google Scholar
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55 Ibid., p. 386.
56 See Gaddis, , Strategies of Containment, chap. 4Google Scholar. Gaddis, John Lewis, “The Rise, Fall and Future of Detente,” Foreign Affairs, 62 (Winter 1983–1984), 354–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar, analyzes the various forms of containment from Truman to Reagan. Because he disregards the ideological character of the Soviet regime he attributes our continued failure to resolve disputes with Russia to a fear of weakening public support for containment. But if the Soviet Union is not radically different from other nation-states, it is hard to see the point of the whole struggle.
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