President Truman grasped reins of world leadership from Britain right after Second World War

In December 1944, as the Germans withdrew from Greece, civil war broke out between the Communists (ELAS) and the Royalists (EDES). During the German occupation of Greece the ideological rivals buried their differences to resist the invader but this uneasy partnership collapsed and ELAS overran the whole country apart from Athens and Salonika.

Despite their early success, ELAS was obliged to concede defeat in 1945. ELAS went underground, regrouped, and resumed full-scale guerrilla war in 1946. The British actively supported the Greek Royalists and prevented Greece disappearing behind the Iron Curtain. They also supplied military aid to Turkey which was also faced with a Communist insurgency.

However, the fragility of the post-war British economy meant that the UK was forced to radically scale back its support to the Greeks and the Turks, so much so that in February 1947 the UK formally requested the United States to take on this role.

In a memorandum William Clayton, the under secretary of state for economic affairs, summed up the situation in the following terms: ’The reins of world leadership are fast slipping from Britain’s competent but very weak hands. These reins will be either be picked up by United States or Russia. If by Russia, there will almost certainly be war in the next decade with the odds against us. If by the United States, war can almost certainly be prevented.’

It was far from certain that the US Congress and people would willingly assume the UK’s mantle and the burden this would entail.

When on February 27 1947 President Truman, George Marshall, the secretary of state, and Dean Acheson, the under secretary of state, spoke to Congressional leaders, they initially met with limited success until Acheson made a decisive intervention.

According to Acheson’s memoir: ‘I knew we were met at Armageddon … in the past 18 months, I said, Soviet pressure on the Straits, on Iran, and on northern Greece had brought the Balkans to the point where a highly possible Soviet breakthrough might open three continents to Soviet penetration … we and we alone were in a position to break up the play.’

Acheson may have been over-stating the case because the Russians were giving the Greek Communists very little material support. However, if the Greek Communists had have emerged victorious the Russians would surely have exploited the opportunities to the full and likewise in Turkey.

Acheson’s intervention proved decisive. After a pregnant silence, Senator Arthur Vandenburg of Michigan said: ‘Mr President, if you will say that to Congress and the country, I will support you and most of its members will do the same.’

An astute Republican of Dutch heritage with serious presidential ambitions, Vandenburg had a complex track record on international relations. Starting off his political career as an internationalist, he became an isolationist in the inter-war years and then ‘a realist’ after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

On January 10 1945 in a celebrated speech to the Senate, he publicly announced his repudiation of isolationism and his return to internationalism. At the beginning of 1947 he became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In that role he cooperated with the Truman administration in creating bipartisan support for the president’s foreign policy, a position neatly summed up in his contention that ‘politics stops at the water’s edge’.

On March 12 Truman appeared before a joint session of Congress and requested $400 million in aid for Greece and Turkey.

Truman reiterated his belief that the USSR intended to use the civil war in Greece to dominate that country and then Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

The president declared: ‘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 people 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 processes.’

This statement came to be known as the Truman doctrine. Although no formal geographic limit was placed on the doctrine, Acheson assured Congressmen that it did not extend to China nor did it signal an intention to undermine Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe.

France and Italy, with their large Communist parties with serious electoral support, were a source of anxiety to the Americans, a point to which Truman alluded almost exactly a year later.

On March 17 1948, the president delivered his special address to Congress on the threat to the freedom of Europe in which he said: ‘Since the close of hostilities, the Soviet Union and its agents have destroyed the independence and democratic character of a whole series of nations in eastern and central Europe. [Communists took power in Albania, East Germany and Romania in 1945, in Bulgaria in 1946, in Poland and Hungary in 1947, and in Czechoslovakia in 1948.] It is the ruthless course of action, and the clear design to extend it to the remaining free nations of Europe, that have brought about the critical situation in Europe today.’

He asked Congress to introduce a peacetime draft (a measure of conscription) and emphasised that it was of ‘vital importance’ for America to keep US forces in Germany until peace in Europe was secure.

As he said: ‘We must be prepared to pay the price for peace, or assuredly we shall pay the price of war.’

Accepting Truman’s assessment, Congress approved the draft.

Truman later claimed that his doctrine signalled America’s willingness and commitment to resist ‘aggression globally’.

The Truman doctrine, the Marshall Plan (which helped rebuild post-war Europe) and Nato constituted three pillars of America’s policy of ‘containment’, first outlined in George Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’ in 1946, to halt Soviet geopolitical expansionism and the spread of Communism.

Both Truman and Kennan, key figures in the ‘Cold War’, were men of Ulster-Scots ancestry.