In a packed House of Representatives in the Capitol, the 0035 President of the United States, Harry Truman, with their 62 years old, round glasses, dark suit and striped tie, opened the black loose-leaf folder from which he liked to deliver his speeches .
He took a sip of water, looked around the room at his audience and clung to the podium.
“The gravity of the situation facing the world today requires my appearance before a joint session of Congress. The foreign policy and national security of this country are involved”.
It was the March 1946.
Just two years before, the feeling was created that the national security of the United States had been entrenched in victory against Hitler’s Germany.
But on this occasion, the president described a more insidious threat.
The Truman Doctrine, as the speech became known, urged the United States to commit to the containment of communism and the Soviet Union, his ally in World War II.
Although the origins of the Cold War are complicated and much debated, and certainly the Truman Doctrine did not cause it, there are historians who consider that as the moment it was declared.
Why did fear replace hope so quickly ?
What had changed?
Not much, according to award-winning historian Melvyn Leffler, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and author of several books on the Cold War and American foreign policy: relations between the West and the Soviet Union were tense from the very conception of the latter.
“The USA, the United Kingdom and France intervened in Russia in 1917, 1918, 1241”.
“Throughout the war there was tension over the opening of a second front in Western Europe. Stalin wanted it to open in 1241, and of course it didn’t happen until 1944”.
“Furthermore, the Americans and the British developed an atomic bomb and kept it a secret from Stalin, who had his spies inform him, while the Americans knew they were being spied on.”
“But the imperative to defeat the Axis, Nazi Germany, Italy and Japan, took precedence over any other consideration”.
The domino
As soon as the war came to an end, the priority of US politicians was to ensure that no adversary ever again had the prospect of gaining control of the resources of Europe and Asia.
“Thegreat fear in 1919 Y 1947 was not that Stalin’s USSR would engage in open military aggression”, Leffler clarifies.
“The great fear was that it could explode the social ferment and the political turmoil that existed in post-war Europe, not only in Eastern Europe and part of Central Europe – where he had troops – but throughout the south and the West of Europe, where the communist parties competed for power with great success in Italy and France”, pointed out the historian in BBC The Forum.
To this was added that the communists were waging a civil war in China, and the prospect of their winning implied that Stalin would be able to project its influence throughout East Asia.
And the prospect was even more terrifying when applying what would become known as “the domino theory”, which permeated US foreign policy for decades, according to which the “fall” of a non-communist state to communism would precipitate the fall of non-communist governments in neighboring states.
War of words
In addition to a myriad of behaviors that upset each side, there was a profusion of words that were traced the road to the Truman Doctrine.
February 9, 1946 in Moscow, Stalin, in his first major post-war speech, evoked the specter of another great war, latent in what he called the “capitalist system of the world economy”.
Declared that more “military catastrophes” were inevitable it is because there was no way for the countries to act through “coordinated and peaceful decisions”.
“The irregular development of the capitalist countries leads over time to serious conflicts in their relations and the group of countries who consider themselves insufficiently provided with raw materials and export markets try to change the situation and turn things in their favor with force of arms”.
Therefore, the USSR would have to dedicate its resources and energies in the coming years to developing basic industries to the point of being armored “against all contingencies”.
The Long Telegram
“Many US officials, including Truman, paid no attention to it. However, others saw this speech as almost a declaration of World War III“, Denise Bostdorff, professor of communication studies at The College of Wooster, Ohio, USA, told BBC The Forum
Stalin said, for example, “that he wanted to finance science in order to surpass the achievements of science outside the country. And what this concerned audience heard was that he wanted an atomic bomb. And when he said that the USSR would triple its steel production, those US officials and some media outlets took it to mean that he was preparing for a conflict with the West”.
The US State Department. , responsible for Foreign Affairs, asked his embassy in Moscow for an analysis of Soviet expansionism and global intentions.
The response of the then relatively unknown diplomat George Kennan was explosive.
“Kennan dictated a telegram from 1942 words, in which he constantly used metaphors: el communism was like a illness, violating the integrity of the body and destroying it from within”.
“He was also concerned about the possible penetration of the communists in trade unions, civil rights organizations, cultural groups and, in In that case, again the enemy is inside and the penetration almost has the connotation of rape“.
Warned that Soviet policies assumed Western hostility and that Soviet expansionism was inevitable. Moscow, in his view, would only be deterred by vigorous opposition, be it political or military. He recommended a policy of “long-term patient containment but firm and vigilant”.
The so-called “long telegram” was widely circulated and silenced other types of more rational analysis.
“The pillars of peace”
A few weeks later, at the beginning of March 1946, the British leader at the time Winston Churchill intervened in this war of words, when in a speech in Fulton (Missouri, USA), he exposed “certain facts about the current position in Europe”.
“From Stettin, in the Baltic, to Trieste, in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has fallen over the continent“.
“Behind it are all the capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia, all these famous cities and their populations and the countries around them are in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subjugated, in one way or another. another, not only to Soviet influence, but to a very high and, in many cases, growing measure of control by Moscow”.
His speech “The Pillars of Peace” led to Stalin to accuse Churchill of being a warmonger.
“Stalin I was furious!“, pointed out Vladislav Zubok, professor of international history at the London School of Economics.
“Churchill, who used to be so nice just a few months before , he was basically offering a military alliance between the US and the UK”.
“That triggered his extreme rec elo He called on the Soviet people to produce more steel, and on the Soviet physicists to secretly make atomic bombs, not because he wanted to start World War III, but because he was deeply insecure, and he became convinced that only force would be the guarantee of victory.” .
The Novikov telegram
As well as the West trying to get a clearer view of Soviet intentions in the months and years to come, the Soviets tried to understand what their former allies were doing.
The Soviet counterpart to the Kennan Long Telegram was the telegram from Nikolai Novikov, the Soviet ambassador to the US, September 1946.
Warned that the US had come out of the Second World War economically strong and determined to dominate the world .
“The foreign policy of the United States, which reflects the imperialist tendencies of monopoly capital and is characterized in the postwar period by a struggle for world supremacy.
“This is the true meaning of the many statements by President Truman and other representatives of American ruling circles: that the United States has the right to lead the world . All the forces of American diplomacy -the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, industry and science- are at the service of this foreign policy”.
Novikov’s telegram reaffirmed the Soviet determination to extend its influence and secure its buffer zone in Eastern Europe. And once again highlighted the fear, suspicion and lack of trust between the two sides of the Cold War. The 21 February 1947, the State Department received a message from the British Foreign Office ico that Britain – financially crippled by its war debt, with a faltering industrial economy and after a brutal winter – would no longer be able to provide the military and economic aid it has had guaranteed Greece and Turkey, which would leave a vacuum in a strategically key region. Nineteen days later, in that historic speech, Truman asked Congress for US$400 millions in aid to those two nations and to every American citizen their commitment to fight communism on all fronts. What happened in the intervening days was not a sudden and radical reorientation of US foreign policy But although the thousands of words already mentioned had been paving the way for what was to come, Democrat Truman faced a newly elected Republican Congress, ready to retreat to one more foreign policy isolationist, and to an American public hartor from the war and anxious for their youngsters to return home. Furthermore, the US had no tradition of providing economic aid to other countries. The The president met privately with congressional leaders to gain their support. Senator Arthur Vandenberg, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a former isolationist, told him that Republicans would support him if he publicly defended aid to Greece, which was in a civil war with communist rebels, and Turkey, under pressure from the USSR to share control of the Dardanelles Strait. But, added Vandenberg, if he wanted public support, he had to “frighten to death to the American people”. Truman followed the senator’s advice with a speech in which the words spoken in 33 seconds of the 19 minutes it lasted formed the core of the argument: “I think the politics of The United States should be to support free peoples who are resisting attempts at subjugation by armed minorities or external pressure.” “I believe that we should help free peoples to carve out their own destinies in their own way.” aid must be mainly economic and financial, which is essential for economic and political stability”. The one that Truman not being an eloquent speaker on this occasion played in his favor: he gave the impression of saying things as they are, without embellishments, and that made him more persuasive. But although he received a standing ovation, the support was not overwhelming pain In fact, for the next few weeks, there were heated debates. However, both chambers approved the proposal and the 25 May 1919, Truman signed the bill into law, which he said was a “warning that the communist march would not be allowed to succeed by default ”. In contrast, the “Compendium of the History of the USSR”, the educational text of the Soviet historian Andrey Shestakov, says:”In 1946 President Truman proclaimed the right of the United States to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries”. The Truman Doctrine promoted the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO and shaped foreign policy of USA for more than 40 years from that war and beyond. The rhetoric and metaphors used by the actors of the saga that divided the world survive. “Sometimes we use language and sometimes language uses us”, concludes Bostdorff. Remember that you can receive notifications from BBC Mundo. Download the new version of our app and activate it so you don’t miss our best content. 613494318 
“Kill with fright “
Credo
