The final eclipse of the Truman Doctrine, a cornerstone of American foreign policy

Globe and Mail

18 hours ago

A posse of European leaders came to Washington this week to praise the United States' role in the world, but they ended up witness to the burial of a vital part of it.
What the members of the delegation who rushed to join the Ukraine negotiations saw was the decline of the continent-wide confidence that came with a cornerstone of American foreign policy for generations, a doctrine so durable that it has persisted through the decades though it bears the name of a president – Harry S. Truman – who governed decades before most Americans were born.
The hours-long White House talks to bring an end to the war in Ukraine may be remembered for marking the final eclipse of the Truman Doctrine, which the 33rd president promulgated a year before Donald Trump was born, and which governed American diplomatic and military strategy through nine presidencies, from the period just after end of the Second World War until the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
It was a period that began with perhaps the greatest military achievement of the United States – Mr. Trump himself this spring cited V-E Day as one of the signal events of the country's history – and ended with what Russian President Vladimir Putin has called the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.'
'These negotiations over Ukraine are an important bellwether,' said David Greenberg, a Rutgers University historian. 'This is a moment of American reluctance to carry through the principles of the Truman Doctrine that we were all so shaped by.'
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The Truman Doctrine was born at a joint session of Congress on March 12, 1947, amid worries that communist insurgencies were threatening to spread in Europe, especially in Greece and Turkey. Then president Harry Truman stood at the rostrum of the House of Representatives' chamber and declared, '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.'
That sentence prompted congressional approval of US$400-million in military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey as part of the struggle to halt the march of Communism through Europe and is regarded as the founding statement of the Cold War. In some ways, too, it was the precursor to the Marshall Plan, known formally as the European Recovery Program, which was unveiled three months later at the commencement exercises at Harvard University and was motivated in large measure by the effort to oppose the spread of communism in Europe.
By any measure, the resistance of Ukraine to the Russian incursion that began three and a half years ago is an example of Truman's 'free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by . . . outside pressures.' The Soviet Union is gone, but Russia remains, and so does its expansive inclinations.
The tentative peace plan floating around world capitals does call for the United States to route US$90-billion in weapons through Europe, but that is a sale, not a grant–reflecting the arm's distance from Ukraine that the Trump team wants.
The Truman Doctrine has been much challenged as policy – in 1977 Jimmy Carter spoke of the 'inordinate fear of communism' – and regarded as the geopolitical approach that led to the now-discredited 'domino theory.' Nonetheless it persisted, even past the détente of the Richard Nixon years and the multiple arms-control agreements Mr. Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan signed with aging Soviet leaders. Additional pacts were signed by George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
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The Truman Doctrine's precept of supporting freedom among oppressed peoples, moreover, was applied to the nation-building undertakings of more recent presidents, especially George W. Bush in Iraq. All that is regarded with disdain in the Trump White House.
'Trump seems willing to normalize Putin's aggression and erase any clear delineation between free democracies and aggressors,' said Melvyn Leffler, a history professor at the University of Virginia and author of A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. 'These negotiations are a repudiation of the Truman Doctrine.'
While the flattery flowed this week, deep worries swirled beneath the surface. Some Republicans reverted to the party's traditional posture of skepticism, if not outright distrust, of all things Russian.
Some conservatives fretted that Mr. Trump's avowed lust for a Nobel Peace Prize rendered him too eager to forge an agreement to bring the conflict to an end. There is also concern that warmer U.S.-Russian relations may free Moscow to divert attention to cultivating Beijing.
And European leaders are wary about the entire undertaking, with President Emmanuel Macron of France saying, 'I am not convinced that President Putin also wants peace.'
Mr. Macron may have inadvertently been channelling an earlier French leader – Georges Clemenceau, who was prime minister between 1906 and 1909 and again from 1917 to 1920.
Of Alsace-Lorraine, a onetime French territory was under German control, Mr. Clemenceau said: 'The fate of a land can be decided, for a time, upon a battlefield, but not the mastery of souls, which escape the might of the sword.'