The Truman Doctrine, put forth by President Harry Truman when he addressed Congress on March 12, 1947, essentially stated:
"The United States will defend free people and their free institutions at any place at any point in the world where outside communist aggression threatens that nation's internal stability."
The Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift
The United States was now committed actively to opposing the spread of Soviet-style Communism. The first plan that put this policy to use on a large scale was the Economic Recovery Plan of 1947, also known as the "Marshall Plan." In a commencement speech at Harvard University on June 5, 1947, George C. Marshall, a former general and now Truman's secretary of state, proposed that the nation make a huge economic commitment to rebuild the war-torn nations of Western Europe.
His objective was to "restore the confidence of the European people in the economic future of their own countries and of Europe as a whole." Marshall believed that the American economy depended on open markets. Thus, rebuilding the economies of Europe would guarantee American prosperity by providing an outlet for the nation's goods.
Marshall also contended that economic stability in Europe would translate into political stability, that Communism would have little appeal to well-fed and employed Europeans.
Between 1948 and 1951, the United States sent $13 billion in aid to Western European nations. West Germany benefited the most from the plan. Between 1947 and 1951, a period that historians refer to as the "German miracle," West Germany's economic output increased 312%.
As the United States invested heavily in the reconstruction of Western Europe, it also struggled with the Soviet Union for influence in Eastern Europe. This struggle became evident during the 1948 Soviet blockade of Berlin. After the end of World War II, the Allies had divided the city of Berlin, and the country of Germany as a whole, into four zones, one controlled by the Soviet Union, and the other three controlled by Great Britain, France, and the United States.
In response to growing American economic and military power in Europe, the Soviet Union cut off western links to Berlin, which was located inside the Soviet-occupied zone.
Truman, in turn, ordered a massive, year-long airlift of medical supplies, food and clothing for West Berliners. Eventually, the Soviets lifted the blockade. In 1948 and 1949, however, the Soviet Union sponsored Communist revolutions in Eastern-bloc countries such as Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Hungary.
In response, in April 1949, twelve nations of Western Europe and North America signed the North Atlantic Treaty, creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The goal of NATO was to coordinate the defense of Western Europe. An attack on any of its member nations was equal to an attack on all, with each nation obliged to battle their common foe.
Primary support, both militarily and monetarily, came from the United States.
A re-post from http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/lectures/lecture24.html
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