The Truman Doctrine of March 12, 1947 was, in the minds of most Americans, a request for $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey. By the time Truman left office six years later, the doctrine had produced four lasting effects: a global anti-communist posture, the pattern of large-scale American economic and military aid to allies, the principle that American security depended on the political alignment of distant countries, and a process of institutional change — the National Security Act of 1947, the creation of the CIA, the formation of NATO, the development of NSC-68 — that built the national security state and gave it the resources and reach to operate worldwide.
Realignment of American Foreign Policy
In 1939, the United States had roughly 350,000 men under arms and a defense budget of under $2 billion. By 1953, the year Truman left office, the defense budget was over $50 billion, the armed forces numbered about 3.5 million, and the United States had formal security commitments to more than forty countries on five continents. The Truman Doctrine was not the only cause of this transformation, but it was the public commitment that justified it.
The doctrine also set the terms of domestic political debate. To criticize the doctrine, or the broader strategy of containment, was to risk being accused of “losing China” or, later, of being soft on communism. The bipartisan consensus that produced the doctrine held, with notable exceptions, until Vietnam broke it open in the late 1960s.
The Militarization of Containment
The doctrine was supposed to be supported primarily by economic and political means. Kennan’s containment had been a strategy of patient pressure applied to specific pressure points, not a global military posture. Within five years, the strategy had been generalized. NSC-68, drafted in 1950 by Paul Nitze and approved by President Truman, called for a roughly threefold increase in the defense budget and a global posture of resistance to communist expansion. The Korean War, which began on June 25, 1950, gave NSC-68 its political justification.
The result was a national security apparatus that looked little like what Kennan had imagined. The CIA, established by the National Security Act of 1947, ran covert operations in Italy, Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, Chile, and dozens of other countries. The Department of Defense was reorganized in 1949 under a single secretary. Military assistance to allied nations became a routine instrument of policy.
The Long Reach
By the 1960s, the doctrine’s reach had been tested in Vietnam. The American commitment to defend South Vietnam, justified by President Kennedy and others as a test of containment, ended in the Paris Accords of January 1973 and the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. The doctrine’s defenders argued that Vietnam was an aberration, its critics that it was the doctrine’s logical extension.
Either reading has support. What is beyond dispute is that the Truman Doctrine gave American foreign policy a vocabulary, an institutional architecture, and a public legitimacy that lasted from March 1947 until the end of the Cold War and that continues to shape the way the United States frames its role in the world. For the strategic framework that gave the doctrine its theoretical content, see the policy of containment.