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This article examines the enunciation in March 1947 of the Truman Doctrine. The doctrine pledged the United States to "assist free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. " Although the statement was initially aimed at winning congressional support for U.S. aid to Greece and Turkey, where the administration feared Soviet penetration, it ultimately underpinned U.S. Cold War policy throughout Europe and around the world. Moreover, the doctrine addressed a broader cultural insecurity regarding modern life in a globalized world. The administration's concern over communism's domino effect, its media-sensitive presentation of the doctrine, and its mobilization of U.S. economic and military power to modernize unstable regions marked the advent of a modern U.S. foreign policy. In its maintenance of military preponderance, its nation-building activities, its organization of alliances, its advocacy of "regime change, " and its resort at times to limited war against armed insurgencies, the Truman Doctrine foreshadowed the contemporary Bush Doctrine against international terrorism.
Addressing a joint session of Congress on March 12, 1947, President Harry S Truman requested $400 million in military and economic aid for Greece and Turkey. Convinced that both countries faced Communist aggression, the president enunciated a bold new foreign-policy doctrine: "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."
In the pantheon of presidential doctrines, Truman's stands out for its breathtaking modernism. The term "modern" defies easy definition. It is typically thought to refer to the most recent stage in Western history, an age of astonishing technological and economic progress. Anthropologists, however, advance a more expansive view of modernity as a worldwide cultural revolution, a state of consciousness that elevates science, mastery over nature, mass production, mass consumption, and social engineering. Initially linked to the nineteenth century's industrial revolution, it impacted different regions of the world unevenly, bestowing material benefits upon some and relegating others to poverty. By the 1940s, however, global war had fractured empires, and transportation and communications networks connected the world's peoples as never before, complicating the meaning of modernity and reshaping international relations.
Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, each keenly aware of the world's growing interdependence, expanded America's international role and...