The Truman Doctrine Redux:

21st-Century American Foreign Policy

Vassilios Damiras, Ph. D.

International Relations Expert

The geostrategic role of the Truman Doctrine in helping prevent the fall of the then-Greek kingdom to communism during the late 1940s created a robust design for American diplomatic and strategic planners that they then utilized throughout the Cold War. Moreover, since this specific policy combined the theoretical principles of realism and idealism, it is argued that Harry S. Truman created the foundations of American liberal imperialism in his readiness to fight Soviet/Slavic communism as an ideological menace in the Balkans and Greece’s immediate geographic vicinity.
President Truman, influenced by his classical education, believed that in protecting Greece from communism, American military advisers defended the cradle of Western civilization and their American culture. Furthermore, Greece founded the glorious Byzantine Empire and the Greek Eastern Orthodox Christian faith. Without a doubt, Truman recognized that the modern Greek socio-political system was not as pure in democratic and cultural values as during the ancient times; nevertheless, in Truman’s interpretation, the United States had an obligation to assist the country that provided the tenets of the American democracy. In addition, he realized that through Greece, American military power would significantly shape the region.

The Truman Doctrine opened a new crucial page in American foreign policy. President Truman’s reaction to the Korean military crisis in 1950 relied on his firm conviction that “this is the Greece of the Far East. If we are tough enough now,” he declaimed, “there won’t be another step.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower perceived the ongoing military crises in Indochina and the Middle East through the geopolitical/geostrategic lessons of the Greek Civil War (1947-1949), warning that if these strategic regions fell to Soviet communist influence, Europe and other areas could likewise collapse under Soviet totalitarian pressures. In the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson argued forcibly that the Greek case provided an example of American military action in Vietnam.
The tenets of the Truman Doctrine left their imprint on the seminal stages of an American foreign policy that was adaptable, restrained, and not necessarily based on military power. Later, when President Kennedy introduced a “flexible response,” Truman and his advisers (some later joining Kennedy) adopted a foreign policy to fight the ever-growing political and strategic challenges to democracy with a broad-ranging arsenal of responses corresponding to the socio-political danger at hand. The Republican party must adopt and promote a foreign policy based on the Truman Doctrine to fight Russian and Chinese imperialism. The USA must create a strong Pax American globally to protect its national interests and support global stability.