From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 by George C. Herring

Author:George C. Herring
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Non-Fiction, Political Science, Geopolitics, Oxford History of the United States, Retail, American History, History
ISBN: 9780199765539
Publisher: Oxford Univ Pr
Published: 2011-02-28T15:00:00+00:00

14

"A Novel Burden Far from Our Shores"

Truman, the Cold War, and the Revolution in U.S. Foreign Policy, 1945–1953

With a touch of modesty—and no small hyperbole—former secretary of state Dean Acheson titled his 1969 memoir Present at the Creation and in the introduction called the Truman administration's task after World War II "just a bit less formidable than that described in the first chapter of Genesis." The challenge, Acheson remembered, was to create from the chaos left by war "half a world, a free half . . . without blowing the whole to pieces in the process." Acheson took understandable pride at "how much was done."1 In fact, the results in terms of U.S. foreign policy were more revolutionary than even he allowed. Responding to the turmoil that was the new world "order" and to a perceived global threat from the Soviet Union, the Truman administration between 1945 and 1953 turned traditional U.S. foreign policy assumptions upside down. A country accustomed to free security succumbed to a rampant insecurity through which nations across the world suddenly took on huge significance. Unilateralism gave way to multilateralism. Through the policy of containment, the Truman administration undertook a host of international commitments, launched scores of programs, and mounted a peacetime military buildup that would have been unthinkable just ten years earlier. The age of American globalism was under way.

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