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In July of 1945, President Harry Truman, himself only recently briefed by Henry Stimson on the status of the Manhattan Project, told Stalin of the United States' possession of an atom bomb and two weeks later, he showed the world its power. On August 10th, 1945, the Japanese people heard their emperor’s voice for the first time in his message of surrender to what Hirohito called “this terrible weapon."
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Following George Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram” in 1946, which characterized the Soviet Union as the biggest threat to international security, Truman sought to foster democracy as a global alternative to authoritarianism in efforts to contain the expansion of repressive states. Truman recognized the need to offer the inhabitants of the bombed out and occupied European nation-states a reason to turn away from authoritarian alternatives. Germany had been gashed by the war, and by 1947, primal “hunger motivated labor unrest, public disillusionment and communist agitation” (Liberty 125).
His goals, articulated in the Truman Doctrine, were, as John Lewis Gaddis writes, “to salvage capitalism and secure democracy in circumstances so unpromising that authoritarian alternatives—despite their obvious dangers to human liberty—could easily have taken hold” (95). Truman sought a Germany that was “a self-sustaining, sovereign nation-state with representative institutions, a market economy, and a united people [that could] govern and feed itself, working cooperatively as part of an American-led society of states” (Liberty 142).
His goals, articulated in the Truman Doctrine, were, as John Lewis Gaddis writes, “to salvage capitalism and secure democracy in circumstances so unpromising that authoritarian alternatives—despite their obvious dangers to human liberty—could easily have taken hold” (95). Truman sought a Germany that was “a self-sustaining, sovereign nation-state with representative institutions, a market economy, and a united people [that could] govern and feed itself, working cooperatively as part of an American-led society of states” (Liberty 142).
Truman’s implementation of the Marshall Plan from the United States’ “vast domestic reservoirs” gave the manufacturers at home rejuvenated markets to meet management’s desire to sustain wartime production levels in a consumer economy and won for Truman and the Marshall Plan significant territory gains in Europe. The reach of the Marshall Plan’s economic investment and the US commitment to the United Nations led to the rise of conflict with Stalin's satellites in the era of communism's expansion into the world.
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The communist victory in the Chinese civil war in1948, Mao’s subsequent tutelage under Stalin, and the ensuing Sino-Soviet pact drew the lines for military fronts in Asia. Seeing Beijing as the puppet of Moscow, Dean Acheson indicated that “the central enemy is not the Chinese but the Soviet Union. All the inspiration for the present action [in Asia] comes from there” (Engel 190).
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Following North Korea’s invasion of the South, President Truman and Dean Acheson were forced to renew their recently withdrawn military presence in Asia, and the United States felt the need to demonstrate strength in order to maintain international security—to uphold “collective freedom against savage aggression,” for as Eisenhower later determined, applying the lessons of the 1930s, “to vacillate, to appease, to placate is only to invite war—vaster war—bloodier war. …it is only surrender on the installment plan” (Engel 194-5). Convinced that communism would expand anywhere the United States showed weakness, Truman sent the United States military to “uphold the rule of law” and to assert “the authority of the United Nations” (Engel 190).