The Cold War and the Truman Doctrine

As was perhaps to be expected, given the different worldviews of the USSR, on the one hand, and the US and UK governments, on the other, as well as the history of strained relations between them since the Bolshevik revolution, the wartime alliance began to break up even before its victory over the axis powers. The two sides disagreed over Soviet access to the Dardanelles, over reparations, over the fate of Japan, over German frontiers, over Iran and over how and by whom Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and other states occupied by the Soviet Red Army should be ruled after the war. These divergences, among others, would lead to growing mistrust between the US and the USSR and eventually to a definitive rupture around 1947. Neither had plans to destroy the other but both began to assume otherwise (Hobsbawm, 1996, p. 226).

In short, the Cold War was very much based on mistrust and miscalculation (Judt, 2005, pp. 120-121). The Cold War, thus, was the result of a gradual process rather than of a single event. As J. L. Harper puts it, “the Cold War began in 1945, escalated in 1946, and was unofficially ‘declared’ in 1947 and congealed into a system in 1948-49” (Harper, 2011, p. 63).

Among the many tensions that led to the Cold War, one that was crucial for the emergence of the aid development agenda was the US aid package “to prevent Greece turning communist”, launched by Truman in March 1947.⁴³ As we have seen, the US had provided aid to tackle specific humanitarian problems after the war. It had also issued hard loans – particularly to Britain – for other economic purposes. The Greek plan, however, was a substantial financial package that did not fit in either of these categories: it was aid that would be handed out on demand to the Greek government to fight “a communist menace”. This menace had a clear military dimension, since it came from communist guerrillas with strong backing in the countryside. The Truman administration was adamant that the Soviets were actively supporting the guerrillas, which very much drove the decision to intervene as the British army left. Yet it was a mistaken view that took another step towards the Cold War. In fact, eager to respect the “influence zones” negotiated at Yalta, Stalin was pressuring the Yugoslavs (and the Bulgarians) to cut down all help to the Greeks – putting state interest before revolution (Jones, 1998, p. 136). Though they were sure that the Soviets were involved, the US government did not portray the Greek drama as a foreign-induced plot. On the contrary, while presenting the plan to Congress, Truman underlined the relation between underdevelopment and communism, and only implicitly and in passing referred to the Soviets. Thus, he sold the US package as not primarily a matter of military support but rather “of economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes”

(Truman, 1947, p. 187). Economic aid was needed to combat the communist menace as the “seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife” (Truman, 1947, p. 188). Communism was abhorrent to US values and undermined the very “foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States” (Truman, 1947, p. 188). Though Truman did mention the strategic importance of Greece’s location, he was not defining security in geopolitical terms. Communism could strike in any poor country, so the Greek package was likely to be the first of many. This open-ended policy to

“contain communism” – partly inspired and justified by US diplomat George Kennan’s long diplomatic telegram on the nature of the USSR (22 February

43 The package also contained help for Turkey to resist Soviet pressure over the control of the Dardanelles. But Greece was the main recipient and the case that triggered the Truman Doctrine.

1946) – came to be known as the Truman Doctrine. It would underpin US foreign policy in many ways throughout the Cold War.

The Greek package had a number of implications for the future of the development assistance agenda. First, it represented a radical break with the original postwar blueprint: open-ended systematic aid from one state to another was now part of the new world order. Indeed, for the first time, the United States was willing to provide in peacetime large grants ($400 million), not meant for humanitarian, reconstruction, or war purposes, to another independent country. Second, the recipient country (Greece) happened to be an underdeveloped one. Third, the money was explicitly intended to counter the communist menace, which was represented as the result of underdevelopment (although this term was not used). The fight against communism, thus, became a struggle for development. The large scope and open-ended nature of the Truman Doctrine thus prefigured the underpinnings of the modern development cooperation agenda: aid would flow until development had been reached everywhere and the communist menace was definitively vanquished. Of course, there was an important nuance. As the objective was to contain communism rather than to achieve development, and as aid resources were necessarily limited, these were bound to be provided, in the first instance, to those countries where such a menace was imminent and had to be resisted by military means. Despite being shrouded in “developmental” rhetoric, the Truman Doctrine was bound to generate more military than economic aid, as was indeed the case with the Greek package. As we shall see, the emergence of a clear development aid agenda required delinking military and development disbursements, a process that in the case of the US, the leader of this new agenda, would not occur until the late 1950s (see Chapter 5).

Scarcely three months after Truman demanded aid for Greece and Turkey, Secretary of State George Marshall made a speech at Harvard outlining policies that would become his famous plan to support the economic reconstruction of Europe and that would depart radically from the logic of the loan to Britain just a year earlier (Steil, 2018). Marshall believed that the US had given insufficient support to Europe and had taken the wrong approach. To achieve reconstruction on a solid basis, more substantial support was necessary. And given that countries were unable to repay loans because of the “dollar gap”, he believed that support should be given as pure aid within the framework of a regional programme administered by a new Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), rather

than through separate national plans. Though the political underpinning of the Marshall Plan was less explicit than the Greek package, the policy clearly fell under the umbrella of the Truman Doctrine. Indeed, its very first allocations for France and Italy were meant to undermine the rising popularity and menace of their communist parties.

Nevertheless, the Marshall Plan diverged significantly from the Greek package. It was much larger and was even more clearly economic rather than military in character. As with the Greek programme, its main driver was politics, but instead of focussing on an immediate menace, it was more strategic: it aimed at consolidating a pro-US Western bloc in Europe as the main bulwark to contain the Soviet menace stemming from the East. Finally, and most important for our purposes, the Marshall Plan was mainly for the reconstruction of developed economies torn apart by war, while the Greek package was directed to a developing country. In its five years of operation the Marshall Plan turned out to be remarkably successful. Reconstruction turned out to be relatively easy. In contrast, Greece would continue to receive aid for many years: development (and the eradication of the “communist menace” in developing countries) would be much more elusive.

As we shall see, the Greek package prefigured the type of development aid that the US would give throughout the 1950s under Mutual Security Act agreements. Nonetheless, in terms of propaganda, the impact of the Marshall Plan on the development cooperation agenda was much greater.

Regardless of its non-developmental character, it raised expectations in the developing world as to the amount of resources that could be mobilised as aid when the political will was there and what that aid could achieve. Since its implementation, calls for “Marshall Development Plans” in different contexts and regions have never really abated, though so far none have materialised.⁴⁴