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American Foreign Policy The direction of U. S. foreign policy was affected further by the onset of the Cold War, the post- 1945 struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. In March 1947, when President Harry S.
Truman announced that the United States would lead a global effort to combat Communism, both Congress and the American public rallied to his support. Truman's new policy later became known as the Truman Doctrine. Truman instituted a policy of containment to thwart Soviet expansion efforts. That policy led the United States into forging a series of military alliances around the world. The country also started to provide substantial amounts of foreign aid to friendly nations, and to alert the American public and the world to the dangers of Communism. Truman's policy led the United States into a series of conflicts, including the Korean War (1950 - 1953) and the Vietnam War (1959 - 1975).
The Korean War originated in the division of Korea into South Korea and North Korea after World War II (1939 - 1945). Efforts to reunify the peninsula after the war failed, and in 1948 the South proclaimed the Republic of Korea and the North established the Peoples Republic of Korea. In 1949 border fighting broke out between the North and the South. On June 25, 1950, North Korean forces crossed the dividing line and invaded the South. Soon, in defense of the South, the United States joined the fighting under the banner of the United Nations (UN), along with small contingents of British, Canadian, Australian, and Turkish troops. In October 1950 China joined the war on the Norths side.
By the time a cease-fire agreement was signed on July 27, 1953, millions of soldiers and civilians had perished. The armistice ended the fighting, but Korea has remained divided for decades since and subject to the possibility of a new war at any time. To stop the USSR from spreading Communism, the United States became involved in Indochina and the Middle East. In Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, a nationalist and a Communist, led a movement for independence from France. The Truman administration had aided France, but in 1954, the French were defeated. An international peace conference in Geneva divided Vietnam at the 17 th parallel.
The United States refused to sign the Geneva Accords, which it believed conceded too much to the Communists. Instead the United States sent economic aid and military advisers to South Vietnam from 1954 to 1961. Although Eisenhower feared further involvement in Vietnam, he supported what was called the domino theory: I f Vietnam fell to Communism, all of Southeast Asia might follow. The lesson, or analogy, of Munich became a dominant model of what could happen in the future unless threatened countries adopted different intervention strategies. During the 1970 s, many American policymakers, concerned about Middle Eastern limits on oil supply, sought an analogy for facing shortages of a vital material that would guide their thinking about future policy.
For a time, many found a suitable analogy in the World War II development of synthetic rubber, which replaced sources of natural rubber blocked by the Japanese. Here, as well as with the Munich Pact example, policymakers assumed that they could envision the future by analogizing a current situation with a known past this case, developing a synthetic substitute for oil. However, oil flow resumed and the analogy was dropped. By the 1980 s the arms race between the two superpowers became unaffordable to the USSR. The burden was much more easily weathered by the prosperous market economies of the United States and its other Western allies than by struggling centrally planned economies of the Eastern bloc. The Soviet leadership also became less able to suppress domestic pressures for increased political freedom.
Such pressures, which were tightened by President Ronald Reagan's escalation of the arms race against what he dubbed the evil empire, resulted in an implosion under the reformist rule of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. In November 1989 the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, a major symbol of the Cold War, dramatically illustrated the decline of the Communist threat. Sources: Dallas, Robert. The American Style of Foreign Policy.
Knopf, 1983. Hoge, James F. , Jr. and Free Zakaria, eds. The American Encounter: The United States and the Making of the Modern World. HarperCollins, 1997.
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