The myth of Soviet expansionism (5)
When President Truman took office and announced the main features of what became later the Truman Doctrine, he was angry and outraged about the « Russian occupation of eastern Poland and the occupation of that part of Germany east of the Oder River. the charge that Russia controlled Eastern Europe merely because she was a World aggressor, was of course, without foundation. She came there because the pre-war Allied practised with Hitler and allowed him in order to push his imperialist and expansionist lebenraum to the East and in last run until invading the Soviet union. the Truman Doctrine was backed by immensely powerful anti-Russian and anti-Communist propaganda inside and outside the United States presenting Russia in east Europe as a brutal barbaric aggressor obviously out to conquer the world.
The Truman Doctrine began its boiling in the President’s mind on 23 April 1945, before becoming two years later, on March 12, 1947, with the Marshall plan, the most powerful weapon in the hands of the United states seeking to contain and to encircle the Soviet Union during the post-war period. Indeed, from the brief review of teh scope and use of the United States power in initial post-war period, it clearly seems to the Russians that they found themselves ringed in and contained and faced with a new and unfriendly threat coming now from her old western Allies. In addition, the Russians could not fail to realize quickly that the Aid provided by the Marshall Plan did not intend to help the Soviet reconstruction. On the contrary, during this period and the immediately preceding this period, the Soviet Government witnessed an expansion of American leadership and American power on a prodigious scale, including new areas of American dominance with the reconstruction of the two defeated nations, Japan in Asia and Germany in Europe. This American leadership appeared in 1946, through US troops still stationed in fifty-six countries and on every continent and by 1949 America had some four hundred world-wide naval and air bases. Now American imperialism stretched to areas located at 7000 miles distant from her borders.
after her bankrupt in Greece during the winter of 1947, this country and Turkey passed under American control. On May 1946, the United States and Britain had forced the Soviet Union to withdraw from Iran. Western troops were present also in Indonesia, Syria-Lebanon, Iceland and other areas.
