Truman Doctrine Dbq

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After World War II, Western Europe was an incredibly tense and economically destroyed part of the world. A key quote that was reported to have been used by Lenin was “Who has Germany, has Europe” (Best et al. 2008, p216) Initially, before the Cold War started, the two key super powers, the United States alongside their Western allies, such as Britain for example, and the USSR divided Germany into two separate states, East and West Germany (Calvocoressi, 2001) and as Calvocoressi (2001) mentions, there were disagreements and concerns from both sides over the structure of Germany. In terms of America’s leadership of the West in the first three decades of the Cold War, the achievements that they had were with the institutions that were formed, and economic policies based on Western values, which will be covered in this essay. These are …show more content…

It lasted 18 minutes, and as Merrill (Merrill, 2006,p.1) mentions in the abstract of the article, with a short quote, Truman pledged to the United States that they would “assist free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures” (Merrill,2006, p.1). And thus, the Truman Doctrine was created. This did two things; one was that it gave aid to Greece and Turkey in the form of military and economic help, as Truman had requested to give $400 million for the two countries. What this also did was that it created a containment of communism within Europe, even though they initially didn’t make it out for this to be the case, and tried to make sure that the communism didn’t spread within the West, and this showed that the US didn’t want the Soviets to expand their influence in Europe. This was a massive change in US foreign policy, and it later defined their Cold War policies, and the concerns of what would have happened if communism had expanded. (Merrill,

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