The Potsdam Conference was held at Potsdam in the Soviet occupation zone from July 17 to August 2, 1945, to allow the three leading Allies to plan the postwar peace, while avoiding the mistakes of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The participants were the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They were represented respectively by General Secretary Joseph Stalin, Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, and President Harry S. Truman. They gathered to decide how to administer Germany, which had agreed to an unconditional surrender nine weeks earlier. The goals of the conference also included establishing the postwar order, solving issues on the peace treaty, and countering the effects of the war.
The Mutual Security Act of 1951 launched a major American foreign aid program, 1951–61, of grants to numerous countries. It largely replaced the Marshall Plan. The main goal was to help underdeveloped US-allied countries develop and to contain the spread of communism. It was signed on October 10, 1951, by President Harry S. Truman. Annual authorizations were about $7.5 billion, out of a GDP of $340bn in 1951, for military, economic, and technical foreign aid to American allies. The aid was aimed primarily at shoring up Western Europe, as the Cold War developed. In 1961 it was replaced by a new foreign aid program, the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which created the Agency for International Development (AID), and focused more on Latin America.
The Truman Doctrine is an American foreign policy that pledges American "support for democracies against authoritarian threats." The doctrine originated with the primary goal of countering the growth of the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. It was announced to Congress by President Harry S. Truman on March 12, 1947, and further developed on July 4, 1948, when he pledged to oppose the communist rebellions in Greece and Soviet demands from Turkey. More generally, the Truman Doctrine implied American support for other nations threatened by Moscow. It led to the formation of NATO in 1949. Historians often use Truman's speech to Congress on March 12, 1947, to date the start of the Cold War.
Containment was a geopolitical strategic foreign policy pursued by the United States during the Cold War to prevent the spread of communism after the end of World War II. The name was loosely related to the term cordon sanitaire, which was containment of the Soviet Union in the interwar period.
A United States presidential doctrine comprises the key goals, attitudes, or stances for United States foreign affairs outlined by a president. Most presidential doctrines are related to the Cold War. Though many U.S. presidents had themes related to their handling of foreign policy, the term doctrine generally applies to presidents such as James Monroe, Harry S. Truman, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, all of whom had doctrines which more completely characterized their foreign policy.
United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, better known as NSC 68, was a 66-page top secret U.S. National Security Council (NSC) policy paper drafted by the Department of State and Department of Defense and presented to President Harry S. Truman on 7 April 1950. It was one of the most important American policy statements of the Cold War. In the words of scholar Ernest R. May, NSC 68 "provided the blueprint for the militarization of the Cold War from 1950 to the collapse of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s." NSC 68 and its subsequent amplifications advocated a large expansion in the military budget of the United States, the development of a hydrogen bomb, and increased military aid to allies of the United States. It made the rollback of global Communist expansion a high priority and rejected the alternative policies of détente and containment of the Soviet Union.
The Mutual Defense Assistance Act was a United States Act of Congress signed by President Harry S. Truman on October 6, 1949. For U.S. foreign policy, it was the first U.S. military foreign aid legislation of the Cold War era, and initially to Europe. The Act followed Truman's signing of the Economic Cooperation Act, on April 3, 1948, which provided non-military, economic reconstruction and development aid to Europe.
The Baruch Plan was a proposal put forward by the United States government on 14 June 1946 to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (UNAEC) during its first meeting. Bernard Baruch wrote the bulk of the proposal, based on the March 1946 Acheson–Lilienthal Report. The Soviet Union, fearing the plan would preserve the American nuclear monopoly, declined in December 1946 in the United Nations Security Council to endorse Baruch's version of the proposal, and the Cold War phase of the nuclear arms race followed.
Buck passing, or passing the buck, or sometimes (playing) the blame game, is the act of attributing to another person or group one's own responsibility. It is often used to refer to a strategy in power politics whereby a state tries to get another state to deter or fight an aggressor state while it remains on the sidelines.
Harry S. Truman was an American lawyer and politician who was the 33rd president of the United States, serving from 1945 to 1953. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as a United States senator from Missouri from 1935 to 1945 and briefly in 1945 as the 34th vice president of the United States under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Assuming the presidency after Roosevelt's death, Truman implemented the Marshall Plan in the wake of World War II to rebuild the economy of Western Europe and established both the Truman Doctrine and NATO to contain the expansion of Soviet communism. He proposed numerous liberal domestic reforms, but few were enacted by the conservative coalition that dominated Congress.
The Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy was written by a committee chaired by Dean Acheson and David Lilienthal in 1946 and is generally known as the Acheson–Lilienthal Report or Plan. The report was an important American document that appeared just before the intensification of the early Cold War. It proposed the international control of nuclear weapons and the avoidance of future nuclear warfare. A version, the Baruch Plan, was vetoed by the Soviets at the United Nations.
The provisional government of Israel was the temporary cabinet which governed the newly established State of Israel, until the formation of the first government in March 1949 following the first Knesset elections in January that year.
Harry S. Truman's tenure as the 33rd president of the United States began on April 12, 1945, upon the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and ended on January 20, 1953. He had been vice president for only 82 days when he succeeded to the presidency. Truman, a Democrat from Missouri, ran for and won a full four-year term in the 1948 presidential election, in which he narrowly defeated Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey and Dixiecrat nominee Strom Thurmond. Although exempted from the newly ratified Twenty-second Amendment, Truman withdrew his bid for a second full term in the 1952 presidential election because of his low popularity. He was succeeded by Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The 1950 State of the Union Address was given by Harry S. Truman, the 33rd president of the United States, on Wednesday, January 4, 1950. He spoke to the 81st United States Congress, to the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate. It was a joint session, and the 160th address given. He said, "Our aim for a peaceful, democratic world of free peoples will be achieved in the long run, not by force of arms, but by an appeal to the minds and hearts of men." He also said, Our Social Security System should be developed into the main reliance of our people for basic protection against the economic hazards of old-age, unemployment, and illness.
The 1946 State of the Union Address was given by the 33rd President of the United States, Harry S. Truman, on Monday, January 21, 1946, to the 79th United States Congress. It was written by Samuel Rosenman and is notable for being the longest State of the Union message at the time: the written speech was sent to Congress, not orally given, and was 27,465 words long. The address combined Truman's economic report with state of the union information regarding returning to a peace economy after the end of World War Two, foreign policy in Europe and the admission of Hawaii into the United States.
The following events occurred in March 1949:
The Committee of European Economic Co-operation (CEEC) was a joint European conference to determine the priorities for the recovery of the European economy after World War II, and to assist in the administration of the Marshall Plan. The committee, consisting of representatives from 16 European nations, met from 12 July to 22 September 1947 in Paris, France.
The presidency of Harry S. Truman began on April 12, 1945, when Harry S. Truman became the 33rd president upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and ended on January 20, 1953.
The main issues of the United States foreign policy during the 1945–1953 presidency of Harry S. Truman include:
The 1949 State of the Union Address was given by Harry S. Truman, the 33rd president of the United States, on Wednesday, January 5, 1949, to the 81st United States Congress in the chamber of the United States House of Representatives. It was Truman's fourth State of the Union Address. Presiding over this joint session was House speaker Sam Rayburn, accompanied by President pro tempore Kenneth McKellar, in his capacity as the acting president of the Senate since the office of Vice President was vacant.
