Transformation of Center-Periphery Relations and the Truman Doctrine

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Other Title
  • 中心=周辺関係の再編とトルーマン・ドクトリン
  • チュウシン シュウヘン カンケイ ノ サイヘン ト トルーマン ドクトリン
  • U.S. Foreign Poicy in the Cold War Era : Re-examinations
  • 冷戦期アメリカ外交の再検討

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In his memoir, The Fifteen Weeks, Joseph Jones, the draft writer of the Truman Doctrine, wrote that “there is a great difference between thinking or determining this [the policy to aid Greece and Turkey] and announcing it as the policy of the U. S. to a questionable Congress and an apathetic electorate.”<br>Indeed, the announced Doctrine assumed such a highly ideological tone as to ask every nation in the world to “choose between alternative ways of life.” But what was the Truman Administration really “thinking or determing” in 1947?<br>Historian Richard Freeland has argued the crisis of March 1947 originated not in Greek developments but in American politics. Surely the Truman Administration was not breaking new ground in extending aid to Greece and Turkey, because in September 1946 Byrnes had already agreed with Bevin to aid them jointly. 'Freeland, therefore, insisted that Truman's politics of ideology derived not from the Greek “civil war, ” but from American domestic politics, particularly the necessity of maneuvering the Republican dominated Congress.<br>But Freeland's hypothesis is, it can be argued, only a partial truth. The Truman Administration was actually “thinking or determining” to obtain world hegemony for the U. S. on behalf of the disintegrating British Empire.<br>In fact, on March 11, 1947, just one day before announcing its new Doctrine, the Truman Administration established the SWNCC Special Ad Hoc Committee regarding Extension of US Aid to Foreign Governments (except Greece and Turkey). This body reflected Acheson's judgement that the problem of Greece and Turkey was part “of a much larger problem growing out of the change in Great Britain's strength and other circumstances not directly related to this development.”<br>The Truman Doctrine needs to be analyzed, therefore, from the standpoint of a transformation of the entire world system. Here three factors were at work: the retreat of the old center, Britain; the social effects of that retreat on the peripheral states, Greece and Turkey; and the intervention throughout the globe of the new center, the U. S. The politics of ideology was the method chosen by the Truman Administration to fulfill America's imperial ambitions.

Journal

  • International Relations

    International Relations 1982 (70), 7-30,L3, 1982-05-22

    JAPAN ASSOCIATION OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

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