All the Trumps

As President Truman last week signed the bill providing $400 million worth of aid to Greece and Turkey, the Truman Doctrine badly needed a full directive and fresh campaign maps. Just what was the Truman Doctrine, anyway? Did it mean that Uncle Sam had turned world fireman and would henceforth be riding here & there to three-alarm fires, trying to douse flames with dollars? If so, a lot of alarm bells were going to be ringing at once. Or was the U.S. aiming at something larger, more foresighted, and more likely to succeed? Instead of waiting for alarms, would it seize present opportunities for a full-scale fire-resistant building program with goods, machinery and dollars to help its friends to help themselves?

Soldier's Estimate. George C. Marshall, back from an education in Moscow, did not like the fire-alarm theory. He was telling his intimates in his soldier's way last week that the menace to Greece and Turkey was pretty much like the Battle of the Bulge. You had to rush up reinforcements (in this case $400 million) "to straighten the line, but you didn't sit down thereafter and wait for another bulge to happen. George Marshall was trying, like a good campaigner, to get the initiative.

If the Truman Doctrine was concerned with U.S. opportunities, there were plenty of places to begin. Scandinavia had not sounded any alarm yet (though Russia has tied up Sweden's economy in a five-year trade treaty). The Dutch had not collapsed yet, though they faced a double calamity--loss of Indonesian trade and breakdown of business with Germany. Belgium was a highly bankable risk.

High on George Marshall's priority list was the problem of Western Germany. If trade with the British and American zones can be restored, there will be more coal for France (which needs coal even more than dollars), more freight for the Dutch canals and Belgian railways, more prosperity--and fewer fire alarms--for Western Europe in general.

That kind of economic recovery could be contagious. Last week Washington heard that some of George Marshall's planners were even thinking of a "Continental Plan," under which the U.S. would make big capital advances to groups of nations which were willing to abandon economic warfare and work together for the reconstruction of Europe. There was even a chance, Washington optimists thought, that some of the nations behind the Iron Curtain would find their loyalties strained if Western Europe as a whole began to produce as it could.

Kremlin's Estimate. For two years after V-E day, the U.S. had lost precious time because it had 1) underestimated the effects of Britain's decline as a force in Europe, and 2) mistakenly counted on Russian cooperation. The end of the British support for Greece (which left the U.S. in a lonely if Olympian sentry box) ended the first delusion. Moscow ended the second by shunning the reconstruction agencies of the United Nations, by stalling on peace treaties, and by stepping up the pace of Communist movements everywhere. The Russians at last made clear that their rubles were on Western collapse, not recovery.

The men who will plan Stage II of the Truman Doctrine still believe they have some time; Marshall hopes for seven to eight months in which to develop the new post-illusion foreign policy, sell it to Congress and the country. But from past experience, the U.S. may not have that much time. Or, if it does, the U.S. may learn that it will cost $2 next year to do what $1 might have done this year.

Europe's Estimate. In the meantime, clear language from Washington was needed to convince the world that a full-grown Truman Doctrine would be the U.S.'s constructive answer to the Communist Party, and not merely a hit-or-miss substitute for UNRRA. The Communists were already busy telling the world that the Truman Doctrine meant imperialism and slavery. Even some French non-Communists thought that the Socialist dirigisme--the "directed economy"--would be lost by listening to advice from the U.S. (see cut). In Britain a large and vocal bloc in the British Labor Party urged Ernest Bevin to steer clear of dependence on the U.S. (see below).

But such doubts that the U.S. would be overaggressive were much less important than the doubt among Europeans that the U.S. would not act vigorously enough. Britain's Economist summed it up this way: "If raw material resources, industrial capacity, scientific knowledge, productive 'know-how,' skilled labor--if these alone were the ingredients of power, then the United States could take on the rest of the world singlehanded. But . . . they are not all. . . . There must also be the willingness, and the ability, to use economic resources in support of national policy. . . . The Americans' hand is all trumps, but will any of them ever be played?"

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