years of U.S.-Soviet relations. In a theatrical dialogue to a joint session of Congress, President Harry S. Truman asks for U.S. support for Greece and Turkey to forestall communist domination of the two nations. Historians have frequently cited Truman's address, which came to be known as the Truman Doctrine, as the representative affirmation of the Cold War. In February 1947, the British government educated the United States that it could no longer supply the monetary and armed forces backing it had been providing to Greece and Turkey in view of the fact that the end of World War II.
The Truman administration supposed that equal nations were threatened by socialism and it jumped at the possibility to take a hard-hitting posture alongside the Soviet Union. In Greece, leftist military had been combating the Greek royal administration since the end of World War II. In Turkey, the Soviets were demanding several manners of controls over the Dardanelles, territory from which Turkey was capable to dominate the strategic waterway from the Black Sea to the
Mediterranean. On March 12, 1947, Truman materialized before a combined conference of Congress to make his case. The world, he declared, faced a choice in the years to come. Nations could espouse a way of life "based upon the will of the preponderance" and administrations that provided "guarantees of entity independence" or they could appear a way of life "based in the lead the will of a marginal forcibly imposed upon the greater part." This latter government, he indicated, relied upon "fear and tyranny." "The distant guidelines and the nationwide safety measures of this country," he claimed, were involved in the situations meeting head-on with Greece and Turkey. Greece, he quarreled, was "endangered by the activist behavior of several thousand equipped men, led by communists." It was incumbent upon the United States to support Greece so that it could "become a self-sustaining and self-respecting democratic system." The "freedom-loving" people of Turkey also required U.S. support, which was "essential for the preservation of its nationwide reliability." The head avowed that "it must be the policy of the United States to maintain free peoples who are refusing to accept challenged suppression by equipped minorities or by outside demands." Truman asked for $400 million in support for the two nations. Congress permitted his demand two months later. In various ways, the Cold War began even before the guns fell silent in Germany and in the Pacific in 1945. Suspicion and mistrust had defined U.S.-Soviet relations for decades and resurfaced as soon as the alliance against Adolf Hitler was no longer necessary. Competing ideologies and visions of the postwar world prevented U.S. president Harry S Truman and Soviet premier Joseph Stalin from working together.