Henry A.Wallace as Presidential Candidate: “Am I in America?”

Henry A. Wallace challenged the bipartisan foreign policy of President Truman in 1948. The Progressive Citizens of America opposed Truman’s “get-tough policy” (the Truman Doctrine, loyalty investigations, Universal Military Training, and the Marshall Plan) and founded the Progressive Party. Other “liberals” formed Americans for Democratic Action and supported Truman, who claimed that the Progressive Party was a Soviet construction. Wallace refused to participate in segregated meetings during his campaign in the South and was violently attacked. He advocated the need for federal measures to prohibit segregation, discrimination, the poll tax, and lynching. Wallace was resoundingly defeated but proved right in the long run: military means could not solve social problems. Instead, it spread hatred of the United States in many countries. The 1948 election determined U.S. foreign policy for over 50 years, resulting in missed opportunities to improve housing, education, and social security at home, which still has repercussions today. JEL Classifications: N42, F50

2. The origins of the Cold War in Europe, 1945–50

‘The origins of the Cold War in Europe, 1945–50’ traces the origins of the Cold War in Europe. In theory and practice, the Americans and British were reconciled to a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. At the Yalta Conference in February of 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin tried to resolve some of the basic disputes while also planning the war’s end game. Within weeks of the conference’s closing sessions, however, the Yalta spirit was jolted by mounting Anglo-American dissatisfaction with Soviet actions in Eastern Europe. The Potsdam Conference in July of 1945 and the Truman Doctrine amounted to a declaration of ideological and geopolitical Cold War.

TRUMAN DOCTRINE (1946); DEFENSE PLANNING GUIDANCE (1991) & THE NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY (2002): THE MACKINDER & SPYKMAN DIALECTICS REVISITED

The aim of this article is to test the hypothesis that Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman’s geopolitical theories, which sustained the grand strategy of the United States with the implementation of 1946 Truman Doctrine, are still relevant today after their termination. The results indicate that the intellectual matrixes were found in documents of the grand strategy of the United States in two moments. First, in 1992, in the George Herbert Walker Bush’s government’s Defense Planning Guidance document, formulated by the Pentagon, in February 1992. Second, they were found replicated 10 years after in the first term of President George Walker Bush, inaugurated in 2001. In the latter, the theoretical formulations repercussions were depicted in the official documents Quadrennial Defense Review (2001) and the National Security Strategy (2002). The article concluded that the authors’ ideas remain valid to explain and interpret the actions of the United States’ grand strategy in the international scenario.

„Długi telegram” George’a Kennana

The Long Telegram by George Kennan was a turning point in the career of the American diplomat, and his theses contributed to the formulation of the Truman Doctrine, which involved fighting the growing influence of the USSR in the world. In the above-mentioned analysis sent in February 1946 to the headquarters of the State Department, Kennan included his observations and beliefs about the nature of the Soviet system and its impact on the foreign policy pursued by the USSR. Despite the fact that the text was written almost 75 years ago and concerned the Soviet Union, many of its theses are still valid, and reading it allows for a better understanding of the foreign policy of contemporary Russia.

Fits and Starts

This chapter deals with the term of the Committee of Information from 1947 to 1949, which introduced a variety of proposals for accountability. It points out how solid Western state domination of the General Assembly and the states' manipulation of UN procedure prevented much of the proposals for accountability from being accomplished. It details the importance of the Cold War in shaping discussion of the UN role in the nontrust dependent territories as the Soviet bloc worked to use colonialism as a propaganda weapon against the West across UN forums. The chapter outlines proponents of an activist UN role in the Chapter XI territories built on the creation of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Transmission of Information to advance a variety of proposals for accountability. It looks at the Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, Berlin Blockade, creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and other international developments that marked the superpower confrontation in Europe.