The United States, he told Congress, should take responsibility for defending "free peoples" throughout the world from communist aggression. President Truman sought to prepare Americans for their new international role by announcing the so-called "Truman Doctrine" in 1947. The United States did not have a long tradition of direct intervention in European and Asian affairs. This strategy, however, meant a radical new direction for U.S. to expand into areas vital to American security." Instead, the United States had to "be prepared, while scrupulously avoiding any act which would be an excuse for the Soviets to begin a war, to resist vigorously and successfully any efforts of the U.S.S.R. His conclusion was that the Soviet leadership was convinced of the inevitability of war between the capitalist and the communist world, and as long as this was the case there was little hope for reaching mutual understanding with them. In September 1946 Clifford sent Truman a memo in which he traced the history of U.S.-Soviet relations and offered a set of recommendations for foreign policy. While there were some within the administration-namely Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace-who dissented from this opinion, calling for greater understanding of the USSR's need for security, most policy makers found persuasive the arguments of White House Counsel Clark Clifford. With the recent experience of the late 1930s very much in mind, President Truman concluded that the Soviet Union was behaving like a bully and that the best way of dealing with a bully was to stand up to him. policymakers was how to respond to Soviet aggression. (For more information on this, see the previous lesson in this unit: " Sources of Discord, 1945–1946"). In the eyes of many Americans, members of the Truman administration as well as average citizens, the Soviets seemed bent on dominating much of the European continent in a manner reminiscent of that of Nazi Germany. By the end of 1946 serious differences had emerged between the West and the Soviet Union regarding the fate of postwar Germany and Eastern Europe.
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