Leffler, Melvyn P.

OUR SYNOPSIS: Melvyn P. Leffler illuminates the grand strategy of the United States during the Truman administration. He argues that these officials “believed the United States had to help rebuild Western Europe, co-opt German and Japanese power, and promote orderly decolonization in the Third World.” (ix) Their “unprecedented wealth and power to exert their influence” enabled converting these beliefs into assertive foreign policy. (xi) The Soviet Union was comparatively weak. But U.S. officials worried about the immense potential of Soviet power and “defined security in terms of correlations of power.” (12) When Truman took office, he was uninformed, ambivalent, and leaned heavily on advisors. His administration sought to restrict the intertwined destabilizing forces of “economic chaos, revolutionary activity, and Soviet gains.” (71) Leffler argues that Truman and company chose a simplified bipolar vision of the international order in 1946, fully commencing the Cold War. In 1947, led by new Secretary of State George C. Marshall, the administration formed new initiatives to establish their Cold War footing: the Truman Doctrine, European Recovery Program, and National Security Act. Budgetary constraints frequently forced difficult decisions. When Truman began his second term in 1949, he made Dean Acheson secretary of state and continued to defer to the State Department on foreign policy even as he prioritized foreign policy overall. Then the Soviets ended the American nuclear monopoly and the administration ramped up military spending. Leffler asserts that U.S. leaders emphasized risk taking to achieve policy goals while trying to keep conflicts localized, relying on the assumption that the Soviets thought they could not win a protracted conflict and both sides wanted to avoid all-out war. At the end of the Truman presidency in 1953, “triumphant as they were in the industrial heartland of Eurasia and proud though they might be of their accomplishments, U.S. policymakers had not been able to stave off the erosion of Western influence in the Third World.” (493)