The Anti-Truman!

The Anti-Truman!

Jeffrey Owens

George Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’ arrived on President Harry Truman’s desk in late February 1946, which more than any other single document, altered United States understanding of the Soviet Union and set in motion what would become U.S. Cold War policy.

Kennan was responding to an inquiry from the Truman administration, asking ambassadors and foreign services staff with experience dealing with Russia on how to interpret Stalin’s malice towards the U.S. in the post Second World War settlement.

Kennan asserted that Russia had to treat the outside world with scorn. For only through this contempt did they find the need “for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict” and “for sacrifices they felt bound to demand.” He emphasized that expecting concessions from Stalin was pointless and that the only successful foreign policy for the United States in dealing with the Soviets was a “long term, patient but firm vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”

Ever since Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the United States had provided enormous financial and military support to Stalin to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, not just to keep the USSR in the war, but eventually to set the Soviets up to win on the Eastern Front.

This support just in September 1941 alone involved commitments of providing Stalin with U.S. Lend-Lease supplied equipment including 1,800 fighter aircraft, 2,250 tanks, 500 anti-tank guns, and millions of rounds of ammunition. Each month Stalin would receive 400,000 pairs of army boots, 20,000 tons of petroleum products, and the U.S. agreed to supply 10 million surgical needles, 20,000 amputation knives and over a million doses of antibiotics.

Although the U.S., Great Britain and the Soviet Union had been allies throughout the Second World War, including multiple “Big 3” meetings between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin to agree on strategy and the post-war settlement, that alliance quickly fell apart in the final months of the war. In short order, Stalin openly violated every promise he had made from allowing free and democratic elections in Soviet liberated Poland to respecting human rights or internationally established borders.

Any and all western supported, democratic institutions or leaders in liberated Eastern Europe were rounded up by Soviet police (NKVD) and either executed or deported to the Gulag in Siberia. Wholesale vengeance was committed against populations by the Red Army which included mass rape; setting in motion in the spring of 1945, the largest panic-driven migration of peoples in human history, as more than 8 million people fled west, attempting to avoid Soviet occupation.

Eastern European borders were shifted to Stalin’s liking. Western Russia extended into Eastern Ukraine, Western Ukraine absorbed Eastern Poland, while Prussia in Eastern Germany became Western Poland. Deportations of “enemy” populations to prison camps numbered in the millions across Eastern Europe while Soviet inspired secret police forces such as Bezipieka in Poland and the Stasi in East Germany imposed severe repression and fear upon their respective populations.

Speaking at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill observed in early 1946, that “an ‘Iron Curtain’ has descended across the Continent. Behind the lines lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe,” the populations of which “…are subject in one form or another” to an “increasing measure of control from Moscow.”

Churchill however was out of power by then as his coalition government had dissolved a year before. Now it was Harry Truman, as President of the United States and leader of the free world, whose forces primarily occupied liberated Western Europe who would be opposing Stalin and creating the post-war establishment.

While Stalin sought security through massive repression and forcibly shifting borders to create greater buffer zones to protect Russia, Truman pursued security by economic rebirth and strengthening democracy.

Taking Kennan’s telegram to heart, and realizing that Stalin’s cruelties were a result of Russian insecurities in having no idea how to govern without them; the Truman Doctrine was born. For Truman, “…it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures” and “we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.”

The single greatest threat to U.S. security in the post-war era was the economic collapse of newly liberated Western Europe and the establishment of pro-Stalin Communist regimes. Employing Kennan’s ideas, retired General George Marshall, now serving as Secretary of State to Truman, developed the European Recovery Act.

The Marshall Plan, as it quickly became known, called for the reconstruction of Europe by pouring billions of dollars into rebuilding its infrastructure and revitalizing its economic power. This was an enormous success not only because it placed the United States on the moral high ground in Europe, but also it forced Stalin onto the defensive.

No distinction was initially made in the Marshall Plan between Western and Eastern European nations, and Stalin offered no such program. Several Eastern European nations appealed for assistance through the Marshall Plan, but Stalin forbade them from accepting it. To ensure that these Western influences were blocked out of his sphere of Europe, Stalin created the very iron curtain that Churchill had coined, by erecting heavily guarded state borders across thousands of miles of Europe.

The most infamous of these partitions and notorious symbol of the Cold War was the Berlin Wall. This massive structure of concrete and barbed wire cut the German capital in half, separating West from East—Free from Communist.

Although Berlin was solidly inside Soviet East Germany, an access road was maintained for American, British and Canadian supplies to reach West Berlin. Like Western Europe, West Berlin received Marshall Plan aid, which brought about huge economic growth, while right across the Wall, the populace of East Berlin was impoverished.

To prevent further Marshall Plan assistance in the heart of East Germany, Stalin blockaded the access road to West Berlin. Knowing that submitting to Stalin would only yield more aggression, Truman responded with a peaceful but massive airlift of millions of tons of supplies to West Berlin. Truman’s display of humanity and strength won the hearts of Berliners and Germans alike, and resulted in significant international pressure, which eventually forced Stalin to end the siege.

Stalin’s behavior convinced Truman that a permanent U.S. military presence was needed in Europe to prevent further Soviet expansion. The result was NATO, which for the first time bound the United States to the peacetime security of Europe.

The alliance expanded to include nearly all Western European nations dedicated to opposing Soviet aggression, and involved the permanent stationing of American military personnel and equipment among European NATO nations. As a security precaution, each member nation of NATO was obligated to come to the aid of any other member nation if attacked, vis-à-vis Article 5.

Traversing massively uncharted territory, Truman navigated ending the Second World War, established a post-war policy of containing Soviet aggression and revitalized Western Europe; all while walking the proverbial balance beam of the birth of the atomic age.

Truman’s modest upbringing in rural America, military service in the First World War, and life as a livestock farmer before running for public office, all played a role in developing the honest, patriotic, trailblazing man of the people and leader of the free world that he became.

If anyone were to be cast as the anti-Truman, Donald Trump would be granted the role without audition, competition or risk of ever being replaced.

Although they entered the White House exactly 80 years apart, the Stalin that Truman opposed was nearly identical to the Putin that Trump faces. Both were fiercely anti-West. While Stalin sought security through ruthless repression, building a literal iron curtain to keep western influence out of his “sphere” of Europe, Putin pursued security via launching aggressive war to upend the world order and reverse decades of pro-Western democratic expansion into Eastern Europe.

As the anti-Truman, however Trump has handled his “Stalin” in the most absolute opposite possible way as Truman dealt with his.

Trump entered the Presidency three years into Europe’s greatest war since Hitler; not terribly different from Truman inheriting the White House after Franklin Roosevelt’s death, six years into the Second World War. Hitler was all but defeated by April 1945 when Truman took the Oath of Office, but he faced the incredibly challenging task of defeating Japan while simultaneously reorienting U.S. policy to deter Stalin.

The Second World War brought out the best and worst in humanity and resulted in the violation of every form of human rights ever conceived to the extent that the term genocide was coined in its aftermath. The Geneva Convention sought to establish a world order including rules of war and punishable war crimes in the hopes of deterring the horrors of the Second World War from ever occurring again.

By 2022 and after more than twenty years of establishing himself as dictator of Russia, Putin had built up a fiercely anti-West state-run propaganda machine, dedicated to exacting revenge on the West over Russia “losing” its status as a great power in the aftermath of the Cold War.

Putin was determined to destroy the post-Second World War “rules based” order as a result of the exact Russian insecurities George Kennan had written about nearly 80 years earlier. Just as in 1945 however, no one was seriously threatening Putin’s rule in 2022 any more than they were Stalin’s.

Putin’s insecurity manifested in resentment over the Soviet Union losing the Cold War and he burned with hatred over the idea of a pro-Western Ukraine whose homegrown Maidan Revolution had thrown out the pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.

Putin launched a violent full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022; dead-set on destroying its statehood right on the doorstep of NATO, thereby, in a perverted worldview, returning Russia to its “rightful” place as a global super power.

To do so, the “rules based” world order had to be destroyed. Russia pursued these ends by openly violating every rule of war established in the aftermath of the Second World War to demonstrate that the “global order” had no means or will to enforce its own rules.

From launching unprovoked aggressive war, to wiping entire cities off the map, to executing prisoners of war, to raping, torturing, filling trenches with bodies of handcuffed civilians to mass-deporting tens of thousands of children into Russia as a means of depopulation; Russia openly, publicly and proudly did it.

Not since Truman faced Stalin had there been such an obvious showdown of good versus evil, and choosing a side in 2025 never should have been a choice at all, but rather a decision of right over wrong. Trump in a single month in office however has wholesale abandoned the Truman Doctrine and pivoted 80 years of pro-democracy U.S. Foreign Policy towards authoritarianism.

Trump never sought the advice of experts as Truman did in George Kennan to understand Russian aggression. While Truman at no time accepted Stalin’s fierce anti-democratic actions and rhetoric, the anti-Truman has regurgitated Russian propaganda, as if Putin had written his press-releases for him.

Trump has taken it upon himself to dismiss mountains of evidence and cruelly blamed Ukraine for being invaded, chastised Zelensky for not making a mythical “deal” to prevent the war and accosted Ukraine for fighting an “unwinnable war” versus submitting to imperialism.

Instead of pouring resources into rebuilding Ukraine to make it an even stronger post-war partner, the anti-Truman dictates that Ukraine hand over to the U.S. the completely arbitrary number of $500 billion worth of its natural resources.

This policy is evil incarnate. The specified resource consumption would be done by private industry, enriching stock owners but would in no way “reimburse” the Department of Defense for weapons stocks. Additionally it would severely handicap Ukraine’s ability to rebuild, without offering a single assurance of security guarantees.

Truman inherited Roosevelt’s “Great Arsenal of Democracy” philosophy which he reciprocated in his peace through strength approach via the Marshall Plan and the formation of NATO. American Lend-Lease to Great Britain and the Soviet Union throughout the Second World War created an economic boon in the U.S. economy, which propelled the nation out of the Great Depression and into Superpower status.

U.S. assistance to Ukraine now is of the identical spirit of the Arsenal of Democracy, but the anti-Truman and his cohorts denigrate this effort as “prolonging” the war, and “provoking” Russia. This is done all while lying about the great effects this support has had not just on the battlefield in Ukraine, but also in pouring considerable resources into revitalizing the U.S. defense industrial complex to backfill the old stocks provided to Ukraine, just as it resulted from Lend-Lease.

The anti-Truman is a billionaire who only cares about power and other billionaires. Ukraine is of little interest to him. Defending democracy is not nearly as exciting as the prospect of extorting Ukraine for its resources for personal gain. Taking the moral high ground against tyranny, supporting allies and strengthening democracy all fly in the face of Trump’s worldview.

Truman’s legacy is a result of his purity of soul from his life experiences and upbringing which provided him with moral clarity to lead the free world through the settlement of the Second World War and the establishment of its Cold War policies. Trump’s agenda of allying with Russia, against democracy to bully Ukraine into an unjust peace will yield the exact opposite. The world of the anti-Truman.

Jeffrey Owens is the Author of the Victory in Europe: A People’s History of the Second World War. He is from Grove City, Ohio, United States. Jeffrey is the correspondent of Mahabahu.

26-02-2025

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