The Truman ghost is all alive saying even today what it said on March 12, 1946, which started off the cold war in open valour that lasted till the disintegration of the USSR in 1991 when the Doctrine’s apparently set mission was officially accomplished. Whereas, in actuality, The Truman doctrine is an eternal legendary American legacy ad-infinitum and not just another foreign policy doctrine as strategic political science would have it. The pervasive fever of Truman Doctrine is still on and it is only timely updated by different faces. It is not archived but continuously re-written and over-read.
Hobbes mistakenly thought the State of Nature as evil as we have him falsified in the 21st century where every human action is justified by the so-called draconian but novel law of the State of Nature: Might is right. We have proven that it is never the humanistic instincts and feelings, the ideological matches or mismatches, the geographical contiguity or polarity and the grand perception of ‘being humans’ which define our love and hate for each other.
Nation-State is only a mathematical entity without any flesh and blood and so thus empty of any feelings which humans might feel
We have experimentally established by deeds that it is purely the economics and politics which define our reality and justify our actions no matter how humanly antagonistic they could be. We have concluded that Nation-State is only a mathematical entity without any flesh and blood and so thus empty of any feelings which humans might feel. It is the world of acute general relativity with the arithmetic of no permanent friends and no permanent enemies as Truman Doctrine still stands truthful more than ever before.
It was horrific times back then at the global political landscape as Greece being exterminated at the hands of the ‘communist terrorists’. Turkey was in danger falling to the communist forces of strife and human subjection. The world was cracking into two unequal halves one of the demons and other of angels. It was the times which necessitated the hyphenation of terrorism with communism as decent human justification was to be created to fight the darkly evil.
Truman Doctrine was staunchly followed when the twin towers collapsed and George W Bush was compelled by circumstances to adopt the role of global saviour as the annihilation of human race loomed wide. He did not have to do such hard work as did Truman. He only updated the Truman version by hyphenating terrorism with religion. It was the extension of American political and economic thought back then in the times of Truman just as it is now in the grumpy Trump times.
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The American standpoint has not shifted from the Truman focus that ‘There is no other country to which democratic Greece can turn’ and so even today where there is any problem in any part of the world, it is the USA, the global mechanic, who ensures corrective measures and thanks to this Messiah that life thrives so lavishly on planet earth!
In setting the tone for his doctrine, he acquired the services of Winston Churchill by inviting him to the USA where he delivered his Iron Curtain Speech which was later used as a pretext and torchbearer for the Truman Doctrine. Ambidextrously, Truman while heralding the grand human values of the American ways of free life, elected governments, and peoples freedom also demonized the communist ways of life portraying them as ferocious, imposing, totalitarian, warmongering, and as non-state elements rivalling against the free will of the people.
The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died. We must keep that hope alive
The sketch was again laid over the strong, appealing and attractive basis of human sentiments and goodness only to be shadowing over the utterly economic and political American intentions of politically and economically circumnavigating the world. The birth of the United Nations and subsequent economic web especially laid out by the Marshall Plan also furthered the tying up of the world in the American threads.
Truman was successful selling the human card and thus the plethora of international aid and international aid agencies also kicked off prefaced by human decent emotions as spelt out by Truman saying, ‘The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died. We must keep that hope alive’.
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To keep that hope alive, USA made an investment into the world polity and as time has proven, the investment was worth doing it as it brought down the bipolar world and established the unilateral world dominated by American economics and politics.
The internal rate of return out of that investment for USA was more than the oracle had estimated in which the catalytic significance of World Bank and the IMF cannot be more than reiterated which still today are the twin watchdogs looking after the American interests so poised in the Truman way of the talk and gaping wide as the cruel Lords of Poverty in the world.
Human being has a habit of proving itself right against something wrong. This gives him the license to promote the good and eradicate the bad. The former is a beautiful act and the later is an ugly act and it is human itself who decides these interlinked things. The Truman Doctrine provided the blueprints for the unipolar American global hegemony.
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It is still the USA who is the saviour of the regimes threatened by power ridden systems and it once more the USA who is at the back and call of such wretched nations of the world! WW-II closed the history of all nations and there is no world history now. The rest is only the history of the USA. Anything politic or economic happening in anywhere around the world is Trumanly American.
Muhammad Jahangir Kakar is a civil servant and socio-political analyst based in Quetta works for the government of Baluchistan. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Global Village Space.