The traditional view is that the Cold
War started with Winston
Churchill''''s speech at Fullton, in 1946. In fact the American stategy regarding the postwar rivalry with the
Soviets was spelled out in the so-called Long Telegram by George F.
Kennan. The principle
suggested in this document came to be known as
containment. President Truman elevated it to the level of official
policy in the Truman
Doctrine in March 1947. In it, he proposed financial aid to
Greece and
Turkey, as well as promising fighting international
communism. The chief foreign policy spokesman of the Republican Party, John Foster
Dulles criticized the
idea as too passive. Instead, he suggested the
rollback of communism. When the Republicans won the election in 1953, the new President,
D. D. Eisenhower publicly endorsed this idea. However, he pursued a rather cautious policy. It was only in January 1957 that he pledged himself to prevent Communist expansion in the
Middle East as a response to the
Suez Canal crisis, in which
Great Britain, France, and Israel attacked Egypt. The Cold War actually turned into a ''''hot'''' one when in 1950
North Korea invaded South Korea. The
Security Council authorized the U.N. troops, practically the U.S., to restore the status quo. The American forces under the command of General Douglas
Macarthur landed behind the enemy lines and pushed them back as far as the Yalu River. Nevertheless,
Chinese ''''volunteers'''' appeared on the other side and the war degenerated into a trench warfare until the conclusion of an armistice in
1953. Next year another war came to an end: the
Geneva Accords provided for the division of Vietnam in to two.
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