This turned out to be the opening salvo in a high-stakes game of propaganda. Leaders in the United States didn’t consider the Marshall Plan an act of psychological warfare per se, but the Soviet Union’s leaders did and barred its satellite countries from participating. Three months later, the Marshall Plan was announced. In what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine, the president pledged to give such assistance as needed to help “free and independent nations to maintain their freedom” in the face of Communist threats. On March 12, 1947, President Truman appeared before a joint session of Congress to request $400 million in economic and military aid to Turkey and Greece. policy makers blamed the Soviet Union for forcing their hand. And, as was so typical throughout the Cold War, U.S. But what changed in the years immediately following World War II was a sense that the United States was engaged in a prolonged battle of civilizations that could not be won through force alone. The country had, of course, engaged in practices that we might consider psychological warfare, using world’s fairs, missionaries, economic policies, and educational exchanges to promote U.S. Prior to the Cold War, the United States had never formally mounted psychological-warfare campaigns during peacetime. More subtext than text, ideas about science subtly undergirded policy makers’ emerging plans for waging and winning this new kind of war. psychological-warfare programs as a stowaway, tucked into the pockets of some of the private individuals to whom the State Department and the CIA turned to wage the United States’ battle against communism. This post is adapted from Wolfe’s new book.Įven as State Department, CIA, and Army officials spent countless hours working through the administrative challenges of launching a psychological-warfare program more or less from scratch, they spent remarkably little time discussing what kinds of messages might best promote the cause of “freedom.” Ideas about science rarely, if ever, explicitly appeared on lists of psychological-warfare objectives. Among other things, the Marshall Plan allotted $13 billion to rebuild Western Europe, Voice of America transmitted jazz and news to listeners in 46 languages in more than a hundred countries, and the CIA sent tens of thousands of balloons filled with anti-Communist pamphlets into China. strategists could dream up, short of overthrowing foreign governments ( that would come later), was up for discussion. During that period of experimentation leading up to the Eisenhower presidency, almost anything U.S. By the time that Truman left office in January 1953, the United States had laid the legal and institutional foundations for overt propaganda campaigns as well as covert action. The question of psychological warfare preoccupied a small but influential group of foreign-policy officials during President Harry S. This was a new kind of conflict requiring new kinds of weapons: psychological weapons.
#Cold war real war free#
“The cold war,” NSC-68 warned, “is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake.” If the United States wanted to defeat communism, it needed to do so “by the strategy of cold war,” combining political, economic, and psychological techniques. strategy, asserted in 1950, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in an ideological clash of civilizations, a battle between “slavery” and “freedom,” a victory by force would be hollow.
foreign-policy strategists used the phrase to invoke a specific kind of conflict, one carried out by “means short of war.” If, as NSC-68, a key document of U.S. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the very years that the battle lines between the United States and the Soviet Union were being drawn, U.S. The phrase Cold War didn’t always refer to a time period.
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