response to the Berlin Crisis (in the form of the Berlin airlift) nor was the doctrine directly linked to the Marshall Plan as it developed in the year to come. There is little evidence to support a claim that Truman or his powerful then-Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson conceived of the Doctrine as a first step toward, for instance, the measured but firm anti-Soviet resolution showed in the U.S. As Martin Folly observes in a superb piece on Harry Truman in the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History: " It is easy to see the Marshall Plan for European economic recovery as following directly from the Truman Doctrine." Folly goes on to note that this association is wrong. However, Truman's speech and authorization of funding on which the principles depended was neither a subtle nor a decisive shift toward the strategy of containment as many later politicians and scholars have surmised. If unsupported in the face of anti-democratic forces, a way of life "based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority", a government orientation which he contended depended on "terror and oppression."
They thus faced a fundamental choice about whether or not states " based upon the will of the majority" with government structures designed to provide "guarantees of individual liberty" would continue. Nations across the globe, as he put it, were confronted with an existential threat. The U.S., he declared, had to step forward into a leadership role in Europe and around the world.
Truman asserted that these developments represented a seismic shift in post-war international relations. In his March address, Truman reminded his audience of the recent British announcement - a warning, really - that they could no longer provide the primary economic and military support to the Greek government in its fight against the Greek Communist Party, and could not preventing a spillover of the conflict into Turkey.
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