<text id=00he1209><title>Out of Isolationism</title>
<history>US Air Force: Events History</history>
<article><hdr>Out of Isolationism</hdr><body>
<p>World War II marked the transition of America from an isolationist country to an international power. The country had waged war on continents and oceans, and had sent millions of men and women to all points of the compass. Many of them came back changed by the experience.
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<p>The prime mover was a blunt, unsophisticated politician from midwest America, the very stronghold of isolationism: President Harry S. Truman. Communist-supported uprisings were racking Greece and Turkey, and Truman asked Congress in his message of 12 March 1947 to furnish $400 million in military and economic aid to the governments of those two countries, and to send Americans to both to assist in the distribution of that aid.
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<p>It was the first element of what later was called the Truman Doctrine: "Totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States."
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<p>Truman's call for aid to Greece and Turkey was answered by Congress, and later echoed and expanded at Harvard University's graduation exercises on 5 June 1947. The speaker was Truman's Secretary of State, former Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, and what Marshall suggested in his speech was a program of US financial aid to European countries to help them rebuild their economies and industries that had been shattered by the war.
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<p>Marshall's European Recovery Plan, known everywhere today as the Marshall Plan, was quickly put into action. In August 1947, 16 European countries sent representatives to a Paris meeting where they worked out final details of the American aid program $17-billion plan.
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<p>With the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, that was to be their road back to normalcy: in four years, the United States became formally a world power. And with world power go world responsibilities At that time, the ultimate way to carry out America's new role as protector of the Free World was with air power and the threat of the atomic bomb.
