The strategic uses of Cold War ideology
The Truman Doctrine set forth a new role for the United States in the world, a new “manifest destiny” for the nation. The Cold War ideological framework it established drew upon a deeper stratum of exceptionalist beliefs in America’s presumed inherent goodness and benefic intentions, beliefs that assumed the United States could be entrusted with world power because it would always use that power in benevolent and protective ways. This presumed moral superiority was also transferable to its allies and client-states, exalted as the “free world” by mere association with the United States.
Though presented in “fairy tale” terms, Cold War anticommunist ideology played an important strategic role in the U.S. quest for global predominance. It did so in five ways.
First, U.S. Cold War ideology greatly magnified the “Soviet threat” and turned a classic geopolitical rivalry into a mythical struggle between good and evil nations. As described in National Security Council Paper 68 of 1950, “the Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.” Since U.S. leaders saw no possibility of compromise or détente with the Soviet Union (at least for the first twenty-five years of the Cold War), their mandate, according to the NSC memorandum, was to frustrate “the Kremlin design” and “foster a fundamental change in the nature of the Soviet system.” To achieve these goals, a level of militarization just short of war would be required. That meant generating “the capability of conducting powerful offensive air operations against vital elements of the Soviet war-making capacity.” Ignoring Soviet security fears and interests, the United States surrounded the Soviet Union with U.S. military bases and allies and conducted covert operations within the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (see section 4 of NSC-68).
Second, U.S. Cold War ideology broadened the “Soviet threat” into a geographically dispersed “communist threat.” Hence, in the name of “containing communism,” the United States suppressed a communist-led rebellion in Greece, undermined democratic socialist and communist parties in Italy and France, aided French efforts to suppress a communist-led national liberation movement in Vietnam, and covertly overthrew democratically elected governments in Iran and Guatemala that were judged to be too open to communists – all in the first decade of the Cold War. Although none of these alleged threats arose from the Soviet Union, U.S. leaders connected them to Moscow by ideological commonality, or what Acheson called “Commie doctrine.”