Harry S. Truman Quotes
In my generation, this was not the first occasion when the strong had attacked the weak.Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese had acted ten, fifteen, and twenty years earlier. I felt certain that if South Korea was allowed to fall, Communist leaders would be emboldened to override nations closer to our own shores.
Truman, Harry S. Memoirs by Harry S. Truman: Volume Two, Years of Trial and Hope. Doubleday & Company, 1956, p. 333.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, NATO expanded to include some fo the former Soviet Nations thus moving NATO territiry to the East--closer to Russia, whose leaders percieved that the expansion was hostile and dangerous for the indpendence of Russia. What made the situation more complex is that the American Secretary of State, when the Soviet Union was very powerful, had made an agreement with the Soviets that in return for Russian aquiessance of NATO being extended to East Germany, NATO would not expand further West. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was quite weak and NATO expanded east despite the earleir comittment. The US and th eother NATO counties took the pozition the previous comitmnts were not binidng as they were never formally signed. The Russians then decided to take a hard line position and flaunt and use military force to which would stop the Western expansion closer to the Russian border.
At the end of WWII there was much tension between Russia and the Anglo-American alliance. This plan was developed but never implemented. See {613195} for Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s description of the invasion idea.
The quotation is notable as it illustrates the great difficulty that modern democracies have with extreme Islamic fundamentalists. Their very perception and world view is so different that often we think of the extremists as insane and they often feel the same way about us.
Harry S. Truman was an American politician who served as the 33rd President of the United States (1945–53). He served as a United States Senator from Missouri (1935–45) and briefly as Vice President (1945) before he succeeded to the presidency on April 12, 1945 upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was president during the final months of World War II, and approved the plan to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Truman was elected in his own right in 1948. He presided over an uncertain domestic scene as America sought its path after the war and tensions with the Soviet Union increased, marking the start of the Cold War.
