ABSTRACT
Spokesmen of the Republican Opposition talked in terms of treating Europe as neither possible to defend nor worth defending against inevitable Russian control, and of concentrating totally on all-out resistance to Communism in Asia. The revolutionary nature and the elaborate machinery of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (N.A.T.O.) created, in the course of time, the impression of a fully effective organization for European defence. The Berlin Airlift and the establishment of N.A.T.O. were manifestations of the relatively cautious but eminently sophisticated notion of 'containment' which the Harry S. Truman administration, under the influence of Dean Acheson and George Kennan, had been slowly evolving since the death of Roosevelt. The Truman administration sought and obtained, from the UN Assembly, authority to secure a united, democratic and independent Korea. The pressures to treat the problem as ideological drove the Truman administration to a largely unrealistic assessment of the whole western Pacific situation.
