In the long list of foreign policy crises that Americans expected to confront after World War II, the fall of Greece likely did not rate very high. Millions of returning GIs and their families at home had hoped their sacrifices overseas would settle the world’s appetite for conflict, at least for a while, so that they could return to some semblance of normal life. From a high of 12 million servicemembers at the end of the war, the United States shrank its military to just 1.7 million, with entire units deployed in Europe seeming to vanish overnight. But the world was not going to wait. In China, the Communist forces of Mao Zedong were making steady advances against the Nationalists, who were foundering despite massive amounts of U.S. support. In Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviets were not pulling back their forces, but reinforcing them. They had made clear that they were not going to withdraw from territory they had taken from the Germans, and would either absorb these lands into the Soviet Union, including the Baltics and Ukraine, or treat them as puppet states, including Poland, Eastern Germany, and Romania.
The Allies had agreed to carve up Europe during the conference of the “Big Three”—Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin—at a summit at Yalta, on the Crimean Peninsula, in February 1945. But now it seemed Stalin was unsatisfied with his slice of the geopolitical pie. In 1941 he had sent forces into northern Iran, ostensibly to protect oil fields vital to Allied war aims; he failed to withdraw them after the fighting ended, claiming they were supporting newly declared “people’s” republics—in reality Soviet puppet governments. In response, President Truman took the issue to the newly created Security Council at the United Nations in January 1946.
In hindsight, the postwar era is often remembered as a time of economic growth and national confidence, of sprouting suburbs and American industrial might. It eventually became that, in the 1950s. But the immediate years after the war were full of anxiety and insecurity. Housing was scarce. Jobs were scarce. Those who had seen combat returned with emotional injuries that many on the home front could not understand. Fears of renewed inflation, or even a return to the Depression, kept Americans on edge. Labor unrest in the Great Lakes region and along the West Coast and racial unrest in the South made it seem like the country might come apart. And then, added to all this, was the possibility of a new armed conflict, this time with a former ally.