Cold War: U.S. less hysterical, more nuanced approach to communist nations?

Could U.S. foreign policy have had a more nuanced view of communist nations, noticing that not all of them beholden to Moscow, and finding ways to peel away support for heterodox communist regimes. Like Yugoslavia.

I got the idea from the comment here:
http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/po...t_and_worst_list_of_foreign_policy_presidents

On Truman - An Ideology of Eternal War
I think on the whole Truman is overrated these days. In letting MacArthur cross into North Korea, despite Beijing's repeated warnings, he ended up at war with *China*, ruining any prospect of peace in that country and leading to ruinously costly conflict for the United States.

More than anything else it was the Cold War ideology. He decided that all Communist regimes, and in particular those in Asia, were in cahoots or basically run by Moscow. Therefore he started aiding the French in Indochina, despite there being only Chinese involvement and the Soviets actually being very conservative there, creating a

He created an "Us vs. Them" mentality which meant China could not b recognize for two decades and which, in the broader sense of America's "ideological crusader zeal", is still with us to day in the form of the War on Terror.

I don't want to denigrate his other achievements - the Marshall Plan and NATO - but the damage he did in Asia and in creating an ideology of eternal war are perhaps irreparable.
 
I think that the article blames it too much on Truman--most Americans were skeptical of Communism, and I believe that the 'monolithic communist bloc' idea wasn't invented by Truman, but rather was just part of general anti-communist paranoia. That said, if the leaders of the USA were willing to deal with the communist nations, than it's plausible that the American public would follow along. But I can't come up with any good POD.
 
I'm also a bit skeptical of the idea of splitting Mao off. In the 1940s and 1950s, it was not unreasonable to see it in cahoots with Moscow, given Soviet involvement in Chinese Civil War, Soviet aid to China, etc.
 
The article doesn't blame Truman, and in fact defends him quite a bit on other issues. The first comment on the article is the one I quoted, though.

I wasn't aiming for a Sino-Soviet split in the '40s or '50s. Rather, I was thinking of the U.S. exploiting Tito's separation from Moscow more.
 
It's possible with a different US VPOTUS than Truman, who was excluded from meaningful participation in politics than Roosevelt. It would be no more successful than IOTL against the Taft reactionaries.
 
It's possible with a different US VPOTUS than Truman, who was excluded from meaningful participation in politics than Roosevelt. It would be no more successful than IOTL against the Taft reactionaries.

What do you mean? Robert Taft was an isolationist- he'd deal with the Communists like he would any other country, most likely.
 
What do you mean? Robert Taft was an isolationist- he'd deal with the Communists like he would any other country, most likely.

Taft was willing to embrace McCarthyism and saw Stalin as Mao's puppet-master. This factor is unlikely to change with a POD leading to a Cold War on OTL terms and is something any replacement for Truman will have to deal with.
 
Taft was willing to embrace McCarthyism and saw Stalin as Mao's puppet-master. This factor is unlikely to change with a POD leading to a Cold War on OTL terms and is something any replacement for Truman will have to deal with.

But that's not the point. It doesn't matter what he thinks of Stalin- he's not going to be starting wars or trying to contain communism in the first place. No NATO, no Korea- nothing.
 
But that's not the point. It doesn't matter what he thinks of Stalin- he's not going to be starting wars or trying to contain communism in the first place. No NATO, no Korea- nothing.

He was one of the bigwigs in the China Lobby, and the ROC by the post-WWII era is doomed short of Stalin killing Mao for Jiang. That factor will lead him to side with the McCarthyites no matter who succeeds FDR.
 
He was one of the bigwigs in the China Lobby, and the ROC by the post-WWII era is doomed short of Stalin killing Mao for Jiang. That factor will lead him to side with the McCarthyites no matter who succeeds FDR.

He could easily be anti-China while being mostly ambivalent on European matters. It's how traditional American isolationists were anyway: non-interventionist in Europe, while wanting to keep America dominate in Asia.
 
Truman's approach was more anti-Soviet than anti-Communist. After all, the US immediatelly offered military aid and assistance to Tito's Communist Yugoslavia as soon as he broke with the Soviet Union. Had the Chinese Communists immediately broke with the USSR upon acheiving power in 1949, the US might not have immediately lumped them with the Soviets as a cold war enemy.
 
The Korean War was the primary reason for the Soviet/US rivalry metastasizing into the Cold War we know and loath. Butterfly it, and a great deal of the hostility will die with Stalin.
Absent the Korea-inspired arms buildup, the US would to some extent lack the capability to fight protracted wars á la Vietnam. Also, W. German rearmament would be far smaller and slower and the Red Scare might not have become the tragedy it did.
 
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