In September 1947, the Soviets created Cominform<span>, the purpose of which was to enforce orthodoxy within the international communist movement and tighten political control over Soviet </span>satellites<span> through coordination of communist parties in the </span>Eastern Bloc. <span>Cominform faced an embarrassing setback the following June, when the </span>Tito–Stalin Split<span> obliged its members to expel Yugoslavia, which remained communist but adopted a </span>non-aligned position.
By 1947, US president Harry S. Truman's advisers urged him to take immediate steps to counter the Soviet Union's influence, citing Stalin's efforts (amid post-war confusion and collapse) to undermine the US by encouraging rivalries among capitalists that could precipitate another war. In February 1947, the British government announced that it could no longer afford to finance the Greek monarchical military regime in its civil war against communist-led insurgents.
The US government's response to this announcement was the adoption of containment, the goal of which was to stop the spread of communism. Truman delivered a speech that called for the allocation of $400 million to intervene in the war and unveiled the Truman Doctrine, which framed the conflict as a contest between free peoples and totalitarian regimes. Even though the insurgents were helped by Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia, American policymakers accused the Soviet Union of conspiring against the Greek royalists in an effort to expand Soviet influence.
Enunciation of the Truman Doctrine marked the beginning of a US bipartisan defense and foreign policy consensus between Republicans and Democrats focused on containment and deterrence that weakened during and after the Vietnam War, but ultimately persisted thereafter. Moderate and conservative parties in Europe, as well as social democrats, gave virtually unconditional support to the Western alliance, while European and American communists, paid by the KGB and involved in its intelligence operations, adhered to Moscow's line, although dissent began to appear after 1956. Other critiques of consensus politics came from anti-Vietnam War activists, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the anti-nuclear movement.
