On this day in 1951, President Harry S. Truman asked Congress to approve military and economic aid to Yugoslavia, a communist nation in Eastern Europe that had broken with the Soviet Union.
From 1945 to 1948, Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslavia’s dictator, having prevailed in an internal power struggle during World War II, remained a loyal ally of the Kremlin. But Moscow’s efforts to dominate Yugoslavia finally led Tito to split with Joseph Stalin.
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The United States then began inching closer to Tito, supporting his regime rhetorically, economically and, finally, militarily, in order to ensure that Yugoslavia would remain out of the Soviet orbit. Throughout the Cold War, American officials saw in Tito a useful example of a communist leader who was not under the Kremlin’s thumb. One example: In 1949, to curry favor with him, Washington backed Yugoslavia’s bid for a seat on the U.N. Security Council.
With congressional assent, the United States and Yugoslavia signed a bilateral military agreement in November 1951 that tacitly incorporated Yugoslavia into NATO’s defensive web. Tito came to rely on U.S. aid to prop up the Yugoslavian economy while Washington tolerated Tito’s role in organizing Third World nations into a nonaligned bloc.
Tito supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 but criticized Moscow’s intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Tito’s denunciation of that move further warmed relations with Washington. But they cooled again when he sided with the Soviets during the 1973 Arab-Israeli conflict.
After Tito died in 1980, the government was run by leaders of five Yugoslav republics under a revolving annual presidency. With the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe in 1989, the forces holding those republics together dissolved. Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia each set up separate states, eventually leading to bloodshed and, for the United States, the prospect, subsequently realized, of a leadership role in U.N.-authorized NATO actions to restore order.