Doctrines - Doctrines abroad

During the Cold War, America's allies and enemies also resorted to doctrinal statements of policy. Here are two of the more noteworthy declarations.

The Hallstein Doctrine This doctrine was enunciated by the West German foreign minister Walter Hallstein in the context of the struggle to codify the postwar fate of the two Germanys and the shape of Eastern Europe. The Soviets had proposed that the two sides end their wrangling over Berlin and ratify the boundaries of the two German states. West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who continued to endorse the Bonn government as the true government of Germany, resisted this plan and countered with his own statement of intentions. The Hallstein Doctrine declared that West Germany would have no relations with any country that recognized the existence ("entered into diplomatic relations") with the German Democratic Republic. The Bonn government followed through on its pledge, breaking off relations with Yugoslavia in 1957. Moscow's inability to settle the German question led Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, in 1958, to issue an ultimatum to the United States on the fate of Berlin, demanding the full incorporation of that city into East Germany. Failure to achieve that settlement heightened tensions over Berlin and contributed to Khrushchev's placement of missiles in Cuba in 1962. Cuba, in fact, became the second nation to run afoul of the Hallstein Doctrine, leading Bonn to break relations with Havana in 1960.

The Brezhnev Doctrine During the spring and summer of 1968, reformers in the Czechoslovak Communist Party, led by Alexander Dubcek, sought to create a new brand of socialism with a human face. Those moves, and the Czech leadership's resistance to Moscow's disapproval, occasioned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Defending his policy of force, Soviet premier Leonid I. Brezhnev maintained that "when internal and external forces that are hostile to socialism seek to reverse the development of any socialist country in the direction of restoring the capitalist system, when a threat to the cause of socialism in that country appears, and a threat to the security of the socialist community as a whole, that is no longer only a problem for the people of that country, but also a common problem, a matter of concern for all socialist countries." President Ronald Reagan would cite the Brezhnev Doctrine in his own doctrinal statement of principles.