During the early stage of the Cold War, when the USA was busy devising a response to Soviet challenges at the time of the Harry S. Truman presidency, the Republican Party acted as a long-term opposition. This fact could have either led to the approval of the chief premises of the foreign policy realised by the ruling Democratic Party, or denoted a programme-like rejection. An analysis of writings by three distinguished Republican politicians - Herbert C. Hoover, John Foster Dulles and Robert Taft - shows the manner in which the American foreign policy strategy, based on the so-called non-party consensus, was created. The above-mentioned politicians and the Truman Administration shared a tendency to perceive the Soviet threat not only as one posed by a competitive power but predominantly by a communist state. At the same time, it was precisely under this Administration that the Republicans conceived assorted ideas and projects - frequently as a response to Democratic errors, or as own conceptions of waging the Cold War; subsequently, after winning the residential elections in 1953, these notions became gradually implemented. A survey of Republican ideas from the titular period, and especially those proposed by Senator Taft, could also lead to a better understanding of the consequences of the present-day foreign policy.
At the beginning of May 1948 US-ambassador in USSR W. B. Smith conveyed to chief of Soviet diplomacy V. Molotov a memorandum about American reservations concerning contemporary Soviet Policy. This action not only evokes a political replay from J. V. Stalin, but arouses a big interest from Leadership of Czechoslovak communist government in development of American-Soviet Relations. At the Initiative from Prague the Czechoslovak charge d´affaires in Washington Josef Hanc had written a series of eight memoranda, where he analyzed actual state of relations between USA and USSR. The texts of these memoranda are published as an annex to this article. In his documents Hanc concluded, that American diplomacy does not aspire to some solutions of basic problems between both states, but only to troubleshooting of some partial problems. It has been the last attempt at some objective analysis of relationship between the super-powers at the beginning of Cold War from Czechoslovak view.
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