On August 9, 1945, President Harry S. Truman alerted the country to a change in US relations with the rest of the world. That night, in his radio address, Truman began not with recent negotiations at Potsdam or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but with his plans to secure postwar overseas military bases. Truman had just returned from Berlin where the devastation of war was everywhere apparent. “It is a ghost city,” he informed his audience. To spare Americans such a fate, and to protect the world from “the ravages of any future breach of the peace,” Truman continued, the United States had to “maintain the military bases necessary for the complete protection of our interests and of world peace.”