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These stirring words from Lord Byron's Don Juan evoked strong emotions among Americans as they witnessed the beginnings of the Greek revolution against the Ottoman Empire in 1821. Then and later, Greek democracy was regarded as the archetype for American democracy, and this assumption produced two antithetical doctrines-the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and the Truman Doctrine of 1947. In the Monroe Doctrine, the inspiration of the Greek revolution celebrated by Byron failed to elicit American intervention and led instead to the triumph of isolationism, in the form of political and military non-entanglement. By contrast, the Truman Doctrine made civil war in Greece the occasion for an involvement that led to