Containment

Containment. The term “containment” signifies the fundamental American politico‐military strategy of the Cold War: resistance, in association with compatible allies, to the perceived expansionary tendencies of the Soviet Union, and later of other communist states. Containment's parentage could be traced to Thucydides' accounts of the Peloponnesian War. More immediately, Winston Churchill, Britain's World War II prime minister, called privately for resistance to Soviet expansionism in 1944–1945, repeating the theme publicly in his 5 March 1945, “Iron Curtain” speech at Fulton, Missouri. George Kennan, a U.S. diplomat and Soviet expert, made a similar case in his “long telegram” of 22 February 1946 and gave it authoritative definition as director of the State Department's policy‐planning staff in a July 1947 Foreign Affairs article. Soviet expansionism, he warned, born of historical, ideological, and political impulses, must be contained by an American‐led coalition until time and events forced an internal transformation.

These ideas received institutional expression in the Truman Doctrine, promulgated by President Harry S. Truman in March 1947, pledging support for Greece and Turkey and for freedom generally; in the Marshall Plan of 1948, committing the United States to the politico‐economic reconstruction of Western Europe; and decisively in the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949.

The containment doctrine was always controversial. In The Cold War (1947), the influential columnist Walter Lippmann criticized Truman's excessively open‐ended promises to strengthen regimes against communism. Kennan himself soon came to regret the universalist and militaristic twist his formulation received. Left‐wing politicians, beginning with former vice president Henry A. Wallace, typically saw it as provocative or as a cover for capitalist exploitation, while the right (most memorably in the Republican party's 1952 call for the “liberation” of countries behind the Iron Curtain) frequently condemned it as too passive.

Receiving an enlarged definition in the National Security Council's April 1950 document (NSC‐68), containment underpinned the globalization of American diplomacy that began with the Korean War in 1950 and continued with bilateral treaties and regional pacts like the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (1954) and the Central Treaty Organization (1959). Defensively conceived, containment steadily became a more aggressive, multifaceted response to complex postcolonial crises in many unstable countries, notably Vietnam. In Vietnam, as in other ex‐colonial nations, nationalism was often confused with communism, and containment rhetoric based on European precedents applied uncritically to incomparable situations.

After 1972, containment seemed vindicated by the era of détente and nuclear arms control treaties. However, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the confrontational stance of President Ronald Reagan's first term, led to renewed tensions until 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev inaugurated, and Reagan progressively encouraged, the Soviet retreat that ended the Cold War in 1989.

Encompassing an array of shifting concepts and policy variations, containment was, essentially, a creative compromise by successive U.S. administrations determined to resist Soviet/communist expansionism but understanding the fundamental need to avoid nuclear war.
See also Anticommunism; Foreign Relations; National Security Council Document #68; Progressive Party of 1948.

Bibliography

John Lewis Gaddis , Strategies of Containment, 1982.
Michael S. Sherry , In the Shadow of War, 1995.

Fraser J. Harbutt