Containment
The basis of the doctrine was articulated in a 1946 cable by U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan during the post-World War II term of U.S. President Harry S. Truman.
[1] In a broader context, the term is employed to denote a strategy designed to limit or hinder an opponent's capacity for international power projection.
In Belgium, Spain, and Italy, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck exerted strong and sustained political pressure to support the election or appointment of liberal, anticlerical governments.
That was part of an integrated strategy to promote republicanism in France by strategically and ideologically isolating the clerical-monarchist regime of President Patrice de MacMahon.
In March 1919, French Premier Georges Clemenceau called for a cordon sanitaire, a ring of non-communist states, to isolate Soviet Russia.
[5] Concurrently, President Wilson became increasingly aware of the human rights violations perpetuated by the new Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and opposed the new regime's militant atheism and advocacy of a command economy.
He also was concerned that Marxism–Leninism would spread to the remainder of the Western world, and intended his landmark Fourteen Points partially to provide liberal democracy as an alternative worldwide ideology to Communism.
[6][7] Despite reservations, the United States, as a result of the fear of Japanese expansion into Russian-held territory and their support for the Allied-aligned Czech Legion, sent a small number of troops to Northern Russia and Siberia.
[9] The U.S. initially refused to recognize the Soviet Union, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt reversed the policy in 1933 in the hope to expand American export markets.
Ambassador in Moscow, once a "confirmed optimist" regarding U.S.–Soviet relations,[11] was disillusioned by what he saw as the Soviet betrayal of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising as well as by violations of the February 1945 Yalta Agreement concerning Poland.
[13] In February 1946, the U.S. State Department asked George F. Kennan, then at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, why the Russians opposed the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
He responded with a wide-ranging analysis of Russian policy now called the Long Telegram:[14] Soviet power, unlike that of Hitlerite Germany, is neither schematic nor adventuristic.
"[16] Kennan himself attributed the enthusiastic reception to timing: "Six months earlier the message would probably have been received in the State Department with raised eyebrows and lips pursed in disapproval.
"[16] Clark Clifford and George Elsey produced a report elaborating on the Long Telegram and proposing concrete policy recommendations based on its analysis.
[22] After Republicans gained control of Congress in the 1946 elections, President Truman, a Democrat, made a dramatic speech that is often considered to mark the beginning of the Cold War.
Portraying the issue as a mighty clash between "totalitarian regimes" and "free peoples", the speech marks the adoption of containment as official US policy.
In the orthodox explanation of Herbert Feis, a series of aggressive Soviet actions in 1945–1947 in Poland, Iran, Turkey, and elsewhere awakened the American public to the new danger to freedom to which Truman responded.
[24] In the realpolitik view of Lynn E. Davis, Truman was a naive idealist who unnecessarily provoked the Soviets by couching disputes in terms like democracy and freedom that were alien to the communist vision.
[25] According to a psychological analysis by Deborah Larson, Truman felt a need to prove his decisiveness and feared that aides would make unfavorable comparisons between him and his predecessor, Roosevelt.
[27] The drama surrounding the announcement of the Truman Doctrine catered to the president's self-image of a strong and decisive leader, but his real decision-making process was more complex and gradual.
The first was a return to isolationism, minimizing American involvement with the rest of the world, a policy that was supported by conservative Republicans, especially from the Midwest, including former President Herbert Hoover and Senator Robert A. Taft.
Truman himself adopted a rollback strategy in the Korean War after the success of the Inchon landings in September 1950, only to reverse himself after the Chinese counterattack two months later and revert to containment.
Eisenhower agreed to a propaganda campaign to roll back the influence of communism psychologically, but he refused to intervene in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution,[40] mainly for fear that it would cause World War III.
However, the success of the Inchon landing inspired the U.S. and the United Nations to adopt a rollback strategy instead and to overthrow communist North Korea, thus allowing nationwide elections under UN auspices.
Rejecting proposals by General William Westmoreland for U.S. ground forces to advance into Laos and cut communist supply lines, Johnson gathered a group of elder statesmen called The Wise Men.
Although it continued to aim at restraining the Soviet Union, it was based on political realism, thinking in terms of national interest, as opposed to crusades against communism or for democracy.
Throughout the 1980s, under a policy that came to be known as the Reagan Doctrine, the United States provided technical and economic assistance to the Afghan guerrillas (mujahideen) fighting against the Soviet army.
[51] The conclusion of the Cold War in 1992 marked the official end of the containment policy, but the U.S. kept its bases in the areas around Russia, such as those in Iceland, Germany, and Turkey.
