Containment During the Cold War

Containment is a military strategy to stop the expansion of an enemy. It is best known as the Cold War policy of the United States and its allies to prevent the spread of communism abroad. A component of the Cold War, this policy was a response to a series of moves by the Soviet Union to enlarge communist influence in Eastern Europe, China, Korea, Africa, and Vietnam. Containment represented a middle-ground position between detente and rollback, but it let the opponent choose the place and time of any confrontation.

The basis of the doctrine was articulated in a 1946 cable by U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan during the post-WWII administration of U.S. President Harry Truman. As a description of U.S. foreign policy, the word originated in a report Kennan submitted to U.S. Defense Secretary James Forrestal in 1947, a report that was later used in a magazine article. It is a translation of the French cordon sanitaire, used to describe Western policy toward the Soviet Union in the 1920s.

Although the term "containment" was first used for the strategy in the 1940s, there were major historical precedents familiar to Americans and Europeans. In the 1850s anti-slavery forces in the United States developed a containment strategy (they did not use the word) for stopping the expansion of slavery and forcing its collapse. Historian James Oakes explains the strategy:

"The federal government would surround the south with free states, free territories, and free waters, building what they called a 'cordon of freedom' around slavery, hemming it in until the system's own internal weaknesses forced the slave states one by one to abandon slavery."

Following the 1917 communist revolution in Russia, there were calls by Western leaders to isolate the Bolshevik government, which seemed intent on promoting worldwide revolution. In March 1919, French Premier Georges Clemenceau called for a cordon sanitaire, or ring of non-communist states, to isolate the Soviet Union. Translating this phrase, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson called for a "quarantine." Both phrases compare communism to a contagious disease. The U.S. refused to recognize the Soviet Union, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt reversed the policy in 1933, hoping to expand American export markets. The Munich Agreement of 1938 was an attempt to contain Nazi expansion in Europe; it failed. The U.S. tried to contain Japanese expansion in Asia in 1937-41, and Japan reacted with its attack on Pearl Harbor.

After Germany invaded the USSR in 1941 during World War II, the U.S. and the Soviet Union found themselves allied in opposition to Germany. The policy was rollback to defeat Germany, Italy, and Japan.

Origin of Containment 1944-1947

Key State Department personnel grew increasingly frustrated with and suspicious of the Soviets as the war drew to a close. Averell Harriman, U.S. ambassador in Moscow, once a "confirmed optimist" regarding U.S.-Soviet relations, 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. Harriman would later have a significant influence in forming Truman's views on the Soviet Union.

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:

Soviet power, unlike that of Hitlerite Germany, is neither schematic nor adventuristic. It does not work by fixed plans. It does not take unnecessary risks. Impervious to logic of reason, and it is highly sensitive to logic of force. For this reason it can easily withdraw—and usually does when strong resistance is encountered at any point.

According to Kennan:

• The Soviets perceived themselves to be in a state of perpetual war with capitalism;
• The Soviets would use controllable Marxists in the capitalist world as allies;
• Soviet aggression was not aligned with the views of the Russian people or with economic reality, but with historic Russian xenophobia and paranoia;
• The Soviet government's structure prevented objective or accurate pictures of internal and external reality.

Kennan's cable was hailed in the State Department as "the appreciation of the situation that had long been needed."  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. Six months later, it would probably have sounded redundant."  Clark Clifford and George Elsey produced a report elaborating on the Long Telegram and proposing concrete policy recommendations based on its analysis. This report, which recommended "restraining and confining" Soviet influence, was presented to Truman on September 24, 1946.

In January 1947, Kennan drafted an essay entitled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct." Navy Secretary James V. Forrestal gave permission for the report to be published in the journal Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym "X." Biographer Douglas Brinkley has dubbed Forrestal "godfather of containment" on account of his work in distributing Kennan's writing. The use of the word "containment" originates from this so-called "X Article": "In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."

Kennan later turned against the containment policy and noted several deficiencies in his X Article. He later said that by containment he meant not the containment of Soviet Power "by military means of a military threat, but the political containment of a political threat."  Second, Kennan admitted a failure in the article to specify the geographical scope of "containment", and that containment was not something he believed the United States could necessarily achieve everywhere successfully.

Alternative Strategies

There were three alternative policies to containment under discussion in the late 1940s. The first was a return to isolationism, minimizing American involvement with the rest of the world. This policy was supported by conservative Republicans, especially from the Midwest, including former President Herbert Hoover and Senator Robert A. Taft. However, many other Republicans, led by Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, said that policy has helped cause World War II and was thus too dangerous to revive.

A second policy was continuation of the détente policies of friendly relationships, especially trade, with the Soviet Union. Roosevelt himself had been the champion of détente, but he was dead, and most of his inner circle had left the government by 1946. The chief proponent of détente was Henry A. Wallace, a former vice president and the Secretary of Commerce under Truman. Wallace's position was supported by far left elements of the CIO, but they were themselves purged in 1947 and 1948. Wallace ran against Truman on the Progressive Party ticket in 1948, but his campaign was increasingly dominated by Communists and helped détente be discredited.

The third policy was rollback, an aggressive effort to undercut or destroy the Soviet Union itself. Military rollback against the Soviet Union was proposed by James Burnham and other conservative strategists in the late 1940s. After 1954, Burnham and like-minded strategists became editors and regular contributors to William F. Buckley's magazine, the National Review. 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. The theater commander, General Douglas MacArthur called on Congress to continue the rollback policy; Truman fired him for insubordination.

Under Dwight Eisenhower, a rollback strategy was considered against communism in Eastern Europe from 1953 to 1956. Eisenhower did agree to a propaganda campaign to psychologically rollback the influence of communism, however, he refused to intervene in the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. The main argument against rollback, was that a Soviet response might trigger World War III. Since 1950, the Soviets had been known to possess nuclear weapons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containment