In this essay, I am going to discuss various policies and wars that were a huge part in America’s history of fighting against the spread of communism throughout the 1940s and 1950s. These things were policies and ideas that helped to shape and mold our nation’s foreign policies as well as touch on events that forever changed our country.
In 1947 the United States called on a man named George Kennan to make an assessment of the Soviet Union to better understand the soviet threat that the US was facing. Kennan, who is known as the father of Containment, sent the US State Department an 8000 word missive in what is known today as the “Long Telegram.” In this dispatch he stated that he believed the Soviets thought themselves to be in a state of constant war with capitalism. He believed that the Soviets would use Marxists in the world of the capitalists as allies. Kennan also stated that the aggression of the Soviets would not align with the Russians and their views or with the reality of the economy, but more so following along with the ideology as the Tsars. Lastly Kennan pointed out that the government of the Soviets had a structure the prevented an accurate picture of the reality, internal as well as external. These ideologies of Kennan and the policy of Containment were the foundation of the Four Pillars of Foreign Policy.
The first of the pillars is Containment. Containment was set forth to stop the spread of communism. Of all the pillars Containment was the most expensive. This was the pillar that created such institutions as NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), CENTO (Central Eastern Treaty Organization) and SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization).
The second of the pillars is that of Deterrence. The idea of deterrenc...
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...ed from July of 1954 through November of 1954.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was from October 14, 1962 through October 28, 1962. The crisis was a 14 day long dispute in Cuba. It was the Soviet Union verses the United State. This is the crisis that is normally viewed as the time when the Cold War almost turned into a nuclear conflict. It is also the first instance that is documented as having a mutual assured destruction, or MAD being a deciding factor in an international arms agreement. The Crisis ended when the Soviets and the United States reached an agreement that stated Cuba would not be invaded without any direct provocation. Missiles were withdrawn by the Soviets as well as certain ones that were placed by the United States. They also set up a nuclear hotline that would allow both the United States and the Soviet Union to have direct contact between their leaders.
Kennan’s 4 points written in his assessment about the Soviets made some interesting observations about the threat to American interests. The first point was that the Soviets were “neither schematic nor adventuristic,” meaning they are illogical in their political threats. The second point was that the Americans were stronger than the Soviets. The third and fourth points deal with the power that the Soviets had via their “negative and destructive” propaganda. These assumptions concluded that Kennan
After World War II ended, Cold War alignments emerged. In 1946, Winston Churchill spoke against the USSR in his "Iron Curtain" speech. George Kennan's "Long Telegram" introduced the concept of containment, arguing that the US could keep communism from spreading by deterring Soviet expansion at critical points.
The question was whether the USA should pursue the same policy regarding communism in the Far East as in Europe, or should it concentrate on making sure that the Soviets couldn?t expand westward? Despite being a little too optimistic, MacArthur?s decisive policy addressed the global threat of communism better because it acknowledged that the U.S. shouldn?t just ignore one communist sector of the world, and because it recognized that we should eliminate an enemy that we are inevitably bound to come into conflict with.
The alliance formed between the US and USSR during the second world war was not strong enough to overcome the decades of uneasiness which existed between the two ideologically polar opposite countries. With their German enemy defeated, the two emerging nuclear superpowers no longer had any common ground on which to base a political, economical, or any other type of relationship. Tensions ran high as the USSR sought to expand Soviet influence throughout Europe while the US and other Western European nations made their opposition to such actions well known. The Eastern countries already under Soviet rule yearned for their independence, while the Western countries were willing to go to great lengths to limit Soviet expansion. "Containment of 'world revolution' became the watchword of American foreign policy throughout the 1950s a...
America and the USSR both had different opinions on communism and how a country should be run. The USSR believed communism was the perfect way to run its country and people. Communism consisted of a one party state which owned the whole of the industry business and the agricultural business too. There would be no individual profit making and everyone was equal and received an equal amount of money. America, however was a capitalist state which meant that there was freedom of speech, free elections and more than one political party.
One of the biggest fears of the American people is that the concept of communism contrasts drastically from the concept of capitalism, which the United States was essentially founded upon. The United States, as the public believed, was not a land of perfect communal equality, but rather a land of equal opportunity. However, what made communism so dangerous can be succinctly described by Eisenhower who compared the spread of communism as the domino effect. As his secretary of state, Dulles, put it, the propagation of communism “would constitute a threat to the sovereignty and independence” of America (Doc B). In addition, the Cold War also planted the seeds of rational fear of a global nuclear war. As Russia caught up to the United States in terms of technological advancements, they successfully developed the atomic bomb as well as the hydrogen bomb, which caused Americans to believe that the USSR would use these weapons of mass destruction to forcefully extend their ideologies to the USA. In fact, Americans were so frantic about a potential nuclear disaster that it...
During the cold war, the United States engaged in many aggressive policies both at home and abroad, in which to fight communism and the spread of communist ideas. Faced with a new challenge and new global responsibilities the U.S. needed to retain what it had fought so strongly for in World War II. It needed to contain the communist ideas pouring from the Soviet Union while preventing communist influence at home, without triggering World War III. With the policies of containment, McCarthyism, and brinkmanship, the United States hoped to effectively stop the spread of communism and their newest threat, the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union and the United States were very distant during three decades of a nuclear arms race. Even though the two nations never directly had a battle, the Cuban Missile Crisis, amongst other things, was a result of the tension. The missile crisis began in October of 1962, when an American spy plane secretly photographed nuclear missile sites being built by the Soviet Union in Cuba. JFK did not want the Soviet Union and Cuba to know that he had discovered the missiles, so he made his decisions very secretly. Eventually, Kennedy decided to place a ring of ships around Cuba and place missiles in Turkey. Eventually, both leaders superpowers realized the possibility of a nuclear war and agreed to a deal in which the Soviets would remove the missiles from Cuba if the US didn't invade Cuba. Even though the Soviets removed took their missiles out of Cuba and the US eventually taking their missiles out of Turkey, they (the Soviets) continued to build a more advanced military; the missile crisis was over, but the arms race was not.
Containment seemed to be the strategy of choice for the United States. This strategy also gave America a reason t...
...hed between the two countries to end the possibility of a nuclear war. America agreed to never invade Cuba and Russia agreed to remove all of the systems support and missiles from Cuba. The quarantine ended on November 20, 1962 after the Russians removed all of their missiles systems and support equipment and left the Cuban island. This dispute ultimately led to the Moscow-Washington Hotline, and American deactivated their weapons systems eleven months after the standoff.
“If... many influential people have failed to understand, or have just forgotten, what we were up against in the Cold War and how we overcame it, they are not going to be capable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.” The Cold War was a dispute between two of the most powerful nations, the Soviet Union and the United States, during the 1950’s and the 1960’s. The Cold War originated from both the United States and the Soviet Union establishing and protecting it’s own spheres of interest around the globe. To add, the United States during the time of the Cold War noticed that the Soviets were spreading their communist beliefs across the world, so they had to find a way stop the spread of this feared ideology. During
In 1945 the United States saw the Soviet Union as its principal ally. By 1947, it saw the Soviet Union as its principal opponent. The United States misunderstood the Soviet regime. .Despite much pretence, national security had not been a major concern of US planners and elected officials. historical records reveal this clearly. Few serious analysts took issue with George Kennan's position that "it is not Russian military power which is threatening us, it is Russian political power" ; or with President Eisenhower's consistent view that the Russians intended no military conquest of Western Europe and that the major role of NATO was to "convey a feeling of confidence to exposed populations, which was suposed to make them sturdier, politically, in their opposition to Communist inroads."
During the Cold War in Europe, the battle between United States and the Soviet Union was considered to be the fight to spread Communism and the struggle to end it. (T) When George Keenan wrote “the containment policy” in his efforts to end the spread of Communism, this impacted and created a new outlook for the Soviet Union. In this essay I will be discussing (a) the motivation for Communists to take over, (b) their approach to persuade the U.S. and (c) why George Kennan considers the U.S. policy of “containment” to be successful.
During World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union fought together as allies against the Axis powers. The relationship between the two nations were tense. Americans had long been aware of Soviet communism and concerned about Russian leader Joseph Stalin’s rule of his own country. For their part, the Soviets resented the Americans for their delayed entry into World War II, which resulted in the deaths of millions of Russians. Neither one country was really to blame for the start of the Cold War. By the time World War II ended, most American officials agreed that the best defense against the soviets was called containment, containment was basically just a way to stop or slow the spread of communism. One of the ways to accomplish this
(“The longest war”, 2000) This was a controversial time in American history which was later influenced heavily by a preferred social direction for the American public. America was at a social standstill following World War II. There was an aim for victory narrative that followed in the Cold War years. (Sarat, 26) A new image of the common American was being formed by an international standpoint. Victory for American leaders meant that the task of the future revolved around building global institutions to avoid another war and economic depression. (Sarat, 26) The idea of controlling the future gave rise to anti-Communism in foreign and domestic affairs. (Sarat, 26) Nationalist dogma ceased prior to Pearl Harbor, a need for global control developed in the American philosophy. With this attitude came the superiority in political thinking and the drive to end victorious in the constant race against communism and the Soviet Union. What happened in 1953 that led to this domino effect? This period of history was a complete world stalemate, on one side the leader of the free world and on the other communist Russia. There were several events which characterized this time period culminating with the Berlin airlift of 1948-49, the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. (“A history of lost opportunities”, 2007) In reality there was a need for rationality. Americans had to believe that there was no