American Involvement During The Cold War

To start this off, let’s talk about containment and what it is. Well what it is is the policy to stop communism from spreading. This is what Eisenhower and Truman favored during the Cold War. So while Eisenhower and Truman favored the policy of containment, Kennedy favored flexible response. Kennedy also had his own economic aid which talked about poor countries not being able to get away from communism, and that the plague of communism keeps getting closer and closer to these poor and weak countries. Truman’s economic aid however helped out these poor countries, while Eisenhower’s economic aid wanted to help out Mid-Eastern countries. As previously stated, Eisenhower and Truman both wanted to help poor countries with their economic problems.

Basically, people in the weak countries want to get away from communism but it’s spreading so fast that it keeps getting harder and harder to get away from it. Now to discuss what the domino theory is, which it is the belief that if one country would fall communist, all other countries around would turn communist. This theory was used so that Americans could have a bit of an excuse for joining the U.S. military and fighting in the Vietnam War. This supports the previous statement because Americans wanted to stop communism from spreading. After talking about the domino theory, it’s time to move onto the topic of Brinkmanship. Now what Brinkmanship is, is it’s when threats are made against other countries up to the brink of war, but the country making the threats doesn’t attack. This policy was used to scare other countries and make their military stand down. This supports this because the U.S. wanted the Cold War to end, so they tried intimidating and scaring the USSR and basically making them pull back their military. Now to talk about Massive Retaliation, which was the policy for the US to use nuclear weapons to calm down an argument. The U.S. did this because we didn’t want a 3rd world