Containment In The United States During The Cold War

Containment is “an act or policy of restricting the territorial growth or ideological influence of another, especially a hostile nation” (“Containment”). Containment was a factor in the Cold War, and the Cold War was from 1945 to 1991 (Fagnilli 22). The Cold War happened after World War Two and it was between the United States and the Soviet Union (Fagnilli 22). Containment was used on both sides of the iron curtain, it was a line across Europe separating the east and the west or the communist and capitalist. One of the main wars that went on during the Cold War was the Vietnam War, which was the United States containing Vietnam from becoming communism. The United States helped many countries out by helping them from becoming a communist country.

The United States helped out countries that were about to go communist after World War Two because it left the country with a unstable economy (Fagnilli 22). One example of a containment policy in the United States was the Truman Doctrine, it is “the policy of President Truman, as advocated in his address to Congress on March 12, 1947, to provide military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey and, by extension, to any country threatened by Communism or any totalitarian ideology”(“Truman Doctrine”). That provides evidence, that the United States used containment in order to keep Greece and Turkey from becoming a communist country. Another example of the policy of containment was the Marshall Plan, it is “known as the European Recovery Program, channeled over $13 billion to finance the economic recovery of Europe between 1948 and 1951” (“Marshall Plan”). That shows an example of a containment policy that the United States provide in the 1950s to 1960s because they prevented communism from spreading to European countries by giving them money. Overall, the United States has used many different examples of the containment throughout the 1950s and 1960s to keep communism out of the western side of the iron

One example of an attempt of containment is, “President Eisenhower gave the CIA permission to secretly train Cuban exiles for an invasion of Cuba. The CIA and the exiles hoped it would trigger a mass uprising that would overthrow Castro”(Danzer 880). This attempt failed because the goal was to kill Castro in the Bay of the Pigs to try to clear USSR influence in Cuba, but the mission failed and Castro did not die. Another example of a containment mission is, “Eisenhower and the Kennedy administration provided economic and military aid to South Vietnam’s non-Communist regime” (Danzer 938). The United States aid did not end up helping as much as it should have, because the United States had to pull out of Vietnam without a victory. The United States had more success with containing countries throughout the world in the 1950s more than the