The U.S. stationed troops in Western Europe, assuring its Allies that it would use its nuclear deterrent to protect Western Europeans against a Soviet attack.
The admission of West Germany into NATO in 1955 led the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites to form a competing military alliance called the Warsaw Pact.
Containment was a strategy to limit and prevent Soviet expansionism. It was a theory that said that communism was like water and would trickle into countries that were weak and unstable. In response, the US had to bolster the strength of other nations around the world in order to defend democracy and the open market. Truman made this his doctrine in 1947, as justification for intervention in the Greek Civil War and aid to Turkey. Containment was presented as a policy option by George Kennan. In describing the USSR's expansionist tendencies, he concluded that ``Its political action is a fluid stream which moves constantly, wherever it is permitted to move, toward a given goal. Its main concern is to make sure that it has filled every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power." He called for ``a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world." Kennan wanted the US to determine its spheres of interest and to defend only those interests which were most vital. For Kennan, that meant centers of military-industrial power, meaning Western Europe and Japan. He also emphasized that containment did not mean backing the Soviets into a corner; they should always be left an honourable way out.
Kennan had analyzed Soviet society and government and had concluded that it could not continue indefinitely as it stood. Since there was no mechanism for real change, the regime would eventually have to fall. He said that if anything happened that disrupted ``the unity and efficacy of the party as a political instrument, Soviet Russia might be changed overnight from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies."
The ultimate objectives of containment were to prevent the expansion of Soviet power. This was an essentially contested concept, however, since there was no firm agreement on the limits. Major problems arose when one considered the psychological consequences of losing peripheral interests; hence, the transformation of containment as a limited, realistic appraisal to the lines of NSC-68. This document claimed that the Soviets were aggressively expansionist and had to be countered wherever they attempted to do so; a policy of crusading activism was called for in the face of overwhelming Soviet power. More importantly, NSC-68 also recognized that force was all that could be used because that was all that the Soviets would understand; diplomacy and negotiations were useless and could only serve to reaffirm US superiority. NSC-68 said that the US should massively increase its military power and cut its social spending in order to do so; 50% of the GNP could be viably used for the military, if necessary, the paper said. This came out in 1950 as a policy response to the Korean War. Thus were Kennan's originally limited proposals turned into an open-ended policy of containment everywhere. His prescriptions were from a realist's perspective; although he recognized the vast ideological chasm between the two societies, he did not countenance simply going to war with the Soviets, or even engaging them everywhere. American idealists grasped only part of his arguments, and developed a policy with the ultimate goal of overthrowing the Soviet regime. This was spoken most specifically by Ronald Reagan, and he did indeed see this end result.
From the idealist standpoint, this strategy was a success in its day, and if it were not for Nixon's attempts at détente, it would have worked out better, and sooner. The realists, such as George Kennan, found the strategy flawed; it went far beyond any possible national interest and committed the US to innumerable conflicts where the US had no interest. The radicals, such as Fred Block, found the strategy to be a simple push for capitalist and Western world domination; the Marshall Plan for aid to Europe was simply to provide money that the Europeans could use to buy US goods. This was said similarly for the NSC-68 plans for the military buildup, that it was simply to feed the US capitalist economy.
Cuts from THE X ARTICLE
- "ideology... taught them (Soviets) that it was their duty eventually to overthrow the political forces beyond their borders."
- Keenan on Soviet weakness: If anything happened that disrupted ``the unity and efficacy of the party as a political instrument, Soviet Russia might be changed overnight from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies."
- "Its political action is a fluid stream which moves constantly, wherever it is permitted to move, toward a given goal. Its main concern is to make sure that it has filled every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power."
- "the main element of any US policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansionist tendencies."
- this must mean more than rhetoric
- the US "should remain at all times cool and collected... its demands on Russian policy should be put forward in such a manner as to leave the way open for a compliance not too detrimental to Russian prestige."
- "Soviet policies will reflect... a cautious, persistent pressure toward the disruption and weakening of all rival influence and rival power."
- "a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Rusians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world."
Domestic Effects?
Various domestic effects resulted from the strategy of containment. First of all, the government expanded. More bureaucracies were created to deal with a larger perception of the world, and new organizations and positions were created such as the National Security Agency. As well, this expansion saw the movement away from professional diplomats toward more political appointments. Second of all, there was the creation of the Iron Triangle, or the military-industrial complex. This was the cooperation between members of congress, the Pentagon, and business; they were all in need of each other to survive, so that it became a growing, self-perpetuating cycle of cooperation in allocating government funds in Congress for the military to buy weapons that it would contract businesses to build, which would create more jobs, making the Congress more popular, and electable. This was warned against by Eisenhower, in his farewell address. A third effect was the anti-communist hysteria. The fifties saw the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who led the nation in bashing leftists, blacklisting innocent people, and calling for a tougher foreign policy. Thus were many of the aforementioned professional diplomats weeded out of the foreign service as suspected reds. A final effect was inside the universities. The social sciences received grants to develop new strategies, such as game theory, and new strategic-study think tanks, such as the RAND corporation, were developed. In addition, the universities were contracted to develop new weaponry. As well, the new development discipline was established in order to better understand the Third World.
The first significant application of the containment doctrine came in the eastern Mediterranean. Great Britain had been supporting Greece, where communist forces threatened the ruling monarchy in a civil war, and Turkey, where the Soviet Union pressed for territorial concessions and the right to build naval bases on the Bosporus. In 1947 Britain told the United States that it could no longer afford such aid. Quickly, the U.S. State Department devised a plan for U.S. assistance. But support for a new interventionist policy, Senate leaders such as Arthur Vandenberg told Truman, was only possible if he was willing to start "scaring the hell out of the country."
Truman was prepared to do so. In a statement that came to be known as the Truman Doctrine, he declared, "I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." To that end he asked Congress to provide $400 million for economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey, and the money was appropriated.
However, there was a price Truman himself and American society paid for his victory. To whip up American support for the policy of containment, Truman overstated the Soviet threat to the United States. In turn, his statements inspired a wave of hysterical anti-communism throughout the country and set the stage for the emergence of McCarthyism.
Containment also called for extensive economic aid to assist the recovery of war-torn Western Europe. With many of the region's nations economically and politically unstable, the United States feared that local communist parties, directed by Moscow, would capitalize on their wartime record of resistance to the Nazis and come to power. Something needed to be done, Secretary of State George Marshall noted, for "the patient is sinking while the doctors deliberate." Marshall was formerly the highest ranking officer in the U.S. armed forces and credited as the chief organizer of the American military victory in World War II. In mid-1947 Marshall asked troubled European nations to draw up a program "directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos." The Soviets participated in the first planning meeting, then departed rather than share economic data on their resources and problems, and submit to Western controls on the expenditure of the aid. The remaining 16 nations hammered out a request that finally came to $17 thousand million for a four-year period. In early 1948 Congress voted to assist European economic recovery, dubbed the "Marshall Plan," and generally regarded as one of the most successful U.S. foreign policy initiatives in history.
Postwar Germany was divided into U.S., Soviet, British and French zones of occupation, with the former German capital of Berlin (itself divided into four zones), near the center of the Soviet zone. The United States, Britain and France had discussed converting their zones into a single, self-governing republic. But the Soviet Union opposed plans to unite Germany and ministerial-level four-power discussions on Germany broke down. When the Western powers announced their intention to create a consolidated federal state from their zones, Stalin responded. On June 23, 1948, Soviet forces blockaded Berlin, cutting off all road and rail access from the West.
American leaders feared that losing Berlin was but a prelude to losing Germany and subsequently all of Europe. Therefore, in a successful demonstration of Western resolve known as the Berlin Airlift, Allied air forces took to the sky, flying supplies into Berlin. U.S., French and British planes delivered nearly 2,250,000 tons of goods, including food and coal. Stalin lifted the blockade after 231 days and 277,264 flights.
Soviet domination of Eastern Europe alarmed the West. The United States led the effort to create a military alliance to complement economic efforts at containment. In 1949 the United States and 11 other countries established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an alliance based on the principle of collective security. An attack against one was to be considered an attack against all, to be met by appropriate force.
The next year, the United States defined its defense aims clearly. The National Security Council (NSC) undertook a full-fledged review of American foreign and defense policy. The resulting document, known as NSC-68, signaled a new direction in American security policy. Based on the assumption that "the Soviet Union was engaged in a fanatical effort to seize control of all governments wherever possible," the document committed America to assist allied nations anywhere in the world which seemed threatened by Soviet aggression. The United States proceeded to increase defense spending dramatically in response to Soviet threats against Europe and the American, British and French presence in West Berlin.
Resources
