U.S POLICY OF CONTAINMENT

U.S Policy of Containment and its Consequences

U.S Policy of Containment and its Consequences

Introduction

The U.S Policy containment is a set of ideas in which U.S wanted to contain those nations, which were least developed and full of resources. In the begning, we will be discussing the background of the U.S policy of the containmen and how did it work for the makers of the policy. The term applies most famously to the policy pursued by the United States toward the Soviet Union, c. 1947-1990. The premise of this ambitious strategy was that denying the Soviet Union opportunities to expand its political influence would force it to abandon territorial and ideological imperialism and address its own severe, internal contradictions. It was designed to both induce and compel the Soviets to choose between change and war, but then to foreclose the option of war. (Paul, 1980, 63).

Its principal instrument was the Marshall Plan to aid recovery of Germany and Europe, bilateral aid to Japan, and U.S. leadership of a global economy that excluded the Soviet bloc, as it was built around free markets, free trade, and liberal democracy. Rapid recovery of the former enemy states of World War II and the reverse course of their quick incorporation into an American led trading and banking system addressed U.S. interests in expanding trade even as it denied Moscow influence over poor, hungry, and therefore, potentially radicalized post-war populations. NATO then reinforced this core of political and economical containment by serving as a form of prudential military insurance against the—privately, considered highly unlikely—outside possibility that Moscow might try a direct military assault on Western Europe.

In short, NATO was used to counterbalance Soviet military advantages in Europe, so as to enable the United States to play its true trump card—a vastly more efficient economy—through rapid reconstruction of Western Europe and Japan and incorporation of these centres of latent, and soon actual, industrial power into a community of free, market societies.

Discussion and Analysis

In the discussion, we will be discussing the agendas behind the containment of U.S policy and how did it work for the U.S and how it affected the nation state.

The U.S policy of containment has major contribution in the relations among the nation states. Tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States existed before the end of World War II. The tensions, however, increased after the end of the war, and the allies became enemies. Winston Churchill called the border between Communist Europe and Democratic Europe the Iron Curtain (Richard, 2006, 191). The Containment was the doctrine developed in the early years of the Cold War to prevent the spread of Soviet communism, and its threat to the international capitalist economic order (Ian, 2008, 111).

In a famous letter, Mr. X (later revealed to be George Kennan), an American attaché in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, predicted in 1947 the beginning of the Cold War, “For ideology, as we have seen, taught [the Soviets] that the outside world was hostile and that it ...