Containment In US Foreign Policy

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.

of the US in the early years of the Cold war. The policy was to defeat

During the Lyndon Baines Johnson presidential administration, both those policy makers who supported America’s involvement in Vietnam and those who opposed the war were part of the “containment generation.” They had reached political maturity during World War II and the early years of the Cold War and had experienced the intense anticommunism of the McCarthy era of the early 1950s. These leaders understood and applied the lessons of American nationalism, which had the primary message that the U.S. was the dominating nation that had to embrace its responsibility to aid and improve nations in America’s image. Therefore, when they saw that there was a threat of the spread of communism to areas of Southeast Asia, a majority of the

The political instability in Vietnam from 1950 to 1975 between the communist North Vietnam and anti-communist South Vietnam during the Cold War era has led to the United States’ inevitable intervention in Vietnam. The main motivators for the United States’ incremental decision to intervene and commitment in Vietnam can be viewed as an accumulation of socio-political, political and economic catalysts. In recognition that there were many other factors that may have contributed to the U.S’s involvement in the conflict in Vietnam, this essay will largely focus on these three factors. As the cold war resonates, the American’s crusade was propelled by the fears of the domino theory and perception of Communist threat and expansion affected the

The Vietnam war has been referred to by many names, one of the longer ones was 'the cornerstone of the free world southeast Asia'. It was called that by John F. Kennedy. He was talking about Vietnam being and essential country in a non-communist world. He believed that if Vietnam became a communist country, all of the surrounding countries would also become communists. This is the main reason America was involved in the Vietnam war. Another reason was that America wanted to spread their “political ideas around the globe”. They wanted to do this so that their anti-communism stance was clear. The public also wanted to keep communism from spreading. To soldiers, the war was like a crusade, a great journey to purge the communists from Vietnam.

Imagine if you lived in a place where you had no freedom and was ruled by a terrible man named Joseph Stalin. That is what it was like in many countries until America’s policy of containment. The United States made a policy of containment because they didn’t like the idea of communism. Communism is where you have no freedoms and you were under the rule of a dictator. The three main reasons for how did the US contain communism are: the Berlin airlift, Korean war, and finally the missile blockade in Cuba.

The Vietnam War was a conflict, which the United States involved itself in unnecessarily and ultimately lost. The basis of the conflict was simple enough: Communism vs. Capitalism, yet the conduct of the Vietnam War was complex and strategic, and brought repercussions which had never been seen before. The struggle between North and South had an almost inevitable outcome, yet the Americans entered the War optimistic that they could aid the falling South and sustain democracy. The American intentions for entering the Vietnam conflict were good, yet when the conflict went horribly wrong, and the resilient North Vietnamese forces, or ‘Viet Cong' as they were known, refused to yield, the United States saw they were fighting a losing battle.

The Vietnam war did not even have to happen. Vietnam was all the way across the world and it did not even matter if it was a communist country, at least then we would have it for a ally. When we started to fight with them we became not on the same side anymore. The TV’s showed us being the good guys down at Vietnam. John Kerry wrote an article explaining Vietnam’s war. “We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coooly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum” (p.3). The idea of what we were doing in Vietnam was twisted to make it seem as gentle as possible.

During the Cold War, America's basic policy was that of "containment" of the Soviet Union. The policy of containment was based upon several principles. First, the Soviet Union wanted to spread socialism to all areas of the world. However, it was felt that the leadership of the Soviet Union felt no particular rush to accomplish their goal. "The Kremlin is under no ideological compulsion to accomplish its purposes in a hurry. Like the Church, it is dealing in ideological concepts which are of a long-term validity, and it can afford to be patient. (Hook and Spanier, 42)." In other words, the Soviet leadership believed that, since their ideas were the correct ones, they would eventually prevail, and thus, no direct confrontation would be

The Soviet and socialist development, Truman and his assistants picked an approach of control in 1947. The arrangement of regulation is U.S. arrangement joining military, monetary, and discretionary systems to keep the spread of Soviet socialism and to improve America 's security and impact abroad. Conjuring the control principle, the United States in 1947 and 1948 started to construct a worldwide monetary and cautious system to ensure American thriving and security and to progress U.S. matchless quality.The containment policy during the time of the cold war was influenced by Asia,Europe, and Latin America.

The United States thought if they stopped communism in Vietnam, it would stop the spread of communism. At this time, America saw itself as

1. Truman’s Policy of Containment was that the U.S. would work to stop the spread of communism by providing political, economic, and military assistance to all democratic nations under the threat of communism or any external authoritarian forces. The political aspect of this policy was the alliances made during the Cold War. NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) was a defensive alliance among the U.S. and other European countries against the Soviet Union. This alliance still exists today. The Warsaw Pact was a defensive alliance that included the Soviet Union and its satellite governments in Eastern Europe. These alliances assured that if one country was attacked, then the others must react by coming to the defense.

Initially, American leaders were unsure about how exactly containment would be implemented. Would it be applied everywhere? Would it involve economic aid to help nations reconstruct their economies? Would it involve military confrontation? The answer was to come soon.

troops from Vietnam. I am going to be looking at the reasons as to why

During the Cold War from 1946 to 1990 the United States had formed a policy called the containment policy which was adopted by President Harry Truman. The containment policy was a doctrine uniting military, economic, and diplomatic strategies to turn back communism and to insure that America would hold the leading role in world affairs.