George F. Kennan 's The Cold War

The Cold War, which was considered the “years of maximum danger,” lasted from 1949-1962. This period brought an increasing sense of danger to America because the Soviet Union came into possession of an atomic bomb in 1949; an idea many Americans thought to be impossible unless the Soviet Union had a spy in the United States, which they did. Because the Soviet Union had an atomic bomb, a nuclear war became a reality. In Kenneth Rose’s “One Nation Underground” he told of rising issues associated with the Cold War and the threat of nuclear bombings. The Cold War, in conjunction with the inventions of (total destructive) bombs, generated new dangers, fears, and morality issues among Americans, which led to further increased fears.

Research this week was fruitful and my bibliography grew substantially. A large part of the reason for this growth was the mining of the bibliography of other sources. One of the most fruitful was, The Cold War in a Cold Land: Fighting Communism on the Northern Plains. The book provided me with a variety of both primary and secondary sources. The list of sources includes, books, articles, and government reports. A second book that provided more sources was, How We Forgot the Cold War. The bibliography provided some sources created by the North Dakota State Historical Society. In addition to these sources, I have been looking into newspapers. I have ordered some rolls of microfilm of the Griggs County Sentinel-Courier and am still waiting for them to arrive. I started with these rolls because they came from the paper closest to the geographic center of my research, as well as the dates of my research. In addition to the rolls, I have ordered The Cold War in a Cold Land, which provided a list of other newspapers that may be useful. In addition to ordering more microfilm reels that I will have sent to me at school, I will also have the opportunity to examine many more when I return home for spring break. Many are housed at the State Historical Society, just twenty minutes

After the end of World War II communism became wide-ranging. In hope of making new allies, the Soviet Union wanted to spread communism all across Europe. After the fall of Germany in 1945, moods changed when the United States started getting suspicious of the action led by the Soviet Union. This was thought of as a power move by the Soviet Union to have world domination. The United States formed a new policy calling it Containment in return.

George Kennan's containment plan is a radical shift in the U.S foreign policy when the Policy of the United States towards the Soviet Union prior, and during the World War II is considered. The containment policy marks the shift of American foreign policy towards the Soviets from alliance to deterrence. Kennan's states in the Long Telegram, "USSR still lives in antagonistic "capitalist encirclement" with which in the long run there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence." (Citation needed) only two years after the end of World War II, a war both the U.S and the Soviet Union fought side by side for a common ambition. If the aspect of radical shift in the U.S foreign policy is seen from a post-Cold War perspective, another radical change can

George F. Kennan was an ambassador to the Soviet Union and sent an eight-thousand-word telegram to President Truman explaining the intentions of the Russians. This telegram was called the “Long Telegram”. He felt like he was isolated from the Washington while in Moscow. His intuition told him that things were bad under Stalin’s leadership and hated Germany because of it. “I HATE THE GERMANS”. HE did not think that the united states had what it took to get take care of things once and for all.

Containment and its role as the Cold War Adversary (Essay #1) Derived from the United States emergence as a world power after World War II, containment traced its roots in the United States’ belief that their dominant Western hemisphere influence was endangered by events in countries and places that had little to no direct contact with the United States. Containment denotes the United States commitment to detain and end communistic expansion through military, political, and economic mean, thus bolstering its own Western hemisphere sphere of influence. First proposed by the father of containment, US diplomat George Kennan containment denoted various forms of financial need for countries implemented through the Truman Doctrine of 1947, the signing

Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, argues that Truman’s principles, expectations, decision, and policies not only gave rise to and defined containments content, but also shaped America’s understanding of the Cold War and as a result of this fundamental role, it is right to say that Harry S. Truman was the first cold war warrior. Truman’s containment strategy also provided the grounds for a new liberal internationalism. For Truman, international meant that American leadership was central as his ideas and policies stemmed from a multifaceted definition of peace, composed of freedom, justice, and order.

“Containment” is a geopolitical strategy that was predominantly used by the United States, and its allies, during the Cold War against the Soviet Union to impede the spread of communism. Following the end of World War II, President Truman, and his advisers, lacked a consensus of foreign policy necessary to deal with the Soviet threat and establish American

With this book, a major element of American history was analyzed. The Cold War is rampant with American foreign policy and influential in shaping the modern world. Strategies of Containment outlines American policy from the end of World War II until present day. Gaddis outlines the policies of presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, including policies influenced by others such as George Kennan, John Dulles, and Henry Kissinger. The author, John Lewis Gaddis has written many books on the Cold War and is an avid researcher in the field. Some of his other works include: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War

Soviet leaders probably did not enjoy reading George Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram,” abbreviated LT for short. A 1946 State Department cable sent from the American embassy in Moscow to Washington, D.C., the LT provided the intellectual foundations for the U.S. policy of containment. Although containment did not necessarily advise officials to eradicate communism’s existing footholds, the policy did make the Cold War “hot” in many countries in an attempt to stop communism’s spread – Vietnam (1965 – 1973), Korea (1950 – 1953), and Greece (1946 – 1949), to name a few. Somewhat less importantly from a policy standpoint (but arguably more so for the individual kingpins within Russia), the LT attacked the USSR’s leaders on a personal level, calling

Containment PolicyAs promulgated in 1947 by one of its chief architects, George Kennan, the policy of containment fashioned a strategy to deal with the implacable challenge posed by Soviet Communists (Kennan, 582). Because of their ideology and history, the Soviets were held to be dangerous and thus their expansion must be countered by the West. To deal with the Soviet threat, Kennan called for a long-term and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies (Kennan, 575). Although containment policy was widely accepted at its point of conception, the policy is in fact logically flawed. If the Soviet system really was a flawed as theorists such as Kennan surmised, then the best policy would have been not to contain it, but to give it enough

This caused the US to believe that Soviets had mainly expansionist aims. The US was “not prepared to see the opportunity for future investment [in Eastern Europe] foreclosed” (Crockatt 67) and this belief sparked the development of the containment policy directed by George Kennan, outlined in the Long Telegram (Lightbody 5). In addition, “the west had to oppose the Soviet Union for its own survival” (Lightbody 5) as the nuclear race between the US and USSR ensued and the USSR strived to equal the already well-established program of the US. This tension did not recede as Soviets sent spies into the US Manhattan Project, the nuclear development program (Lightbody 5). When the Soviets refused to join the Baruch Plan – which controlled nuclear weapon development – the USSR became even more openly viewed as a threat to US security. The growth of communism in Asia within the countries of Korea, Vietnam, and China along with tensions between the “Iron Curtain,” or divide, between Eastern and Western Europe also contributed to increasing threat towards capitalism and the Cold War’s inevitability.

The Cold War, coined by Bernard Baruch, would be used to describe the period between 1945 and 1991, where tensions between the East and West increased. Reasons for the Cold War have been heavily debated, orthodox theories, look at Soviet aggression as dictating American policy, yet this is disputed by revisionist, who attribute more blame to America. However, post revisionism is possibly better, looking to other factors rather than blaming one state, looking mostly at leadership and the breakdown of diplomacy.

"My enemy's enemy is my friend," quotes author and historian Odd Arne Westad throughout the course of his book, The Global Cold War. Westad uses this quote to reference and even explain how Third World countries in the Cold War would play off the two superpowers and influence the world around them. The goal of the author, as well as the major thesis of The Global Cold War, is to place a greater amount of emphasis on Third World countries during the Cold War era. By using a voluminous number of examples of these countries as well as quotations from leaders, Westad successfully argues that the most important events and decisions by the two superpowers in the Cold War were connected and linked to developments, as well as failures, in the Third World.

Political and economic perspectives should not dominate the analysis of communist rule. Analysis of the social aspects and results of communist rule are necessary to achieve a full understanding of the effects of such government. Slavenka Drakulic produced How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, an appealing work with this fresh social approach. This nonfiction work combines the author’s own recollections with the stories of other women of the Eastern Bloc.