Doctrine of Containment of the Soviet Union

Events, indeed, have borne out Kennan's argument. Well into the 1980s, the Cold War still appeared as though it might persist indefinitely. But from 1985 on, the Soviet system collapsed from its own internal tensions, nearly bloodlessly and indeed all but effortlessly. A final confrontation did indeed prove unnecessary; containment succeed in its objectives, albeit after nearly half a century.

In the first six chapters of Strategies of Containment (written in 1982, well before the Soviet collapse was visible), John Lewis Gaddis offers a historical and analytical survey of the first two decades of containment doctrine, through the end of the Eisenhower administration. It will be noted that the above sentence contains a striking assertion, namely that containment as a concept well predated Kennan's formulation, and was indeed an active component of U.S. strategy during the Second World War, when the Soviets were our allies, not our rivals.

Gaddis emphasizes this point, arguing that U.S. policy make

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ommand planning in the 1950s was predicated on a first strike, or "anticipatory counterattack" (Herken, 1985, p. 97). The Soviets, acutely aware of their own weaknesses--and unlikely to comfortably suppose that the West was unaware of them, however hard they themselves tried to conceal those weaknesses--must have had some awareness of the evidence for U.S. first-strike intentions on the military level that Herken discusses. It was not a secret that could be kept, since much of it was revealed by, for example, the highly vulnerable dispositions of U.S. bombers. Such dispositions made sense only if the bombers were not expected to ride out an attack, but to deliver one first. While military planning in the 1950s was centered on a climactic confrontation with the Soviet Union, and presupposed the use of nuclear weapons, political contingencies were moving in quite a different direction. The European colonial empires were crumbling, introducing new players onto the political chessboard, and with them new problems for U.S. policymakers. Melvyn Leffler and David Painter, in Origins of the Cold War (1994), offer a selection of recent views dealing with some of these problems. In a collection of independent essays it is difficu
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