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Doctrine of Containment of the Soviet Union

The doctrine of containment of the Soviet Union, first set forth in detail in a celebrated article by George Kennan in the late 1940s, was the essential strategy of the United States during the Cold War era. In its most essential terms, containment as a doctrine argued that an ultimate confrontation with the Soviet Union was neither inevitable nor necessary; that if the United States and its allies could hold their ground and buy time, that would in the end be sufficient.

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 makers were not naive about the prospects of future Soviet-American relations after the war, but were well aware of the potential for rivalry and incorporated it into their wartime thinking (Gaddis, 1982, pp. 5-6). It is true, argues Gaddis, that FDR relegated containment of the Soviets to a very secondary priority, in part because of the overriding need to defeat the Axis, and in part because Roosevelt was inclined toward "containment by integration" (Gaddis...

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Doctrine of Containment of the Soviet Union. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 19:21, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1692725.html