Pros And Cons Of The Containment Policy

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After the Second World War, the nations that were still standing strong were the United States of America and The Soviet Union. The domination of these two countries in the second half of the 20th century is known as the time of the Cold War, the diplomatic, geopolitical, and ideological clash of interests, also known as the rivalry between the capitalist democracy ( The United States of America) and the Marxist-Leninist communism ( The Soviet Union), which resulted in several proxy wars, but not with an actual war between these two superpowers ( Palmer 2014: 887).The distrust towards the U.S.S.R government was enormous and as a result to this, the State Department of the United States formulated the containment policy which would prevent the…show more content…
In the following essay the different reasons of the containment policy will be discussed and therefore the distinctive approaches of George Frost Kennan, former diplomat and the author of “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” which inspired the containment policy, and Denna Frank Fleming, an American historian who wrote the essay called “Resolving the Russian American deadlock”, will be used. One of the key arguments in order to create the containment policy, mentioned by George Frost Kennan, was the innate antagonism between capitalism and socialism. Kennan made this conclusion after analyzing the outstanding features of communist thought. One of the main elements of Communist ideology was that Capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction and the working class will one day rise…show more content…
After the second world war, the Soviet Union occupied several countries in eastern Europe by not allowing them to have free elections. By doing that they created a buffer zone in order to protect their ideology. The government of America saw it as a violation of their pledge and the possible spread of the disliked ideology all over the world. This motivated the States to put their energy into an arms race and to be ready for a Soviet invasion, which actually never happened because this might not even have been the goal of the Soviet Union. In his work, Fleming explained that if the Soviets wanted to attack the united states of America they had done it because they had all the necessary equipment but at that period the nation was more interested in its inner politics than conquering the world. Seeing the Soviet Union as its biggest threat and being afraid of the “Domino” effect, the American government decided to take actions by supporting the rebels in Latin America and countries that were gaining their independence in a hope that these societies will adopt the capitalist ideology. The decisions that the USA made where not always elaborated and in some cases they did more harm than good. Isolating the U.S.S.R from the world politics was
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