A policy enacted by Harry S Truman’s administration during the Cold War.
Tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States existed before the end of World War II. The tensions, however, increased after the end of the war, and the allies became enemies. Winston Churchill called the border between Communist Europe and Democratic Europe the Iron Curtain.
Containment was the doctrine developed in the early years of the Cold War to prevent the spread of Soviet communism and its threat to the international capitalist economic order. Shown here in this 1950 Oval Office photo are President Harry S Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, two of the principal architects of the containment doctrine. (Abbie Rowe, National Park Service, Courtesy Harry S Truman Library)
In a famous letter, “Mr. X” (later revealed to be George Kennan), an American attaché in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, predicted in 1947 the beginning of the Cold War, “For ideology, as we have seen, taught [the Soviets] that the outside world was hostile and that it was their duty to overthrow the political forces beyond their borders.”
Once the Truman administration realized that the Soviet Union was also trying to spread its ideology and influence beyond its borders (or the borders of the communist bloc), it decided to launch a new policy that was called containment. This policy was part of a four-pillared policy. The first pillar was deterrence; the second, the commitment to intervene; the third, the establishment of a “liberal” economic international order; and the fourth, containment through alliance. The goal of this was to contain Soviet expansionism, either in its ideological or territorial form. The main goal of this policy was to create a “wall” of countries surrounding the Soviet Union and its allies, preventing them from expanding into Europe, the Americas, or Asia.
The first time it was mentioned was again by Kennan in 1947, “United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”
The containment policy began with the activation of the Marshal Plan (1947), in which $12 billion was granted to sixteen noncommunist states in Europe (including Turkey). The second step was the signing of several treaties, which enabled such containment. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was established in April 1949 as a military cooperation treaty. Most of the European democracies joined NATO. Nowadays, NATO includes former members of the Warsaw Pact, which was established as the communist answer to NATO in 1955. NATO also has had an economic impact. The European members of NATO developed the first buds of the European Community (after 1991, the European Union) in 1959.
The Soviet answer to the economic containment was the establishment of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in January 1949. The Soviet Union centralized the economic polices of its satellites, for example, the Bulgarian trade volume with the Soviet Union grew from 12 percent in 1937 to 92 percent in 1951.
The containment policy included regional pacts in other parts of the world as well but with less success. The Baghdad Pact included Muslim countries such as Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. However, Egypt, the most populated Arab country, was called to join the treaty only after Iraq, which pressured Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president, to ally with the Soviet Union and form an alternative axis to that of the Baghdad Pact, despite the fact that Egypt was not a communist country. In Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa, the United States supported noncommunist regimes, even when they were not democratic and required the protection of U.S. armed forces.
Nadav Gablinger
See also: Cold War; Council for Mutual Economic Assistance; Soviet Union.
Gaddis, John. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Kennan, George F. “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” Foreign Affairs 25 (July 1947): 568–570, 580–583.