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Cold War Containment Theory Essay

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As World War II came to a close, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union became tense. George Frost Kennan, a historian and diplomat in Soviet Russia after war, was an advocate for using a policy of containment for communism (Shi and Tindall 1066). It appeared that the Soviets were confident that capitalism and communism could not coexist peacefully and so the American response was to limit its parameters in the world. President Truman himself coined the domino theory, which maintained that if one country fell to communism, others would follow (Shi and Tindall 1006). This theory is what the Truman Doctrine encompassed and also continued to be the opinion on communism for the duration of the Cold War. The Cold War itself …show more content…

The containment theory, which ruled approaches to the Cold War for a majority of the era, was expressive of the social and economic state of the United States. Immediately following the conclusion of World War II, the United States was in a position of power and prosperity. “During the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, the United States enjoyed unprecedented economic growth, and most Americans were content” (Shi and Tindall 1035). As Americans saw their standard of living consistently raising to new levels of comfort and luxury as a result of capitalism it is unsurprising that communism, an oppositional and radically different system, threatened Americans’ sense of security. For Americans, capitalism worked as seen by the creation of consumer culture and suburbia (Shi and Tindall 1042). The Civil Rights movement dominated domestic social politics during much of the Cold War. Interestingly, the Soviet Union used the lack of equal rights in the United States as propaganda against capitalism. How could the United States be fighting for freedom when a large percentage of Americans were being oppressed? Many young liberal Americans asked this same question during the 1960s and 1970s. “The same liberationist ideals that prompted young people… to protest against the Vietnamese War also led many of them to embrace other causes… to demand equal opportunities and equal rights”

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